Born in San Francisco Children’s Hospital, where mother Ruth A. Frary, MD, was completing her medical residency. Moved to Watsonville shortly after, where we lived in the former nurses’ housing behind the town’s first (private) hospital on Third Avenue. Father, Jerome A. Ludden Jr, MD, joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor. We moved to Brewington Ave., only a block from the (then fairly new) community hospital. Then moved to 130 Rogers Ave., where I walked to primary and bicycled to middle schools, 5 blocks away.
I took sewing at E.A. Hall Middle School, the first boy to do so. The next year, 6 girls wanted to take shop — which upset the system. Played cornet and sang in chorus.
Rode my bicycle to middle school, and then to Watsonville Joint Union High School in class of 1956, but stayed an extra year (to compensate for skipping third grade) so graduated with the class of 1957. Worked after school at the five-and-dime as a stock clerk, where I was paid more (75 ¢/hr) than the saleswomen (50 ¢/hr). Worked one summer at an apricot orchard with migrant laborers picking and carting fruit to the highway for pickup.
I always had a mechanical interest. In high school, I worked on cars and built a hot rod with my friend John Eiskamp. We rebuilt the engine in his ’49 Chevrolet and my ’36 Plymouth, and I added dual exhaust to my mother’s Pontiac, which I helped drive home from the factory pickup when US 10 across North Dakota was mostly a gravel road.
My father flew to Long Beach, California, where he picked up his uncle’s 1936 Plymouth coupe, had the brakes poorly ‘fixed’, and drove the 400 miles home using only the handbrake. I installed seat belts in that car, and in the 1957 Volkswagen that my father bought for me later.
We often visited my year-older cousin in Portland, Oregon. On summer when I was 13 I learned that he was a radio amateur, participating in an experiment to learn how far microwave would transmit by driving away from Mt Hood. I became fascinated with electronics, and built a number of electronic Heathkits.
After each of my senior years, I worked at White Wolf Lodge, on the upper rim of Yosemite National Park, where I learned to enjoy nature — even though I was briefly in the Boy Scouts, where I learned to tie knots.
Dreamed of economics engineering, because MIT had a joint program with Pomona College (where my father and his uncle graduated), but (since I did not crack a book that summer) I failed my placement exam for the required Physics 101. I had to take Chemistry instead. I switched my major to Chemistry; though I did take Economics my sophomore year — and received a “D” grade from an uninspiring professor. So much for the joint MIT program! Every Wednesday afternoon the chemistry department held a seminar, snagging chemists who were visiting somewhere in the Los Angeles basin to speak to faculty and students. We were encouraged to ask questions, which followed on my own constantly asking, “Why?”.
Started hiking with the Sierra Club and eventually led a couple of trips for them — up Mount Whitney and cleanup in Mount Rainier. So those college summers I either worked in Dr. R. Nelson Smith’s lab or went on backpacking trips.
After hiking in the summer of 1960, I returned to senior chemistry at Pomona to hear Dr. Smith announce that we now had a computer in the Chemistry building, handed the 12 of us seniors each a key to the computer room, and told us that he was doubling the homework, so we better learn to use the new computer!
I followed one seminar speaker to University of Washington, and moved into the (then relatively new) Lander Hall dormitory. One night I looked out the window and a floating home (built on log raft) across the shipping canal had caught on fire. Fire trucks were wending their way down the north slope of Capital Hill, but the neighbors cut the house loose and pushed it out into the shipping canal — away from other houseboats. A fireboat arrived from Ballard, turned on the pumps, and washed the burning house into the water. After 5 minutes the fireboat turned around and left.
The first person I met when I moved to Seattle was Dave Dahl, an organist. I sang in the church choir where he played (Phinney Ridge Lutheran and Trinity Methodist). After a year in the dorm, we roomed together in Ballard, across the street from Trinity Methodist. Dave wanted to restore tonal elements of the pipe organ, so we made a number of changes, culminating with a re-dedication concert by EE. Power Biggs, a famous organist at the time. During this time I made friends with a number of Seattle organists, and with Glenn White, an acoustic engineer and music lover, and became fascinated with pipe organs, which connected my music interests with my mechanical ability.
