Autobiography

NOTE: Because I'm in the process of moving my house, this autobiography page is now on a semi-hold and won't be updated regularly. I'll mark new additions with the new- tag

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Heritage

Hello - Jacksonville, Illinois, USA: August 23, 1956

I was born August 23, 1956 at Passavant Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois USA.

Jacksonville was also the home of the Jacksonville State Hospital, an old-time, large warehousing facility in the state's mental health department, where my father worked as an Occupational Therapist.

Those days are long gone now: such facilities no longer exist, at least in Illinois.

I have only been to Jacksonville a couple of times since and remember nothing of it.

Early Years - Bradley, Illinois, USA: 1957-1963

The first place that I do remember is Bradley, Illinois. It's like a suburb of Kankakee (yes, the Kankakee of the song).

We had a house on the corner and my mom worked nights and I spent the days ostensibly at a woman's house although in reality we were outside all the time and over at each other's houses

A couple of years before it was time to go to school, my mom switched over to working days. That meant that I stayed at Mrs. Powell's Nursery School. It was the way that people avoided latch-key kids at the time. It was pretty fun. Mrs. Powell's had a swimming pool that we got to go in and there were parties all the time and it seemed to be a good time. I've got lots of pictures from various birthdays at Mrs. Powell's.

Then I went to St. Paul's Lutheran School for first and second grade. It was in downtown Kankakee.

I just went and saw that place in the summer of 2004, the day I got two haircuts.

Our next door neigbhors to the north was a family named Legris, headed up by Paul and Rita Legris. They had five kids: the oldest, Toni, got married while I still lived there, so is quite a bit older than me; Paul Jr. and Rick, who are also older, although I did interact with them; Joe, two years older than me and who I was very close to; and Mary, the youngest, nine months younger than me.

We were inseparable from the Legris family when we lived in Bradley. I spent as much time over there as at my own house. There was always music playing from the older boys and I discovered much music that was going on at the time at the Legris household.

Mary Legris and I were best buddies and used to walk together three or four blocks south to Beland's Market, an old-time corner store with candy (Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum @ $0.01/piece). The Legris family is Catholic and on the way to the market we would pass by Mary's school at the Catholic church and I learned about individual confession and other differences between the practices of Catholicism and the Lutheran church. As I write this on May 6, 2005, I wish a happy 48th birthday to Mary Legris, whereever and whoever you are now.

My parents and Paul Sr. and Rita played euchre, a card game, many nights until late. The Legris kids would be put to bed and I would be put on Paul and Rita's bed to fall asleep. Somehow (did Dad carry me?) I would end up in my own bed next door.

We kids also used to play all kinds of games. We played a lot of "Mother May I?" and games like that. The very first wargame I ever saw was the 1964(?) edition of "Battle of the Bulge". I think we even tried to play it. I remember something about needing to blow up bridges.

Another time, right after the episode of "The Twilight Zone" (the originals) where a girl had fallen through her bedroom wall into the "Fourth Dimension", the Legris kids chased me around their living room, pushing me into corners so I could join her. Recently I tracked down Joe Legris but wasn't sure that it was really him. I introduced myself and asked if he was Joe Legris from Bradley, Illinois. He responded by asking me if I'd like to go into the Fourth Dimension. It was Joe!

There were a couple more things that happened around this time that were somwhat remarkable. The first one that I can remember was being in the living room of the house in Bradley and hearing a radio report of the early goings on of the Vietnam War. Suddenly I was overcome with fear and started crying very hard, telling my parents that I didn't want to go to war.

The second event was learning the lyrics of the song "America" (My Country Tis of Thee) in second grade. When we got to the part "land where my father's died" and I became inconsolable. I had to be sent to the principal's office where I was allowed to call my mom and tell her about my upset.

At this point I can correlate these early clues to come to the conclusion that I've been conditioned to fear death very much. This has been a theme in my life and undoubtedly contributed to the sprirtual searching that has characterized the second half of my life to date.

It was sometime in second grade that I was told that I was no good in Art. I was pretty crushed at the time and just kind of gave up doing anything that could be called artistic for a long time.

Before that happened though, another boy and I made a little bit of money making hand-drawn "Beverly Hillbillies" trading cards. That show was in it's first season and was extremely popular.

I remember bringing "Chutes and Ladders" to the school once and we played outside on a back porch of a building.

Early on in the Bradley house, around the time I was one year old, I fell against a concrete step and severely cut the skin around the orbit, the eye-socket bone. Then, much later, I was playing football with the Legris kids, evading tacklers, and I impaled my left lower leg on a Y-shaped piece of sharp iron property marker.

My dad and mom drove me to the hospital emergency room and my dad was there when they stitched me up. Ironically, the Registered Nurse could not be in attendance. I (obviously) still have those scars, along with a nearly symmetrical scar on the other eye socket skin that I got playing basketball in high school.

Even though we moved away from Bradley, we still would visit the Legris family. They would set up a bed in the boys' room and I would sleep over, listening to music till late at night and talking. Mary Legris was working nights at that time and I never got to see her on those visits although I knew that she was just over there, sleeping behind that door.

I was having a fantasy of knocking, being welcomed and entering to lay next to her, etc. Ah, adolescence! That never happened, although I did see Mary Legris a few more times in the ensuing years.

The last time I saw her was on a visit to Eastern Illinois University at Charleston, where she was going to college.

Manteno, Illinois, USA: 1963-1967

This was one of the defining periods of my life. We lived on the grounds of the largest mental hospital in the state of Illinois. It was in Manteno and the place was like a city of its own.

It had a movie theater and gymnasium, a golf course, a commissary and other amenities for the patients and the employees (and the employee's kids) to use.

Our house, or "cottage" as they were referred to, were on these side spurs near the front of the complex, which was huge and housed many thousands of patients. All of our utilities were free as the hospital had its own power plant that supplied electricity and steam heat to the entire facility.

There was also a building called the "Staff House" that was a large apartment building where lower-rung staff lived. We also lived in the Staff House when our cottage was being renovated at one point.

