I'll begin with a summary of my life, then move on to details and stories.

I majored in physics at Brown University, graduating in 1965. I chose physics because some radio ham friends convinced me it was the key to understanding the mysteries of the universe, but I began to have my doubts. I cultivated a great many interests: art, peace activism, idealistic left-wing politics, and photography, among others. I briefly considered switching to architecture, but Brown didn't offer an architecture program and I didn't have the passion and resources to pursue it elsewhere.

I spent two years getting my Master's in physics at Wayne State University in Detroit. Living in Detroit was an intense and traumatic experience; I felt alienated from mainstream society. The Vietnam was was just reaching its peak, and I strongly opposed it at a time when most Americans still supported it. My friends were part of the counterculture-- an artist and several graduate students in the humanities. I stayed in Detroit during the colorful summer of 1967 when the hippies descended on San Francisco.

In September 1967 I started my first full time job at Honeywell Electronic Data Processing in Waltham, Massachusetts, on Route 128 west of Boston (the birthplace of high tech industries before they migrated to California). The field was magnetic tape and disk recording, which interested me because I'd spent a lot of time in high school maintaining my Wollensack recorder, which sounded great in those rare moments when it worked right. It was the start of a lifelong career. I lived in a two bedroom apartment in Brighton, a rather pleasant neighborhood a few miles west of downtown Boston. I was intensely involved in photography-- I had a darkroom in one of the bedrooms-- and I went hiking when the weather permitted. In 1969 I met Nancy, an artist and eventually the mother of my two children, at a life drawing class in Cambridge. When Honeywell relocated to Billerica, north of Boston, we rented a little two hundred year old house in Winchester, a rather lovely old town about ten miles north of Boston. In July 1970 Honeywell announced that they were going to transfer our entire department to Oklahoma City. I knew beyond doubt I didn't want to move there. Here's a bit of synchronicity: The reason for the transfer was that Honeywell purchased the GE computer division. I just checked the Internet to find some links, and saw the announcement that GE is purchasing Honeywell.

My next stop was Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, where I worked for Sperry Univac (now Unisys), the company that invented the computer. I'd occasionally see the inventor himself, J. Presper Eckert, wandering through the halls. I never met him; I've been told I was fortunate: he was incredibly arrogant. We rented a small house next to a summer day camp in Blue Bell, close enough to walk or bicycle to Univac. I continued my passionate involvement with photography, often wandering with my cameras through old towns like Reading. Pennsylvania lacked the sweeping natural landscapes I loved (and still love) to photograph. For a while I had the pleasure of teaching an evening class at the Fleisher Art Memorial, a free evening art school in South Philly, administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1973 Univac purchased a disk drive company called ISS in Cupertino, California, and gave many of its Blue Bell employees the opportunity to transfer. I couldn't resist the siren call of the land of John Muir, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Wynn Bullock.

Cupertino was a patchwork of high technology office parks, suburban subdivisions, and orchards on the western side of Santa Clara Valley, which was just then becomming known as Silicon Valley. We found much of the valley to be excessively bland, so we rented a tiny house in Saratoga, an older community in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, and in 1974 we bought a house in nearby Los Gatos. It wasn't much (a pretty basic starter house), but it was on a 1/4 acre lot: enough for a large garden. It turned out to be an outrageously great investment, increasing six times in value by the time we sold it in 1988. I probably couldn't afford it now. I continued my involvement with photography, and went hiking in the Santa Cruz mountains and the Sierras whenever I could. My sons Nathan was and Henry ware born in 1976 and 1979. In 1982 I went to work at a startup called Applied Information Memories (AIM). It crashed and burned in 1985 along with my marriage (a stressful year). The Silicon Valley dream is to get rich and get out. I couldn't find another job there so I achieved half the dream by taking a job with Kodak in San Diego.

San Diego was a decent and delightful place to live, but I had to overcome my deeply ingrained Northern Californian prejudice against Southern California. It wasn't easy moving from the land of the environmentally sensitive and spiritually evolved to the land of the shallow Hollywood hustler. It took me years to see through the (mostly) false stereotypes. By now, Silicon Valley hustlers have far outstripped their Hollywood counterparts. That of course that could change overnight thanks to the dot com crash, but I no longer care. I wasn't deeply involved in photography while I lived in San Diego (actually, Encinitas, a pleasant beach town about 25 miles north of San Diego). It wasn't until I moved to Boulder and got back into darkroom work via the computer that was I able to make fine prints of pictures I took while I lived there. My old interest in audio was rekindled in a big way. I got into collecting LP records, which people were unloading cheaply thanks to the CD, and I designed and built vacuum tube amplifiers with the help of the PSpice computer program. When Kodak was shutting down its San Diego labs in 1998, I briefly considered getting into the audio business, but sanity prevailed. I went through some difficult relationships, including three years with a woman I later learned had borderline personality disorder, characterized by intermittent raging temper tantrums. Real Jekyll and Hyde stuff. Things got much better when I met Louise Marks in 1992. We purchased a large and wonderful house in Olivenhain (inland Encinitas near Rancho Santa Fe) at the end of 1994. It was in forclosure when we bought it. I thought we'd make a killing on it, but the timing wasn't quite right when we sold it. We came out a little ahead.

In November 1997 Kodak announced that it was looking for a buyer for the San Diego Labs. Apparently Hewlett Packard had tried to purchase it two years earlier but Kodak wasn't interested. By the time Kodak was ready, HP had exited the disk drive market and the stocks of most disk drive companies had crashed. No buyer was found. I couldn't even get a job interview in San Diego, but I received the red carpet treatment at StorageTek in Louisville, Colorado, just outside of Boulder. I moved to Boulder in April 1998, and Louise followed in July. We love it here, but making friends has been a slow process. It will take a while. We don't miss California much, except for my son Henry and Trader Joe's. I much perfer the mountains to the ocean.

The mystery of threes and twelves

Early years

My home was less than a mile from the George Eastman House, now the International Museum of Photography and Film. I visited frequently, and these visits left me with an abiding love of cameras and fine photographic images. It was there that I first saw Ansel Adams' great images of the American West, images that stayed with me and influenced my decision to move to California in 1973. Childhood impressions exert a powerful psychic pull. They certainly influenced my recent (1998) decision to leave California for Colorado, where the trees and seasons remind me of Rochester, but the mountains are magnificent and the sun shines as much as in California. Such a deal!

I attended Number One Elementary School and Monroe High School, graduating in 1961. My principal hobbies were birdwatching (ages 9 and 10), ham radio (ages 13 through 18), and taking apart old radios, modifying them to try to make them "high fidelity" (ages 14 on with relapses in later years). I was a relatively introspective and intellectual child, regarded by my peers ad "nerdy" (though the word wasn't yet in widespread use).

Some fellow radio hams convinced me that the secrets of the universe would be unraveled by physics, so I applied to be a physics major at the University of Chicago, MIT, and Brown. I was accepted by all three. (My ego, that devil, made me write this.) MIT was my first choice, but I was already developing doubts about physics, so at the last minute I switched to Brown, which offered excellent programs in the liberal arts as well as the sciences-- so I would have more options should I ever decide to switch. Of course when I decided to switch out of physics-- to architecture-- I learned that MIT had a program and Brown didn't. So I toughed it out in physics. I didn't have the passion to become an architect. I'm delighted that my son Nathan has it.

Back to beginnings

Next: college years