My musical friends introduced me to a number of Seattle organists, including Peter Hallock at St Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral. I occasionally substituted in the Compline choir that sang there every Sunday evening. I also took a graduate level Madrigal singing at University of Washington School of Music.
In grad school my schools in the semi-basement, with a window at ground level. I was working with explosives, so one wall of the lab was a maze of evacuated glass tubing. I came into the lab one morning to notice a metallic odor and my experiment had been dis-assembled in the fume hood with organic metal compounds dribbled across the floor towards the window. I tasted metal in my mouth for 2 weeks.
In the lab right across the hall, a fellow grad student was dis-assembling a flask of boiling ether, which caught on fire. I heard him holler, grabbed a very large CO2 fire extinguisher, and put out the fire. Later that day, on my way to the student union for lunch, I stopped by a card table and asked why they were there. They said they were recruiting for the Peace Corps, and a placement exam would begin in 20 minutes upstairs. So I went up and filled out the forms.
A couple of weeks later I got a phone call that said I had been chosen to serve in Nigeria (I did not know where that was) and would I like to join the training group at Columbia University in 2 weeks! I said ‘yes’, packed my car, drove to my folks’ house in California, and joined the Peace Corps Nigeria VII training group, summer of 1963, for 3 months of introduction at Columbia Teachers’ College to teaching, culture, and staying healthy.
We flew to Lagos, the took a DC-4 over the jungle to Enugu, in the southeast of Nigeria. We stayed a couple of nights in the PC rest house (hostel), then were delivered in a Chevy Suburban. As we dropped off volunteers, each school became more and more primitive — mine being the last — 30 miles of dirt road from the nearest town with a ‘cold store’ with a refrigerator. I was to teach at Aggrey Memorial College in Arochukwu, the oldest private secondary school (1932) in in West Africa.
The owner and principal was Alvan Ikoku, also the head of the teachers union and leader of the opposition political party. He had a degree from University of London and was the best speaker of the English language I had ever heard. I had one of his daughters as a student. He lived in the same, very modest house (roughly 500 sq ft), as all the other teachers, though he had 2 houses, one for each wife.
My first Christmas school vacation I worked in the local hospital, which was run by a Nigerian physician who had trained in Edinburgh. There was no power, so he performed surgery by kerosene light, with one nurse to fend off the flying insects. Patients were fed by their family, who slept on the floor under the bed. The doctor very seldom helped with infant deliveries, because if the woman had trouble, she would walk to the hospital with a couple of friends. The exercise usually induced labor. She would squat over a cloth, deliver the baby, and carry the baby in to the hospital to proudly show the doctor.
The second Christmas vacation I planned my Honda CB125 motorcycle to ride across Africa with two friends to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, but one of the others could not make it. We did ride 4,000 miles in a loop through Chad, Central African Republic, and Cameroon.
After 1 1/2 years teaching science and math, I realized that teaching is not my love nor my talent. I transferred to the Eastern Nigeria Peace Corps headquarters and spent the rest of my term delivering freight, maintaining Jeeps, and training new volunteers how to use and be safe on Honda 50cc motorcycles. Since I had a plane ticket home, and it was good for another year, I arranged for training on pipe organ building in Germany through my contacts in Seattle and purchased a Volkswagen for factory delivery.
So I flew to Stuttgart, went into town and bought some clothes suitable for cold climate, then got on the train to Ulm. There I transferred to the train to Blaubeuren, but went the wrong way. The conductor looked at my ticket and told me to get off at the next stop, buy a ticket back to Ulm, cross the platform, and get on the southbound train. So much for my college German class! I was only a couple of hours late.
I picked up the new Volkswagen that I had ordered from the factory. There were 4 other Americans at the Goethe Institute language school, all on Fulbright music fellowships. Since I had the car, we took many weekend trips during our 3 months of schooling. I felt comfortable speaking German (except perhaps on the phone) after this training.
I drove up to Bielefeld (in the British zone) and worked at Detlef Kleuker Orgelbau in Brackwede, a suburb of Bielefeld. Kleuker arranged with a neighbor of his for me to rent a room — with only cold water half-bath. I bathed at the public swimming pool. So, for a year I spoke only German, with very few exceptions.
