May, 2015


I didn't start attending VCS until the ninth grade. I tend to think of my time there with a mixture of acute embarrassment and abject contrition. Without question I could be insufferable, as some of the more colorful (and richly deserved) inscriptions in my senior yearbook will attest.


I don't know how to explain what sticks in the mind and what doesn't, but here are a few random things I remember from those years:




After graduation, it was on to Yale. I majored in math, and did quite a bit of performing . I played in all the standard musical groups - bands, orchestras, jazz ensemble - and when someone was planning a special performance of some kind and needed a percussionist, I would often get a call. The most exciting example of this was the 1967 New York premier of Benjamin Britten's "Curlew River", organized and conducted by John Mauceri. At the time John was just an undergraduate music major, but you could see that the kid had potential. (Last fall our daughter's 8th grade humanities magnet class went on a study trip to New York, and John was nice enough to sit for an interview with them.)


I would also occasionally be brought in to play drums for whatever musical was being performed at VCS at the time.


Sophomore year, my roommate Mike Baum was manager of the Yale Apollo Glee Club. This wasn't the main Glee Club, mind you; it was kind of a JV squad. Along with a chorus from a nearby women's college (Yale College being all male in those days), they were planning a spring break tour in the northeast. It occurred to me that VCS was a potential stop for them. One evening I called Mrs. Kocher and put Mike on the phone with her. In surprisingly short order I learned that it had all been arranged - the time and date of the performance, lodging arrangements for the musicians, the works. The concert went on as planned, and even got a standing ovation. Mrs. K. was an amazing person.


(I'm not sure how or when it started, but Mrs. Kocher and Miss Schantz were avid Cleo Laine followers. They would catch any performance of hers that was within their power to attend. I think she got to know them after a while.)


I had spent the summers of '63 through '68 as a counselor at the Ontario County 4-H Camp near Bristol. One year while I was still in high school Mr. Houseman was the camp director and I got to call him "Wayne". Rojean Niggli and Mary Rose also worked there, though perhaps not at the same time as Wayne. (Expanding the list to include other VCS classes would bring in David Ramsay, Janice Wiley, Anne Tobey, Jeannie Paynter, Sue Mykytyn, Larry Peck, and my brother Bruce, and I'm probably forgetting a few. David was a med student at the time and he would ask people to bring him fresh roadkill, which he would dissect for the edification of the campers.)


The mention of Bristol reminds me that it always seemed to be the answer to any question that Mr. Pietropaolo would pose as to where one might find any given animal, plant, or mineral. Spotted salamander? Bristol. Skunk cabbage? Bristol. Saguaro cactus? Giant anaconda? Bristol.


In the fall of '69, B.S. diploma in hand, I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I paid my way by serving as a teaching assistant. The idea was to get a Ph.D. in math. I never quite made it. I enjoyed the subject, the faculty was fine, and I completed all the requirements except the most important one. But as it came time to write that thesis, I was forced to admit that I might lack a couple of essential qualities, namely (a.) talent, and (b.) dedication. Perhaps by way of rationalization, I also came to feel that the academic life might not be for me.


I took some extra computer science classes to round out my time in Madison, and in 1975 I moved to Belvidere, IL and took a job with a company that made numerically controlled machine tools. As a hobby I took up bicycling in a somewhat serious way. I would go on rides of as much as a hundred miles with the Blackhawk Bicycle Club of Rockford and others. One of the other participants on some of these rides was Lon Haldeman, who lived in nearby Harvard, IL. (This was before he became famous for his transcontinental exploits.)


In 1978 I moved to the D.C. area and began toiling in the vineyards of Federal contracting (and riding with the Potomac Pedalers). I have worked for several different companies, on contracts with NASA, NOAA, the FBI, the FAA, and (currently) the USDA. An offshoot of some of the NASA work led to a contract with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to install a Landsat receiving station, and I did month-long stints in Beijing a couple of times (1986, 1991). The FAA work involved an installation at their "Oakland" Center in Fremont, CA and for 18 months or so (1988-89) I led a bicoastal existence, a two weeks here, two weeks there sort of thing. (I don't know that it's still the case, but there was a time when, if you crossed the N. Atlantic or the Pacific by air, your flight was being tracked by software that I helped to write. I also wrote the software that notified NORAD of known oceanic flights approaching US territory. I had to give a briefing to the brass in Colorado Springs once.) Currently I work for a subsidiary of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, one of the thirteen Alaska Native Regional Corporations created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. (No, I have never been to Alaska, though I once sent a fax to Anchorage.) Our contract with the USDA involves the collection, processing, and analysis of satellite imagery for use in global crop yield forecasting. I share a rather squalid office with several other people, but if the shades are open, I can look up at the top of the Washington Monument from my desk.


I lived in suburban Maryland at first, moved into D.C. proper in 1982, and moved back to Maryland with my wife Connie Li in 1997.


I had met at Connie at work. We were married in 1995. Our son Nolan was born in 1999, our daughter Nora in 2001. Before the kids were born, I was afraid I would resent them for keeping me from doing some of the things I had enjoyed doing before. Once they arrived, though, I found I never wanted to be away from them. Now that they are teenagers, I am reassessing my position. Connie was born in Taiwan and emigrated to the US with her family when she was 12. Now a US citizen, she works for George Mason University (also her alma mater) at NASA on a joint US-Japan mission to measure global precipitation from space.


Summing up, I'm frequently troubled by the discrepancy between how bright the future seemed when we graduated and how grim it can look for my kids. On the other hand, it may be that the future is always brighter in retrospect, and to quote the John Hiatt lyric, I got just enough left to wanna see what's next. All in all I can't resist echoing Woody Allen (whatever you may think of him), who said of himself, "His one regret in life is that he is not someone else."