Joe Patrina (b. 1952), pursuing active careers in technology, music and publishing, is married to Laura Brittain; they have four children, with all family members proudly born in New York City. Today, Joe and Laura live in Simsbury, Connecticut.
A 1987 co-founder of Wall Street Systems, and the architect of the firm’s global foreign exchange trading platform, Joe ran product development, sales and project management as company President. In 2006, Joe and his partner Lucien Kneip sold Wall Street Systems to Warburg Pincus, who subsequently sold the company to Ion Systems in 2012.
Joe's musical endeavors began at age 7 on piano after seeing a young Japanese female virtuoso on the Ed Sullivan show, causing Joe to beg his mother for piano lessons. Next, he moved to trumpet after seeing Herb Albert on TV, and finally landed on guitar, after witnessing the British invasion, an overwhelming onslaught.
Performing in the 1970s, including blues oriented and then punk oriented band formats, Joe notably played the hotbed clubs, CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City, both in lower Manhattan.
Joe and Laura visited with Janette Carter of the Carter Family in Virginia in 1996, and after taking Janett’s wise counsel regarding songwriting on board, Joe began his songwriting career, eventually writing more than 200 rock, blues, country and American ballads, performing these with his band LittleHouse.
Joe’s wife Laura administers the LittleHouse “Welcome to the Barn” shows which began in 2009. Laura runs stage lighting as well, with Joe’s brother Jim running multi-media images projected behind the band on the back screen. A serious show.
Joe’s book writing started with a small book describing the songwriting process, but it then branched out to address a cornucopia of historical subjects including American Political history, Russian history, Italian history Belgian history, Irish history, Scottish history, Global Art history, and Israeli history.
Joe then applied his deconstruction analytical approach to Property Taxation, Major League Baseball Batting, an Organic Breast Cancer Cure, and a Revisionist History of Pre-civilization Mankind.
Joe’s book titled Encounters is autobiographical, tracing his chance encounters with fifty, 20th century luminaries over his life time, people like Jackie Kennedy and Muhammad Ali. Each encounter chapter is a vivid retrospect of the luminary’s impact on their times, concluding with Joe’s humble but telling encounter itself. We are all “Forrest Gump”.
Joe, with his singing partner Jessica Nolan, besides being a very rare male/female duet musical team, also co-authored a series of children’s books illustrating the various animal types and the sounds they make. Check out; “That’s Not a Toykey”
Early Life
Born on a Navy Base, while his lieutenant father was out to sea, Joe was raised in Queens, New York and then out on Long Island, New York, before moving to Connecticut at age 12. Joe’s father was Joe Patrina Sr., an engineer and an international executive in the electric power systems field, and his mother Mary Lou Burke an economist, political scientist and historian. Joe has two brothers – Jim and Stephen - and a sister - Carol.
Early Adulthood
After high school Joe struggled in college – unable to find the library - but he finally came to rest at Hartford’s Trinity College where he studied International Economics and Philosophy, graduating in 1978, with high honors.
His economics paper covered the potential impact of unifying the various European currencies into a singe currency. Years later in 1999, the unification actually took place with the introduction of the Euro, and Joe’s company, Wall Street systems, converted 40 major banking systems at once on January 1st, 1999, retiring the various national currencies in exchange for the Euro on each bank’s database. Joe considers this, Wall Street System’s greatest logistical victory.
Joe’s Philosophy paper covered the History of Human Thought. Admitting he bit off more than he could chew on this one, the best-effort-try nevertheless enabled him to pursue a lifetime study into the matter, leading to his book: SUBJUGATED– A Revisionist History of Pre-civilization Man.
Death of First Wife
Joe married Janna Burger in 1976, and she developed Hodgkin’s Lymphoma later that year, surviving in and out of New York City hospitals for 10 years before succumbing. In this period, Joe and Janna experimented with a pure vegetarian diet that resurrected Janna from near death to full vitality. After six months, she decided to go off the diet and died later of pneumonia.
But the diet lesson stuck with Joe and decades later, it would become the centerpiece to his Organic Breast Cancer treatment protocol.
Software
After Trinity College, Joe trained in software programming, and worked at Aetna Insurance in Hartford for a year as a consultant, publishing a management inventory report of the firm’s application systems, each system’s role, expense and impact. After this Joe re-located to New York, first working for The Bank of New York, before being recruited by European American Bank to build its foreign exchange and treasury management system.
Founding of Wall Street Systems