Dave Dahl brought his college choir to Europe on tour and asked me to meet them in Paris. I took the train to Paris and found myself translating French for a group of about 5 students — 3 of whom were college French majors! So much for my high school French and college German!
Kleuker originally considered me to be an apprentice, but soon realized that I did know which end of a screwdriver to pound with, and raised my pay from $25/month to $50/month. After a couple of months, the electrical engineer, who had been designing magnets to move the organ stop sliders, quit. I said that I could do his work installing the electrical parts, and he raised my pay to $125/month. We single employees (and apprentices) walked a couple of blocks to the post office, where a woman brought in a hot meal for about 25¢/day. [For breakfast I got brown rye with jam, and for supper I got brown rye with cold cuts as part of my rent.]
I joined a small hiking group with one of my co-workers and several other young folks from the city, and we went on walks nearly every weekend. I drove through the Russian zone to Berlin, both to visit a violinist friend from language school and to install a pipe organ at Berlin Heiligensee — a church built in the 13th century that had 18” of plaster on the ceiling of the organ loft. Being in Berlin felt like being in prison to me because I had to go through immigration and was constrained to the autobahn while driving through the Russian Zone. There were several workers from eastern Germany working in the organ shop who had not seen their families since the war.
I had originally planned to attend the Technische Hochshule für orgelbau in Stuttgart, so did not spend any time as a tourist there. But after 9 months working as an organ builder and consulting with my boss, I realized that I had already learned the theoretical part of organ building that apprentices normally missed by only attending secondary school in the mornings. So I worked in the pipe shop for a couple of months before returning to Seattle.
Back in Seattle, I joined Dave Dahl and Glenn White in Olympic Organ Builders. They had been importing organs, custom-built in Germany. I set up shop (which took about 6 months) in Glenn’s father’s closed sheet metal shop in the Fremont district of Seattle. There, I designed organs, and Glenn and Dave sold them, and Glenn and I installed them. I supervised 5 employees. All told, we built about 20 organs around the Pacific Northwest between 1967 and 1970. I also designed and built a organ and wrote instructions so it could be built as a kit.
One of my employees sold me his houseboat (a wooden house built on a log raft — known as a ‘floating home’) that was moored just off Westlake in Lake Union. While working on the bath faucet one day I looked down through the drain and saw the lake — there was no sewer plumbing!
One day I returned to the houseboat from the organ shop (less than a mile away) and found a notice stapled to the door, saying that I was moored in a public street and had to remove the houseboat in 30 days! There was no visible evidence of Lynn St crossing Westlake (which ran at the foot of a hill parallel to the lake shore). I had no hint of this coming.
I scrambled to find a place to tie up my boat and moved it to a pier near Gasworks Park. This pier was on the route from Ballard to the UoW football stadium, so when football season began, many boats passed by my houseboat. At some point, the beams holding the log raft together broke, one or two logs floated away, and half my house was under 6” of water.
Since the city was starting to clamp down on houseboats that were polluting the lake, moorage was very hard to find. I wanted to just sink the houseboat, but did find a legal place to tie up on Portage Bay, just across from the University Hospital. I had an end (prime) moorage in a cooperative that also owned two houses on land and 1000’ of lake frontage. My moorage fee was $85/month, that included payment for the land!
We owners of 3110 Portage Bay Pl, we proceeded to replace the docks, electric service, and added underwater storage tanks for sewage, which was pumped up to the city sewer main. We added a laundry house with parking on the roof. My neighbor commuted in his canoe across the shipping canal to work at the hospital.
In 1970, Boeing — the largest employer in Washington state — lost a huge government contract to build a supersonic transport. The economy of Seattle slipped into a slump, and an economist friend recommended that we sell and leave. So I sold the houseboat for $13,500, traded the VW for a used Mercedes 220, packed everything into a utility trailer, and headed for Hanover, New Hampshire, the state where Carol was born and where my Peace Corps physician, Rob Chapman, lived and taught at Dartmouth Medical School. We rented a house built by the Shakers in Enfield, the site of a Shaker Village, where — at the time — a Roman Catholic men’s order had a boy’s secondary school. We moved into the big stone house, and I taught math and science while Carol taught history and politics.
