 He attended Norfolk Public Schools and graduated from Matthew Fontaine Maury High School, the Norfolk Division of William and Mary/VPI (now Old Dominion University) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.His maternal grandfather, J. Fred Muhlig (1876–1948), also an MIT graduate, once worked as an engineer under Thomas Edison in West Orange, New Jersey.After four years of employment as a marine engineer and naval architect at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, in 1951, this ninth generation resident of Hampton Roads joined the family of companies founded by his great-grandfather Edward Webster Face (1829–1907) in 1867.