Here's a picture of one of the buildings some number of years ago. Many of the buildings are in ruins now while other parts are being used for community education.

Living there was like living in a huge urban park. There were trees and hundreds of acres of grass and open space. Across the streat from my cottage, in the grassy center of the U-shaped streets were apple trees that would fruit each year. I think they produced Macintosh apples. We used to climb in those trees and hang out.

We also played Army and Man from U.N.C.L.E which had just come on TV. I had a Man from U.N.C.L.E gun that could be transformed into different lethal toy-type weapons.

Every year they would flood the field next to the baseball diamond by my house and it would freeze and we would skate and play hockey.

In the summer there were employee softball games and the circus made an appearance each year. One year, my last year at Manteno, my friends and I got to to work with the circus and I got a job with a carnival worker in his "Throw Darts at the Balloons" booth. We also got our picture taken feeding a Llamma that the circus had. Right after the picture was taken, my friend Albert was spit on by the llamma.

There was a golf course there, originally a nine-hole course that was later expanded to and eighteen-hole course. I believe that some famous golfer designed the back nine of that course, but I could be wrong. I learned to play golf there and during the summer my friends and I would trudge around that course, turning in several rounds of golf a week. My dad also took up golf and was somehow able to walk around and play at that time. We also helped out at the golf course. There was a driving range where we would hit balls and we would use the ball-pickup tubes to go out and collect balls. Clubs were free to use, so there was not expense to us.

There were also Occupational Therapy type activities at the hospital and we found that we could participate in those if we wished. For a while we were very into doing pottery at the pottery shop at the Occupational Center. There was a man there whose last name was Shirley and went by that name. Shirley taught us a lot about making pottery including using the wheel, glazing, firing and the like.

Then one day we came in to work on pottery with Shirley and things were different. Shirley was not a happy camper for some reason and began to yell at us. We didn't know what we'd done wrong but stopped coming to the pottery room. Not long after I found out that Shirley, who I had assumed to be a member of the staff, was actually a patient.

That wasn't that unusual. My Grandma Ford worked at the hospital too, in a sewing room, teaching patients to sew. I used to go and visit her and sit at a machine and sew right along with everyone else.

Pop Ford also worked at the hospital (almost sounds like political patronage, don't it?), running the print shop that printed up the voluminous paperwork that got sent around the hospital and to farther reaches. There were two patients that worked with Pop, Charlie and Hyman. They were very nice men. Hyman didn't have much to say and Charlie's favorite word was "Boop", which he would spontaneously say in the middle of conversation.

There was a ring of hedge around the cottages that patients were not allowed to enter. Some of them would sit out in the forest behind my house, just outside the hedge and talk loudly to themselves. One time I came home from school and went to open the back door as it was hot in the house and I found that two patients were right on my back porch having sex. It scared the heck out of me and I called my mom who then called security who got them to go away.

Every weekend there were free movies at the gymnasium. The balcony area was reserved for employees and their families and the patients sat down on the gym floor. I saw many movies there including "Thunderball" and others.

Since there was very little traffic on the roads, my friends and I were allowed to ride our bikes on the streets. This was a big change for me as in Bradley I was only allowed to ride my bike on the sidewalk

Albert was into Estes rockets, so we all got into it and all built rockets, even my dad. My mom has a short film of many of our launches and probably has pictures of some of my rockets. I continued this rocketry hobby into my time in Clarendon Hills

There were many doctors from other countries that lived and worked on the grounds. My family doctor, Doctor Wroblewski was from Poland and lived on the grounds. I was very sick once with the flu or something and was losing fluid at both ends and Dr. W prescribed a very gross lemon juice, (too little) sugar and (too much) salt solution that I had to drink instead of water. It was hard to hold down and beneficial. I only could hold it down because he said the next step was an I.V. drip and I didn't want that. I see that solution is the standard remedy for kids who have diarrhetic illnesses to keep them from getting dehydrated.

We had some neighbors down the street who were from Mexico and there I had the first Mexican food that I had ever eaten. I think it was only tacos, but they were so good that I told my mom we needed to eat like that. I don't think we ever did.

Our neighbors from across the street, Dr. and Mrs. Popovich had two incredibly beautiful daughters: Olga, a year younger than me; and Coco, several years older. I used to hang out and play with Olga constantly. They were from Serbia and pined for the return of their beloved Serbia from Soviet domination. I hope they're happy now. One time Mrs. Popovich came over to my house and asked to use my phone to call Security. It was summer and I had been out playing with the kids at my house. Mrs. P. had walked down to get her mail at the Administration building and had left her front door unlocked. As she was walking back, she had seen a female patient walk off of the sidewalk and go into her house and lock the door.

When Security arrived they found a window in the front of the cottage that was unlocked and opened it. There was not a big enough opening for one of the grown-ups to enter, so they boosted me through the window and told me to run around and open the front door. They said that if the patient was visible, to come back out right away through the window.

I went in and unlocked the door and didn't see the patient. It turned out that she was in the bathroom washing her hair and using Mrs. Popovich's makeup and stuff.

Another friend of the Olga's and mine, was Josef Zivanovich. He lived in the Staff House with his mother, Dr. Taubel, who had what sounds like a German name to me. They were also Serbian, so Joe and Olga could talk their language in front of me when they were trying to be funny.

The hospital was having an outbreak of hystoplasmosis which was being attributed to the incredible number of starlings (birds) that were inhabiting the trees on the grounds. One day they organized a huge hunting party that would follow the flocks from tree to tree, blasting them in an attempt to exterminate them all or drive them away. My dad participated and I hear they killed a huge number of birds. I never found out if they were successful in their long term goal.

The coolest thing that my dad did at Manteno, his crowning acheivement, was the big move. They were decommissioning several of the older wards (even back then, 1967?) and he created the plan that resulted in move of over 3,000 patients from different areas of the hospital to other areas. Very many of the patients carried their personal effects (a bag of stuff) and walked in big long lines to their new homes. I didn't see this in person but saw the pictures in the Manteno State Hospital News.