While in New Hampshire, we hiked in the White Mountains, leading guided hikes and helping in the huts of the Appalachian Mountain Club. I built two portable pipe organs while in New Hampshire, one for SUNY and one for Boston Camerata.
Soon it became clear that we could not survive economically in Enfield so we moved to Beacon Hill, Boston. I got a job drafting waterproofing details for Columbia Cornice Company, one of the biggest roofing companies in New England. They had the roofing and waterproofing contract for the 3-block Albany South Mall of government buildings.
I quit to attend architecture school at Harvard School of Design, but soon realized that they did not know how to teach architecture, and there were plenty of unemployed architects on Harvard Square already. Only one other of my classmates had ever picked up a hammer! So I went back to Columbia Cornice as engineering manager, supervising two other engineers. I learned a lot about roofing large buildings. The boss insisted that I have a car, so we bought a diesel Mercedes, and I arranged with the boss to park it across the street in a heated garage.
Then, with the Arab oil embargo, the economy of New England went bad. What to do when the economy is bad? Go back to school. We figured that we liked to hike, so working in some outdoor field would be good. I applied to several forestry graduate schools. In the winter of 1975, Carol flew to Seattle to interview for a job in Olympia with the state community development office and stopped at the University of Washington College of Forest Resources, where I had applied. She asked Dr. Schreuder how my application was coming, and he asked her, “What particular area of forestry interests Jim?” Looking at his bookshelf, she replied, “Economics”, not realizing that I had earned a “D” in college Econ.
A few weeks later, we got a phone call that I could start grad school in April 1975. So we packed up again and drove back across the country to Seattle, with two cats and a crate of tropical miniature flowers in an ice storm in a Mercedes 240D and trailer, with just enough power to get up to speed, but not in high gear once we left Pennsylvania. Through the Midwest, we drove in a notch in the snow drifts just one semi-truck wide on the Interstate. When we arrived at the Rockies, we waited, with the truckers, in a truck stop until each pass was plowed, then joined the parade to the next truck stop.
So I started in April in two new subjects for me, economics and forestry. After two years, Carol’s mother was dying of cancer, and she asked me to sit with her, as she was working full-time for the state of Washington. So I flew back to Maine and typed my dissertation while tending to Carol’s mother dying of gut cancer. I had found a series of published lab data, but the analysis was based solely on statistics. I used my computer and science background to re-analyze the data based on physics and chemistry. This earned me a PhD in 1977, after 2 1/2 years of study.
I put a Weyerhaeuser employee on my dissertation committee, and he got me a job — not as a forester or economist, but as an inorganic chemist. However, I learned that my dissertation on chemical pulping of wood chips was promoted to all the company pulp mills. I was the manager of technical support to the panel mills (plywood, particleboard, and eventually stringboard).
We bought a 1916 house in Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, an easy walk to the UW bookstore. I gradually replaced some of the wiring and old iron water and sewer pipes and remodeled the kitchen.
Carol had, since age 13, wanted to be a minister in the church, but no church accepted women. In 1976, the Episcopal Church allowed ordination of women, and Carol started investigating. I subconsciously realized this, and asked her one day, “When are you going to get zapped?” She applied to become a priest and was accepted to General Seminary in New York City. I wondered how I would ever afford to live in New York! So I got the book What Color is Your Parachute, and spent 9 months working the exercises. It said that I should work as a general management consultant.
I applied to 3 of the bigger consulting firms in New York and got a job at Cresap, McCormick and Paget (CMP, one of the ‘big three’, specialized in helping corporations and institutions improve their operations, from cost reduction to strategic planning). Turns out they had two prospective clients in forest products, and my PhD nailed the contract. I spent 6 months commuting to Atlanta to work with Kimberly-Clark on computerizing their inventory and sales systems, then one summer in the Amazon basin on a huge forestry and pulp mill project, and a project with Diamond International, from Oregon to Maine, and computer system evaluation for a Portland cement factory in Canada.
