After beginning his college career at Georgia Tech, Randy graduated from the University of Illinois. After graduating, he served in the US Navy on the USS Jack C. Robinson ADP-72. This ship was originally built as a destroyer escort but it was reclassified as a high speed transport and commissioned in 1945.  He served as the ship's gunnery officer and the noise from the guns did give him some high frequency loss of hearing.  His son remembers stories he told of walking out on the ship deck in the morning and picking up flying fish that had landed on the deck during the night. He would take them down to the galley and have the cooks fry them up for breakfast. That’s where he developed a taste for fish for breakfast which the family enjoyed on Florida beach vacations at Casey Key. 

When the Korean War started up he went back into active service for a year and served at a Navy ammunition storage base in Nevada. After his Naval service he worked as an engineer and then head of the brick association in South Carolina. He lead a local chapter of the Sea Cadets, a sort of nautical version of the Boy Scouts in Jacksonville, Florida while living there. He lived in Aruba (in the Caribbean), Jacksonville, Florida, and in Columbia and Greenville, South Carolina.