I've been back to the place a couple of times since then. There'll be more on that later, including the time that I came down with severe vertigo during a visit and the theories about that.

This whole facility was gifted to the town by the state in 1985. I was surprised to find that there is a large housing development where all of the employee housing used to be.

Clarendon Hills, Illinois, USA: 1968-74

My dad got a promotion and became the Administrator of the John Madden Mental Health Center in Maywood, Illinois, outside of Chicago.

Madden was an early example of the move away from warehousing concept to a smaller, community based approach with the emphasis on out-patient treatment. The development of anti-psychotic drugs had made it possible for people who formerly required institutionalization to live within the community.

This meant that we moved away from Manteno. When my parents first told me about this, I was very upset. The usual attitude of the rest of the state of Illinois toward the Chicago area is one of horror and somehow I had picked up on this too. I was afraid of the crime and the gangs, etc.

Well, there was nothing of that in Clarendon Hills, Illinois, where we eventually ended up. It was so up-tight that it was actually in a "dry county", meaning that you were unable to buy alcoholic beverages anywhere in DuPage county. I understand that there was some drug use, mainly marijuana, going on in school, and I was oblivious to it until my senior year.

The biggest problem with our community, although they didn't see it that way, was that they were racists and all the houses had restrictive covenants on them that supposedly would prohibit the owners from selling them to black people or Jews.

That summer I did some really stupid stuff that resulted in me alienating all of my neighbor kids. I made new friends at Zion the coming fall and still never made amends with those neighbor kids that I ended up going to high school with.

The summer of 1968 was a turning point for me. Up until that time I had few opinions about the government or the police. Watching the events happening less than 20 miles away during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago changed things completely.

The spectacle of a "police riot", as it was described by the Walker Report investigation on the disturbance described it perfectly. I saw the powerful elite crush the attempts of the demonstrators to be heard and to disrupt the convention. I saw policemen beating people with their nightsticks, whether they deserved it or not. I've always believed that my anti-authoritarian streak and my fear and hatred of the vehicles of government power were formed at that time.

My mom thought it was really important for me to be confirmed in the Lutheran Church, so I went to seventh and eighth grades at Zion Lutheran School in Hinsdale, Illinois.

Zion had the reputation of having good basketball teams under their coach Mr. Geuder, who was replaced the following year by an equally good coach, James Brackensick. I learned to play basketball and actually got to be okay at it, especially at rebounding. In eighth grade we did really well and nearly won the big Lutheran league tounament held at the local Lutheran High School.

I also did the eight pound shotput in seventh and eighth grade and never got the hang of that particular sport.

I was eventually confirmed, which affirmed my savedness that I had been promised at my baptism...or...hmmm. There was a big party which I hardly remember but have many mementos from, including this little gem, strange "signatures" on my "Confirmation Memento". I also got a really nice Bible from my uncle Don and Aunt Leona, my godparents.

I got involved in a Christian Youth group while at Zion. It consisted of the people of my class, the eight grade teacher, Mr. Charles Fischer, and the pastor, Robert Grabowski, who was apparently involved in some kind of scandal somewhat later and was forced to leave the church. We went on some outings and had weekly meetings where we talked about Jesus. We also went to a big-tent evangelical thing where I went up front during "the call" and accepted Jesus as my lord and savior. I recall that I was pretty enraptured by the whole thing. That didn't last.

The group went on a camping outing at an island state park. We had to drive through the river at a ford to get to the park. The second day it began to rain and I got worried that we would be stuck on island if the ford filled up too much. I began to agitate to leave that evening and talked up the concept with other kids. Finally, as the rain kept pouring down and the clamour to leave got to be more than the sponsors could stand, the decision was made to leave. When we got back to Zion that night, Mr. Fischer took me aside and told me that we were quits; that my agitation was wrong and he was done with me. It was okay, as I was also done with him and all that he stood for. I'm sorry for writing you off, Charles Fischer, wherver you are.

Right before high school started, my Uncle Don and Aunt Leona and their three kids, my cousins Janet, Donna and Bill, moved just a block or so away from our house. Janet is a half year or so older than I am, so she was in my class at high school. We spent a lot of time together all through high school.

Donna is a couple of years younger than Janet and at that time we didn't hang out much together. Bill was even younger, being born in 1964.

The cousin that I am in touch with the most these days is Bill, who lives in the western suburbs of Chicago with his wife Leslie and young son Hunter.

Hinsdale South High School, Darien, Illinois, USA: 1970-1974

Hinsdale South was built in 1965 and was a pretty new school when I went there. The first graduating class was in 1968 and they had come there in 1965 from Hinsdale Central as 2nd year students.

The class of 1969 was the first graduating class that had attended the entire four years there. (Thank you to Jim Fanning of the class of 1968 for this information.)

I graduated in 1974.

The summer before I started high school I played on a baseball team. The class of play was called "Babe Ruth League" and they were pretty good. The problem was: I hadn't really played much baseball before, at least not much hardball.

Here's a picture of my team, "Dog 'N' Suds", sponsored by a local drive-in restaurant. I'm number thirteen and that's my dad peaking over my right shoulder and that's my friend Tom Gaare from Zion on my left and his dad over his left shoulder.

I played other sports in high school. I played football my freshman and sophmore years and toyed with it the other two years, played basketball on the freshman B team one season, played two seasons of indoor track and three seasons of outdoor track.

I played tackle football for the first time in the late summer of 1970 under the tutelege of Paul Ferris, a young coach who taught art for his day job. Mr. Ferris had been some kind of wonder player in college until some kind of injury ended his chances for a pro career. He had an incredible physique. He was maybe 5' 4" tall and built like mountain. I do not believe that I am exagerating that I saw him bench press 450 pounds. And he was incredibly fast!

The bottom line is that Coach Ferris, without pads or helmet, played tackle football with and against teams of fully uniformed (padded, helmeted, etc.) fourteen year old boys and did it an such an all-out way that it was inspirational to watch. It was leadership being played out right there in front of us. It is still inspirational to think about now. He would have five or six boys attached to him and still be plowing away toward the goalline.