While in New York, we attended St Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, where Carol had been active before she moved to Seattle. That meant a walk through Greenwich Village, usually a couple of times a week.
We lived in an apartment of General Seminary on the “Close” — one entire block of Manhattan, Chelsea Square. This apartment alternatively served the lowest faculty or a student. I worshiped with the students when I was not on the road. I could either walk to work (on Fifth Avenue), take the subway, or take a bus.
As seminary was finishing, the consulting business had a big slowdown, so I returned a bit early to Seattle and called my acquaintances at Weyerhaeuser. I figured that computing was an industry that would likely provide employment for the next couple of decades, and I was comfortable with computers.
The Scientific Computing department at Weyerhaeuser (a DEC shop within R&D) wanted to create a long-range plan, so I contracted with them. This turned into a 5-year contract, then employment (when I went from 6 weeks’ vacation on my own nickel back to 2 weeks’ paid vacation). I started and ran the computer help desk and helped the department ‘act as if it were an independent small business’ — an edict from a new corporate vice president.
Finally, some economics. We bettered my first-year budget by 3%, and after a few years, the chief financial officer (who managed the accounting Honeywell computer) told the VP of R&D that he wanted to take over Scientific Computing. The VP said, “That will cost you $7 million. They make money for me every month.” My 5-person help desk department also made money every month. I had enough surplus to buy a server and a license for SQL Server — newly released database software — and learn Structured Query Language (SQL).
When we first returned to Seattle in 1983, my wife, a newly trained minister but not yet ordained a priest, started the Pike Market Ministry. At first, the congregation met in an empty bar on First Avenue, in a building about to be torn down. I rigged up water and electricity, and some friends from Tacoma came and scrubbed many years of cigarette smoke off the walls. Then we shared space with Real Change, a street-people newspaper. Finally, we moved into a storefront on Post Alley, next to the clinic.
Since the only private place to hear confession in that storefront was the toilet, I built an office into one corner of the single room. Carol wanted to have a church in the market because she loved the merchants, and someone needed to serve the 600 low-income residents who live in the market.
I opened my tactless mouth once too often and was shown the Weyerhaeuser door late in the 1980s. I went to work for Auto Warehousing Company (AWC), in the port of Tacoma, as director of MIS (Management Information Services). We built a very early SQL database to run the company, reducing the delivery of new autos from 2 days to 2 hours. Our pilot installation was in Flat Rock, Michigan, where the Ford factory also produced Mazdas.
I soon learned that the practice (when I hired on) was to deliver new software on Friday. That meant that bugs first appeared on Saturday morning, at 3 a.m., when our first installation started work on Eastern time. When they had a problem, they paged us, and one of us had the pager. So, as the boss and one who liked to sleep a bit later, I required the programmers to sign their work (so that the person trying to fix the problem knew who to ask) and that a second person had to check the function of the software — and sign the code that they would be willing to get up at 3 a.m. to fix it.
This change had two benefits: 1. it reduced the number of bugs by about 90% immediately, because the testing caught most of the problems, and 2. programmers learned tricks from one another by reading each other’s code. I also asked that, if code was not immediately clear, they add comments to explain what the code was doing.
One of the programmers that I inherited was supposed to be writing the user interface — except that he never talked with the users, who walked past his desk every day. When we paid for him to go to a conference and he charged all his meals to room service, I terminated him.
The software was basically well designed, but had no reporting facility. So I designed a reporting system that the Teamster employees could understand and use to create any report they needed. Each major ‘entity’ started with three basic report: Summary (which included basic statistics), Detail (as deep as you wanted), and List. The user could change the sort sequence, select value ranges, and easily add or remove attributes. And it was designed to use features of the database, so when we added an attribute, it automatically was visible to the users. We never had to write another report — except for those with customer-required formats — such as union reports.
After 3 years at AWC, I got tired of commuting a couple of hours every day and hired onto a consulting firm that provided contractors to Microsoft and others. Microsoft had just settled with the IRS over its treatment of contractors, so we could not work there more than 13 months in a row. So I alternated between Microsoft and other big firms around Puget Sound, including Boeing, Group Health Coop, and Washington Federal Savings. For these 10 years as an ‘intellectual day laborer’, I was never ‘on the bench’. Best working days of my life!
