Until I received Louise’s letter in March, I didn’t fully comprehend that it has been 50 years since we graduated from Chi Hi. Since that letter, I’ve been thinking long and hard about putting together a bio. There is no way that I can put things in any kind of a meaningful chronological order. Why you ask? There have been so many starts and stops, so many job/career changes, so many ups and downs, living on the east coast then the west coast, that a chronological listing would be most confusing. Instead, let me give you some snippets of my life so far.

Carolyn and I were married in the summer of ’61, after we had each received an undergraduate degree. Then it was off to graduate school for five years. It was after graduate school that things got crazy. Let me summarize it this way: Since that time I have had nine jobs, (not counting summers) split between being a corporate scientist and teaching in colleges and universities. The institutions of higher education ranged in size from less than 1,000 students to almost 50,000 students. I even taught at David Letterman’s alma mater. My class sizes ranged from a mere handful of students to almost 500 students per class.

I have also been fired, laid off and stood in unemployment lines. Beyond that, I have turned down a number of jobs that, in retrospect, I probably should have accepted. It turns out that I’m a slow learner. My major advisor in grad school told me I probably would not like working as a corporate scientist. It took 10 years and three corporations before I accepted his judgment. While corporate salaries are nice, corporations exert a great deal of control over your life. I wanted more control over my life, I wanted to live life my way; teaching offered that opportunity.

So far we have lived in eight different states; but there’s more, we’ve lived in one state three different times and one state two different times. In that time we have owned five houses and seven RV’s (only one of which I totaled). In some teaching situations I had a full year contract. At other times I had summers off. One summer I became a photojournalist and published two articles on western North Dakota. For two summers I did post-doctorate work, at Oklahoma State University and Penn State University. I also acted as a photographer aboard a small Cessna at 10,000 feet. The idea was to photograph all of the sections in several North Dakota counties to verify crop acreage in order to satisfy government loan programs. I did that for two summers (ably assisted by both of our children) and in the process found more potential duck hunting sloughs than one can explore in a lifetime.

Our two children, both married, don’t seem to have been traumatized by our (my) frequent moves. We keep in constant touch by phone and email. Mark is a small animal veterinary surgeon in private practice and has two children. Michael is a web guru with IBM (now Lenovo) and has three children.

We approached hobbies/activities the same way I approached jobs/careers: when you no longer have a need for it, drop it. In that sense, we were strongly in to archery when we lived in suburban Philadelphia, canoeing (many trips to Boundary Waters) when we lived in North Dakota and dutch oven cooking when we lived in Oregon. For the most part these are gone now. However, for more that 50 years I’ve maintained an active interest in fly fishing (salt water fly fishing is a new interest) and fly tying (I have no talent, but I keep at it anyway).

I have to give my wife Carolyn a great deal of credit for putting up with me throughout all of these moves. I don’t think many women would have done what she did. It’s been a great life and it’s not over yet. Our latest RV, a truck camper built in Canada for cold weather outings, will be used to trek to Yellowstone Park (we’re about 90 minutes away) for late fall fishing and early spring viewing of grizzlies and wolves.

My best teaching gig was probably in the PAC 10 at Oregon State University. I headed up much of the freshman chemistry program in an institution that is focused on graduate education. For me, this was a great job because I had almost total control of the program. To be very clear, undergraduates don’t have much standing in a research university, particularly in physical science departments. This of course means that freshmen are barely acknowledged by the faculty. Yet, there are hoards of undergraduates and even more freshmen that deserve attention. My primary role was to teach freshmen in large classes (about 250 students) and help them to gain a meaningful education.

I retired in the spring of 2000 and we moved to Bozeman, Montana shortly after that.