Mr. Ferris drew a personal caricature of each team member (he was an incredible artist too!). I still have mine and may be able to find it. The thing I like about football is how each player has a role to play that is unique on each play, kind of like chess, and if everything comes off right, it's a score!

I took the normal classes in my freshman year. One exception I found was that I was a year behind my public school educated peers in mathematics. I had had some German in junior high at Zion, so I took German 1 in high school. I hated it and decided that I had no aptitude for languages. Boy, was I wrong!

That meant that I started with Algebra I when most of my classmates started with Geometry. It didn't matter because I didn't like math anyway. I had never believed I was good at it, etc.

I did outdoor track my freshman year, after not making the golf team. I threw the shotput and the discus. I wasn't very good at either.

Of course, there was the episode of the Hike for Hunger. I had decided that I would do this 30.2 mile (50 km) walk and I gathered per-mile pledges. I did the walk all right and was completely wiped out at the end of it. Unfortunately I had a track meet the next day and came in with huge bruises all over my feet. Coach Yavorski took savage delight in cutting them open and liberally applying antiseptic. Somehow I did okay in spite of it all

Sophmore academics were about the same except I realized that I was interested in science and really liked physics. I took German 2 and double-hated it. I decided that I would just have to find a college program that didn't require any more language, since I was so poor at it. In order to get extra credit in German class that year, my friend Tom and I did some extra stuff, like putting on self-produced plays all in German.

One of them was about a depressed man (Tom) who is going to jump off a bridge when he finds a bottle. He rubs it and out pops "der Flaschenfairie", a large (me), oddly dressed magical creature. The fairie solves all the problems of the guy and then gets laughs by trying to seduce the man. It was very strange.

Sophmore football was different. The first thing that was different was that I was bumped up and was now playing on the Junior Varsity team (i.e. practice cannon fodder for the seniors) and also now under the guidance of Coaches Paul Schrader (Head coach and P.E. teacher) and Dave Smith (Asssistant coach and math teacher).

I think I was doing alright in the actual football, but something happened that changed everything from that point forward.

One evening, maybe a third of the way through the season, we set off to run our big laps around both baseball fields and more, I found that I was not running fast enough for Coach Smith, who had run up behind me and was now yelling at me very loudly: "RUN!!", he shouted, and simultaneously he grabbed me by the shoulder picked me up and THREW me forward.

I fell on the ground and he kept picking me up (he was an enormous guy!) and kind of pushing me forward and kicking me in the ass and screaming, "RUN!!!". Well, I was pretty humiliated by now. It wasn't long after that that I was transferred down to the Sophmore team where I did really well, having been trained by the big boys. Something inside had changed though and this would manifest the following year.

I honor Coaches Schrader and Smith for their efforts to wake me up to the reality of hard work and giving my all to the team effort.

Junior year academics started to heat up. I took a keen interest in chemistry. My dad brought home an early electronic calculator and was letting me use it and I was amusing myself by doing chemistry problems on the side. Math started to be fun.

I found a book from the U.K. called "Calculus Made Simple" and read the heck out of that. I found that kids in the U.K. are taught Calculus at a young age and then are taught it again later. But they are able to use the principles of calculus to understand things they learn earlier in school, instead of waiting till college.

I contacted the head of the math department and asked her if there was any way that I could take calculus in my last year of high school. She said that I could if I could pass a comprehensive trigonometry test to be give just to me at the end of the year.

I told her that I was game and she gave me some experimental programmed learning books on trig. I learned it and took the test and got credit for trigonometry. She signed me up for Calculus for my senior year.

I did indoor and outdoor Track & Field sophmore year also.

Coach Schrader had been sweet talking for half a year and was now a sweet father who realized the error of his ways and now knew how to deal with a guy like me. He got me into Driver's Education during summer school so I would be able to drive sooner. And so on...

Junior year football was a pretty short time. I went to the pre-pre-season workouts in the fall of 1972 and then told Coach Schrader that I wouldn't be playing football. I had so much pent up rage towards him and Coach Smith, fueled by reading a book called "Meat on the Hoof", written by a rebellious Univeristy of Texas football player, about the football program under Darrell Royal, and his decision to quit football. Coach Schrader was very unhappy with my decision and verbally abused me. I persisted anyway and did not play football in 1972.

Junior year track was my best year. All of a sudden I started figuring out how to fling the discus and in one meet near the end of the season I think I threw it 164 feet, which wasn't far below the school record. That one throw seeded me at the top at the District trackmeet. Unfortunately, I did not throw as well at that meet, although I believe that one throw, out of bounds, was as far or farther. I can't remember if all three throws went out of bounds or only two, with the third being short. It doesn't matter. Coach Yavorski, was disgusted with me and told me so. He kept me from getting a varsity letter that year because of that performance.

It was during the last part of my junior year that Betty Harmon was murdered. Betty had been my dad's secretary since the waning years of Manteno. During that time my parents went on a couple of trips and Betty stayed with me at the cottage.

Later, her husband Jerry was in the Army and Betty lived at our house in a guest bedroom. She was living with us the night she disappeared. I don't want to go into the details of her death. Suffice it to say that she had been visiting her mother in Manteno and was driving north on Interstate 57 towards Chicago when her car was struck by that of another driver.

These two guys from Chicago had decided to go rob people and had figured out a new way to do it. They killed three people that night: Betty and a young couple in a separate incident.

My parents knew that there was something wrong when she didn't come back to our house that evening. My dad called the police, who told him that they couldn't do anything until she had been missing for twenty-four hours. That was their standard procedure.

My dad took matters in his own hands and when I got up the next morning I found out that he was gone. He had chartered a private plane and pilot and was cruising up and down I57 looking for Betty's car. He found it and, while the plane circled overhead, he spotted her, naked, laying dead in a field.

He called the police and told them where to find her body and he was one of the first people to see her. The experience marked him for life.

To top it off, at first the police didn't believe his story of how he had found her and for a very short time my father was on the police's short list of suspects. They interrogated him pretty thoroughly and it became obvious that not only did he not have a motive, he wasn't capable of having committed the murder. Then they found the second set of vicims and knew that something completely different had occurred.

