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Biography

Born September 16, 1943 in the Bronx, New York, Pete was the eldest of nine children. Accompanied by his maternal grandmother, he saw his first movie, the aptly titled “Welcome Stranger,” in a theatre in 1947, several years before the family had a TV. He became an instant film buff and has remained one ever since.

Pete’s first job was delivering newspapers for Long Island’s Newsday at the age of 13. One of his customers was the manager of Century’s Bellerose Theatre where he would get to pause and take in a scene or two of a film to gauge whether it would be worth seeing in its entirety. At 16, he went to work at Century’s 3,000-seat Queens Theatre where he worked as an usher after school. He later worked at the concession stand and became the concession stand manager while still in high school.

While attending college at night, Pete worked as a film editor at an educational film company before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965. Assigned to a major supply company in Darmstadt, Germany for 16 months, Pete went from a job as security clerk to Operations Manager and Training NCO. He quickly learned that the best way to teach a class was to show training films in the local theatre, a few steps from his second-floor office in what once had been a Nazi barracks.

After his discharge from the service, Pete began a 40-year banking career with Citibank in Manhattan, where for four of his years with the company he had an office in the theatre district where he got to meet numerous film, TV, and theatre stars. After working for Citibank for 14 years where with the help of a programmer he developed the first ever recovery collection system, he was recruited by Wells Fargo and moved to California where he continued his banking career until he retired at the end of 2005.

At the time of his retirement, Pete was a Division Manager with offices in California and Idaho. As a member of the bank’s due diligence team, he travelled extensively throughout the country meeting with the management teams of potential acquisitions for the bank.

Returning to the east coast in 2011, Pete now lives on the Jersey shore where he currently chairs the Publicity and Rules and Regulations committees of his homeowners association. He has been editor of his association’s monthly newsletter since 2015, and the administrator of its website since 2016.

Pete has been a member of and contributor to the UAADB since 1998 and CinemaSight since its inception. He has been writing weekly home video reviews for the site since 2008 and weekly Oscar profiles since 2010. He has had his own film awards called the Patrician Awards, a play on his last name, since 1960. They are called Oscar Shouldabeens on the UAADB. He has been a member of the Online Film and Television Academy almost since its inception, and a member of the Executive Committee for almost as long.