Born in Springfield, Ohio, Elgon Williams grew up on a farm near the town of South Charleston and the village of Selma in rural southeastern Clark County. "That was about two miles from nowhere and between cornfields," he states in one of his autobiographical pieces.

"To the great relief of my parents, teachers and me, I graduated from Shawnee High School in 1974." In the fall of that year he began studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, eventually receiving a BA in Humanities with a major in Mass Communication. In the summer of '79, in the midst of a major economic crisis and the height of the gas shortages, he hitched a trailer to a gas-guzzling '76 Monte Carlo and hauled all his worldly belongings to Austin where he spent a couple of years studying Marketing Administration at the University of Texas.

"By the way, the only place I had trouble finding gas on my journey from Indiana to Texas was in central Texas. Out of gas, meaning the needle on my gas gauge was bent around the nub next to the letter 'E', I pulled into an Exxon station, ignoring the sign that stated 'Gas For Locals Only'. After explaining that my car was not going to make it out of town and as a result I would become a local, the station's owner allowed me to fill my tank. My guess is he didn't really want a Yankee like me as a neighbor. Who would? I was obviously a trouble maker."

During college he sold brass peephole installations door-to-door to make some extra spending money. "It may not sound like a lucrative enterprise but I was very successful at it. First, you know if you have a qualified customer before you knock on the door. Second, it's all in the presentation. The closing was automatic."

As a college-age kid with long hair and a scraggly beard, he knocked on a prospective client's door. When the door opened there he was holding a power drill in one hand and a box of brass peepholes in the other, asking, "Wouldn't you love to know who's at your door the next time someone comes calling?" He pulled in a couple of hundred dollars a week, which was really good money back then.

After receiving his degree from UT Austin, he sold vacuum cleaners for a while, though not with anything like the success of brass peephole installations. He relocated to the Tampa Bay area where he worked for a small advertising agency by day and a grocery store by night.