Incidentally, the triggerman in Betty's murder was one of the people whose death sentence was commuted by Jim Edgar, the former governor of Illinois, a few years ago.

It took me quite a while to accept that Betty was gone. I kept expecting it to all be a mistake and that she would show up any minute. Of course, that never happened

The reality of Betty's death came back to me in a big way in the events leading up to my divorce. My wife had gone to Arizona on vacation and there she met a man that she fell in love with. So she turned off her phone. I kept trying to call her and leaving mesage for her and...nothing. Suddenly I started to panic: was she alright? had something happened to her? I didn't know. I sat there and cried and cried and cried and finally traced my way back to the impotence we all felt back in 1973 when we lost Betty in such a senseless way.

I had toyed with the idea of attending Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, urged on by a family friend who liked me and had gone there. A high school friend and I, both sixteen, took a long road trip together in the summer of 1973. We spent our first night from Clarendon Hills in Gettysburg, PA. We spent the next day touring the memorial there, trying to understand what had happened there and being unable to. It was only later, when I started wargaming and played a Gettysburg game, that I understood it better.

From there we drove north to Washington D.C., where we stayed with my friend's uncle and aunt, a diplomat of some sort or another. The uncle and aunt were so nice and so generous. They took us to a performance of "Waltz of the Toreodors" starring Eli Wallach and his real-life-wife Anne Jackson at the Lincoln Center. The place was new then, I think.

From there we headed up to New Jersey, to my friend's cousin (the daughter of the people we had been visiting in D.C.). She took us to Princeton University and into Manhattan. We walked around on Times Square and saw the library where George Washington took the oath of office. We also rode the Statten Island Ferry on a special engagement. It was a part of the Newport Jazz Festival and we were attending a "riverboat" performance of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. I don't remember much of that day.

After leaving New Jersey, we drove to Boston. We were on our own at this point. I don't remember much about it except the driving seemed crazy and the streets seemed crooked and we ended up lost and so on. We did go to Cambridge and I think I saw Harvard, but I'm not sure

Then we finally headed north, pretty darned far north, to Dartmouth University. I had them excited because of my football skills, and my academics. I told them that I wouldn't be playing football for Dartmouth College.

We drove to Niagra Falls, New York to spend a day or so with friends of my parents. We went and saw the falls, etc., and I wanted to go home. My friend was still game for more travel, having his eye on Toronto. We agreed that it was best that we drive home instead.

I got a job at K-Mart as a stockboy. It wasn't long before I caught the notice of the head of the Building Material department. He offered me a raise if I'd come to work for him. I did that and then he quit.

I started working for his assistant, now the head of the department. I learned to drive a forklift and learned to work fourteen-hour shifts, which was the normal weekend day shift from 8AM-10PM.

Then I made a mistake which resulted in being given the choice of resigning or being fired. One evening I was sitting around waiting for customers before closing, talking with friends. I had some pennies in my pocket, so I punched up $0.01 on each department, then dutifully put my pennies in the drawer. The next day I was called to the manager's office and told that I had committed a firable offense and that I could get fired or resign. I chose to resign.

Then I got a job at McDonald's, first making milkshakes, then fries, then buns. Then I started working the grill, a job for which I had great aptitude. I kept this job until after Christmas of my first year in college.

I took the ACT and the SAT that Spring also. I did pretty well on both and decided that I'd take them again the next year.

Senior year was the time when all of this was finally played out.

I decided that I would play football. I attended the three-a-day practices the week before school, doing really well, as I remember it, then decided that I wasn't going to be playing football after all. This time the coach was livid. He told me that I was no longer eligible for the "P.E for Jocks" class that he taught. I turned right around and told him that I would be in that class. It was a more challenging class and had a higher level of competition, which I valued at the time. Plus, those guys were my friends.

On the academic front, things were more clear. I loved Calculus and started doing extra homework every night. I also was taking a class called Computer Math. The school was leasing time-share space on a dial-up HP minicomputer that ran Basic. I took computer math 1 and 2 in the two semesters along with two other guys. Our class project was a "game board" for Monopoly that would conduct all operations of a gamemaster for that game (keeping track of pieces, conducting auctions, awarding properties, banking, etc.).

It was a very good program and had some very neat features. Years later, one of the guys sent me program, which was stored on paper tape. I tracked down a teletype with a paper tape reader and read in the program. It was an old form of basic where all string variables were of the form $b1 and all regular variables were of the form b1. There was not a comment in the entire thing. I could no longer make sense of what we had done, this thing that was so intimate with us that we could instantly jump to the right line to make a change!

That year we also got a new chemistry teacher with better qualifications. He started a class called Advanced Chemistry which I took. I was totally blissing out on chemistry and calculus and learning at an incredible rate.

My last class, and the most fun of all, was a full year of typing. I was the only upper-classman and the only male, in a class of perhaps sixty younger females. Plus, the teacher was a double hottie too. I loved that class.

When the rubber hit the road I really (like deep down) did not want to attend Dartmouth and I had submitted a very, very poor application for early enrollment and was turned down right away. The application was quite detailed, with long essay questions about our most significant book, what major life contributions did we hope to make, etc. I wrote mine up in a couple of hours, in pencil, with erasures, making stuff up as I went along (did I even read a book last summer?, etc.).

I ended up going to my second choice school, The University of Illinois, which turned out to be a very fine place to be.

Hot on the heels of my football triumph, the indoor Track & Field season started. The indoor track the time at Hinsdale South was in the basement of the school, with reinforced, recessed concrete structure seven to eight feet overhead. The track was an eighth of a mile around. I was throwing the indoor shotput, a rubberized thing much larger than its outdoor equivalent.

Suddenly, while running some laps, I realized that I wasn't going to be doing Track & Field anymore either. I just ran off the track and into the locker room, then into a toilet stall, which unfortunately didn't have doors (what was the deal with that?). I was followed closely by Coach Yavorski who demanded to know what the fuck I thought I was doing. I replied that I thought I was taking a shit. Then he told me that I was going to get my ass back out on that track and I replied that I wasn't going to be doing that. That was the end of my academic sports career.