Microsoft offered me employment in 2000, so I hired on, nominally as a data architect, but actually to try to get software designers to cooperate on software architecture. After a couple of years, the project was declared a success, and the department was closed. Carol was diagnosed with primary CNS Lymphoma in 2005, so I retired to take care of her. But she bounced back after chemotherapy, and I worked a few more years as an intellectual day laborer until the daily commute (usually home at night) became too long.
In 2011, we made a trip to follow Spring up the Rocky Mountain chain. While in Taos, my wife, who was an inveterate internet investigator, found a new co-housing community. (We had been looking for a residential community for decades.) We drove to the site, which is only a 15-minute walk from the town Plaza, and bought the most wooded lot (not realizing at the time that the trees were invasive Siberian Elms).
After two more bouts of treatment, with remission and going back to work between, Carol finally decided not to undergo further treatment and died in 2014.
I began to consider building in Taos, and, having studied Fine Homebuilding magazine for 20 years, I wrote up 30 pages of requirements for a new house. My starting criteria were taken from Rex Roberts Your Engineered House: warm, dry, and paid for. I talked with one architect, who said he could design me a house, but I could have no input. I found another architect, Bill Hoffman, and we worked together for months, by email and phone, and I made 3 trips to Taos to work in person with him. Together we designed a house in the pueblo revival style, though with double stud walls instead of adobe. Thermal mass is increased by using 5/8" fire-rated wallboard rather than 1/2" wallboard, a 70% increase. I gain solar heat in winter using ideas from James Kachadorian Passive Solar House.
I negotiated a time-and-material construction contract and asked if I could be present during construction. Eli Sanchez said that little questions always arise, and my presence would mean they could keep working. We started early in April 2015, after the ground thawed. I took time-lapse photos from the window of the barn across the street. I worked with the construction crew 6 hours a day for 9 months. I bought all the doors, fixtures, appliances, and kitchen cabinetry, designed the roof, hired the roofer, bought kitchen cabinets and lighting. I had help with interior colors and flooring from Sybille Palmer, who also suggested that the lighting in the mud room would not enter the closets and that the kitchen was too large. We made these changes before we were done.
I joined St. James Church and sang in the choir, working as Jr. Warden, responsible for building and grounds. I also sang in the Taos Community Chorus, for a time on the board of directors and section leader. I also helped the Native Plant Society with data for their state-wide conference, which was held in Taos at Fort Burgwin, operated by Southern Methodist University (SMU) as a retreat from hot Dallas days. I also collected water samples with Amigos Bravos — at least until COVID hit.
My house is in Valverde Commons, a nominal co-housing community. We each own our lot and house, plus 1/28 of the road, sewer system, Common House, barn (with a complete professional wood shop), and a central meadow. I have served on committees supporting the barn, landscaping, and Common House. This land was overgrazed pasture and covered with invasive thistles and Siberian Elms. Repeated mowing has nearly removed the thistles, and I am gradually replacing the elms with a variety of trees that will do well here, including Eastern Redbud, Hawthorne, Piñon, American Ash, Juniper, Mountain Mahogany, and Gamble Oak.
I hired a landscape architect to design a native garden that was low maintenance. She put in 4 spruce, which are below their native habitat. The warming climate has made them look terrible, so I replaced the worst three with junipers. They protect the house on the north and west sides.
In 2023, I had 3 kW of solar panels installed on the roof by a firm from Albuquerque that was clearly newly in the business. They made some obvious design errors, which I had corrected before they started installation. Then they installed the panels out of code (too close to the parapet walls so it would be impossible to either complete the installation or maintain them). They gradually got it right, and now the panels power my plug-in electric vehicle — which I had to pick up 250 miles away because New Mexico does not force them to be sold in the state.
In 2024, I added a heat pump, buying all the material and contracting a crane (to lift the compressor onto the roof), an electrician, sheet metal man (son of the man who did my original sheet metal work), and refrigeration tech to make it all work. Supposedly, the heat will automatic switch-over to the original gas furnace if it is too cold, but that has not yet happened.