Working at McDonald's was really fun. I started working the lunch shift since I had no classes at that time. That resulted in a $0.25/hour pay increase (up to $2.00/hour - whew whew!) too. I also learned to open the store and do the pre-work to get it going. That required getting to work at 4 AM or so to filter the fry vats, etc. Then I would cook breakfast until it was time to go to school. In the summer I did much more of this opening and closing behavior, sometimes in the same few days.

Other nights (weekend nights) I closed the store. I was working split shifts and having a great time. After closing we'd go to one of the manager's house and party until two or three in the morning.

One night I was getting home from work and the after-work party, being very quiet and careful as I unlocked and opened the door to find that my dad was standing in the entryway with a gun pointed at me, telling me that I needed to make more noise the next time. I took his advice!

We did one cruel thing while working at McDonald's. There was a guy that worked there that was incredibly obnoxious. We had all gotten extremely tired of him and his non-stop obnoxious talk and one night we grabbed him, took him out to the dumpsters and such, and dunked him, legs first, into half a barrel of (cold) used cooking oil and hamburger grease. He never came back to work and we all felt bad at what we'd done. I am heartily sorry, George, for helping to dump you in the fryer grease.

That summer I retook the SAT and did even better. I also took the Advanced Placement (AP) tests in chemistry and calculus and did well enough to skip the first semester of chemistry at the university.

I also took the calculus AP test and did well enough to skip the first semester of calculus.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA: 1974-1979

I arrived at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in late August 1974, just a week or so before my birthday. I was assigned a triple room in Oglesby Hall, a large two-tower dormitory complex in the (then) extreme southeastern section of campus.

Every fall the dorms would be full to overflowing at the beginning of the year. Floor lounges were stuffed with extra beds and four or five students. By the end of the first semester all of those people had rooms and by the end of the year, dorm rooms would be half full. The university gave them a chance, pocketed their money and let the freshman flunk out courses do the rest.

I was admitted into the Chemistry program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Before classes started I had took another placement test in chemistry, this time to see if I could test out of the second class that chemistry majors take. It turned out that I did really well on that one too and that meant that I skipped a whole year of chemistry classes and would start right in with the second year program.

That meant that I started out with Quantitative Analysis. Several things became clear during the course of that class. I realized that I had zero laboratory technique in a class that was all about laboratory technique. I did experiments over and over trying to get results that have a statistically valid correlation to the right answer. And, I didn't know a wit about statistics. These were things that I would have been exposed to and practiced in that missing year.

I opted out of the chance to take a calculus test that could have gotten me out of the second calculus class. That was a good choice, even though it didn't feel that way at the time.

My second semester the first year I took Organic Chemistry, which ended my chemistry career in college. I have never been good at rote memorization and that is basically what the class required. I got a bad attitude and quit going to class and the rest is history. I think I got a D in that class.

In the spring semester of my first year I had the good fortune to meet with a guy from another floor. He was incredibly spiritual and he and I spent a day together under very unusual circumstances where he laid on me the basics of Hinduism (atman), Buddhism and more and tied it all together with the Christianity of my youth and created a huge spiritual miasma that has still not abated. It took a while for this thread to develop, but when it did it became very powerful. I understand that John (the guy) went on to become a guru and had his own ashram and a following somewhere in the midwest.

I started looking around for a program that still used math and science and didn't require any foreign language and found Engineering. I made plans to visit two departments: Mechanical and Electrical, in that order. I visited the Mechanical Engineering department and they impressed me so much that I didn't even go talk to the Electrical people. I've felt regret over that decision from time to time. Yet, what is, is. The truth of the matter is, I've done very little mechanical engineering over the years.

Mechanical Engineering is the broadest of the engineering fields, encompassing machine design, thermodynamics, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, control systems and more. It used to be that engineers of any stripe, but especially mechanical engineers, could always find a job. I have friends who are mechanical engineers and can't find a job at all, at least in Northern Colorado.

Mechanical engineering turned out to be interesting although I still had to overcome the bad attitude that I had developed while failing chemistry. My dad played an instrumental role in that. I called him one weekend, crying, telling him that I couldn't do it, that I wasn't going to make it in college. He summoned up will-power and gave me a very forceful transmission of a whole bunch of it over the phone. After that there were no more thoughts and no talk of quitting school.

It became clear that I really enjoyed thermodynamics, which I took the summer after my first year of school. That summer I also took a civil aviation class where I obtained my private pilot's license. My dad had always wanted to fly and this was his way to do that through me. I did quite a bit of flying for the rest of college, whenever I could barely afford to keep my proficiency up, which requires a certain number of hours flown in a certain time period. In retrospect I should have just flow with an instructor to keep current, but that would have been even more expensive.

One time, much later (grad school?) I took a friend out flying with me. I had switched from using the University's airport and airplanes (Beechcraft) and had gotten checked-out to fly out of Illini airport in Urbana. Illini was a small airport with a short runway that required coming in over power-lines. I never got comfortable with that (a short-field takeoff and landing over power lines) and that time I flared too high and fast and shot up in the air and stalled about 15 feet above the runway. We hit really hard and that was the last time I ever flew in command.

I got out of the dorms after my second year at school and went to live in a large house with people that I knew from the dorms the previous year. Also living in the house was Monica Avis, now Hughes (see video page), who now lives in Denver with her husband Mark and her three kids. Monica is one of my longest friendships.

The people in that house were really smart people. Two or three of them are dentists, one is a doctor and one is a professor of mathematics somewhere. It was a very stimulating environment in more ways than one.

One of the house projects was getting a dog. The people of the house had found a dog and we were feeding it and taking it in but he turned out to someone else's dog. We had named that dog Chairman Mao Tse Tung, who had recently died and whose soul was now in that dog

With the loss of the first Chairman Mao the search began for another. This time we went to the pound and picked up a black furball Labrador/Doberman mix and he was named Chairman Mao Tse Tung also.

Here is a picture of Mao the dog circa 1977 on and around the back stairs that led to the porch bedroom that I lived in. My room was one of only two entrances to the house on the main floor! The only other entrance to the house was the basement. The house had been a former fraternity house and we used to get mail addressed to the fraternity from the John Birch Society. Some of it was a pretty interesting read.

After my senior year I was the department recipient of the Air Conditioning and Heating Award After interviewing for one job (Schlumberger - working in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait setting off explosives and measuring echoes to find oil), I decided that I would go on to graduate school.

I talked to my favorite professor, Wilbert F. Stoecker, about him being my advisor for graduate school. He agreed and showed me the project he had selected for me. It was an extension of work done the previous year by another grad student.

In the previous work the student had created a simulation of a residential air conditioner and could change one key component (the expansion device) and see what effect that had on the operation and efficiency of the system.

My job was to take his model and construct simulated houses for the air conditioner to operate in and feed the model real climactic information for different areas of the country (Chicago, Illinois and Houston, Texas) to obtain seasonal energy usage data for both expansion devices.

The modeling proved that the thermostatic expansion device provided better energy efficiency, which was (thankfully) exactly what our corporate sponsors (the expansion valve manufacturers) hoped would be found.

That first two semesters of graduate school I had a research assistantship. That paid my tuition and gave me a monthly payment that went a long way towards covering my expenses. My final semester I had a teaching assistantship for Professor Savage in a course of thermodynamics and heat transfer for non-engineers.

As an aside, several years before the current Iraq War, I recieved a letter from a mechanical engineer in Iraq's power industry who wanted me to send him a copy of my thesis. I went as far as to copy the thesis and look into sending it to Iraq. It turned out that it was impossible for me to that much stuff to Iraq. The best I would have been able to do was to send a letter, nothing more. I thought that was pretty strange.

On my birthday in 1979, right before my last semester of graduate school, I met Mary B. Deschene. Actually I had met her a year earlier, but that's a story for the next chapter.

Mary Beth Deschene, Champaign, Illinois to Fort Collins, Colorado : 1979-2002

No, she isn't dead.

Here's a nice picture of Mary, from 1981 or so

I met Mary Deschene in the summer of 1978 after my last semester of undergraduate studies. Her friend Linda was living in my old porch room at the big house at 201 S. Lincoln and I had moved to the Lincoln Trailer Park (both of these places are long gone: things change fast in Champaign-Urbana) a couple of miles north. My parents bought me a trailer to live in for graduate school with the idea that I would sell it and have some seed money for my new life.

I thought this energetic auburn haired young woman was quite pretty and intense, so we made arrangements to meet and go out on a date. Unfortunately, the schedule got messed up somehow and when I showed up, Mary didn't answer the door. Instead it was Harry, her downstairs housemate, who directed me to go up the stairs. I went up, thinking that there would be a door or something and instead came up into Mary's living room where I found her and some guy having a very deep kissing session.

I beat a hasty retreat and went outside. Mary came out to talk to me and apologized for the mix-up. We agreed that we'd get together some time and that didn't happen until August 23rd, 1979.

It was my birthday and I was having a good time at my trailer with close friends who had come to celebrate. Somehow Linda and Mary heard about this party and showed up. I ended up talking to Mary and taking her home when the others had left. We kept seeing each other after that.

Mary comes from a large family of eight children. She has three older brothers: Steve Jim and Dan; and four younger sisters: Pat, Barb, Nancy and Jan.

It was around this time that my car, a 1974 Volkswagen Rabbit, was totaled in a late-night accident when I was driving Mary back to her house. We were on Randolph, a main north-south one-way street. On this stretch of Randolph, north of downtown Champaign, there were no stop signs or lights for through traffic and we were driving normally.

Suddenly, from the right side a guy in a Kharmann Ghia ran a stop sign and appeared right in front of me. He never even saw us and we hit him broadside at about 25 mph. The guy was alright and told us, before the cops came, that he was very drunk and sorry. I remember telling him to keep his mouth shut. I think I would handle it differently now.

The really strange and ironic thing about that whole situation is that the very Kharmann Ghia that hit us had once been owned by Mary!

Mary suffered some whiplash in that accident that she has never fully recovered from. The guy that we hit didn't have insurance and had to make restitution to Mary for her chiropractor bills. He continued to do that even after we moved to Seattle.

The brown 74 Rabbit was replaced with an orange 76 Rabbit that had a lot less frills and could be purchased for the insurance settlement. That car also had a very short life, meeting it's end on the Ballard Bridge in Seattle, Washington in late fall of 1970.

Seattle, Washington, USA: 1980-1988

We moved to Seattle in January 1980. we took a long circuitous route to avoid snow. This took us through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon and finally Washington.

I had gotten a job offer from Boeing Commercial Airplane Company in Seattle as a mechanical systems engineer. The group was named "Mechanical and Electrical Systems Research". I immediately got started learning about EASY5, a comprehensive modeling program that my boss A.J.P Lloyd had helped invent.

I also started doing research projects, what Boeing and the government called IR&D projects. Boeing would show that they were doing research and publishing and the government would give Boeimg money.

I began growing my hair right about coincident with the assassination of John Lennon in 1980. By the time this picture was taken, circa 1981, it was pretty long. I had never had long hair before that.

This was taken at our apartment in the Fremont neighborhood in north Seattle. At that time, Fremont was a distressed area, with a bombed-out looking "downtown" area (it had once been a separate town that was swallowed by Seattle). It also has a Frank Lloyd Wright library building

One of my early research projects was a complete redo of the 727 cabin air pressure controller, originally done in analog, into a digital form running on a 1 MHz Z80-based microcomputer.

There was this most amazing of labs there that I got to work in that was perfect for the dynamicists among us. Ostensibily it was the Anti-skid Braking research lab. In reality it was used for a variety of things and was a really fun place to work.

The lab was equipped with three high speed (1 MHz bandwidth) analog computer that could be bussed together. The computers were also equipped with tunable analog filters and digital logic. The implementation was patched onto a large panel with wires. At the end of the day, or when one's time on the computer was done, you could take off the panel and put it into a special cabinet.

One guy, who's lab it actually was (the anti-skid guy) would fire up all three of the analog computers plus a digital simulation. His simulation modeled the slow dynamics of the plane landing on the digital computers and the fast stuff (springs, struts, etc.) were on the analog computer. The whole thing was then applied to real hydraulics that were whining away in the next room. This was to test out the braking system on the planes and the brakes that were out there were all instrumented so he could measure what was happening. It was very impressive.

Our first apartment was in the Magnolia neighborhood in near-northwest Seattle. It was a really nice third floor two-bedroom place right on a busline.

My first week of going to work on the bus, Seattle had a rare snow. It snowed maybe 3-4 inches of heavy wet snow. I waited and waited at the bus stop, never seeing a bus, never seeing a rider. Finally I gave up. I turns out the city was paralyzed, with buses careening down the hills downtown like some rabid pinball scoring big points on the parked car bumpers along the side.

We had only been in Seattle for five months when "Morning Edition" (new back then) told us that Mount Saint Helens, about 200 miles from us, had erupted spectacularly. I truly had not ever thought of volcanoes and their proximity to us. In fact, scientists had been expecting Mount Baker, maybe 100 miles northeast of us, which had been steaming for years, to be the one to erupt.

One day in August I was walking around with camera in Magnolia, taking pictures of flowers and I happened to look up. There was a huge cloud forming in the south and spreading towards the east. I took a couple pictures, then decided that I would try to make a panaorama photo of the entire spreading cloud. I took two pictures and for nearly 25 years these two pictures have been sitting side by side in a photo album. Not anymore: last night (May 3, 2005) I fired up the picture stitching software in my Roxio suite and came up with the following picture. Notice Mount Rainier on the left side of the picture.

Almost immediately, we bought a tent and backpacking equipment and started doing more and more ambitious hikes.

Our first long hike was in the North Cascades National Park. It was called the Beaver Loop Trail, and it was really something. Here are a choice of maps for the whole park if you'd like to follow along (the maps themselves are big and very nice, this link is just to the map selection page).

My long haired days ended at that time when my parents visited in the summer of 1981. The laid into me about my hair. This picture was taken at Mount Rainier National Park while I still had my hair. Later my dad put on the full-court press and I decided that I would get a haircut. You'll see that I grew my hair back while I was in Fort Collins.

One day I was reading the paper on the bus and an insert fell out. It was published by the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Washington and commemorating the birthday of Most Worshipful Grandmaster George Washington (yes, that one) of the Grand Lodge of Virginia. I began reading about the Masons and suddenly I remembered something from my past, or was it a dream...

I was riding on the train with my mother. We often did that when I was younger in the Bradley days, riding the train down to Grandma and Pop's house in Springfield. I looked over and saw a man who was reading heiroglyphs of a sort, a purely symolic language that he was reading and I could not. I had the feeling that there was something profound in that symbolism.

Well, in essence, that is what is at the core of Masonry, even as it is practiced today, although I scoured the Masonic library at the Main Seattle Temple and found nothing like my dream/memory.

Masonry is responsible for the handing down of a set of symbols relating to the stone construction industry of the midle ages, and more, for a long time now. The ceremonies are very profound and I've got a lot of good stories.

Masonry hung out in the back of my mind for a while. Then, one day I was talking to my friend Donald "Cotton" Shuler, telling him of my desire to find a Mason so that I could become a Mason.

Cotton surprised me by telling me that he was a Mason and that he would sponsor me for membership in his lodge: Century Lodge #208, Seattle, Washington.

I paid my dues and the date was set for my initiation as an Entered Apprentice Mason. The details of the ceremony can be found in many places in bookstores and on the internet. I will not detail them here.

My surprise was complete when the initiation ceremony began and found that my friend Cotton was playing the role of the Worshipful Master. He had learned the part especially for me. That's how it works: the degrees are elaborate rituals involving performance by the brotherhood, illustrating the Masonic symbols through an ancient drama. All parts of the performance are memorized by the brothers who are not merely walking through their parts: they are involved.

Cotton learned the part of Worshipful Master for each of my three degrees, providing me a continuity throughout the process that some may not have gotten.

I participated in Lodge very faithfully during the remainder of my time in Seattle. I was at lodge when I heard my of my father's death. I first announced my wife's pregancy with Martin to my brothers at Century Lodge.

Unfortunately I stopped going to lodge when I moved to Fort Collins. I attended a couple of meetings of Fidelity Lodge in Fort Collins, yet did not persist. That lodge was largely made up of war veterans and both times I was there I was regaled by tales of old soldiers

The bottom line is that I don't practice Masonry anymore, I will always be a Mason. My cable-tow is within reach and I have not forgotten my vows.

In the time that followed, we got married (April 23, 1983) and nine months five days after our wedding we were blessed with the birth of our son and only child Martin Noble Emde, January 28, 1984.

Boeblingen, Germany: 1988

My boss offered us the chance to live in Germany and work with our division's (Mechanical Design Division) people over there. We packed up and the company put our stuff in storage, including our cars, and we arrived in Stuttgart in late January, 1988.

We lived in a village named Gaertringen, about 15 km from the HP site in Boeblingen and even closer to the huge Daimler-Benz factory in Sindelfingen.

Fort Collins, Colorado, USA: 1988-?

We moved to Fort Collins in July of 1988 at the behest of my employer, Hewlett-Packard Company. The idea was for us (30 families of my coworkers and us) to achieve some incredible synergy with the Electrical Design Division folks that were already in Fort Collins. That never happened.

This picture was taken in the summer of 1989 when we moved into the house that I'm living in now. Those of you who have seen the recent videos will know that this tree, only about 10 feet tall here, is probably 25 feet tall now.

Mary and I got divorced in August of 2002.

Marty met Kristen Wile in the summer of 2002 and they were married on August 1, 2003. This picture was taken on May 1st 2005.