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About Me....
I'm a native St. Louisian and other than college and vacations, I've been here all my life. Like all St. Louisians where we went to high school [Normandy 1966] and college [William Jewel in Liberty, MO; Mizzou (B.S. Chemistry 1970), UMStL (M.Ed. 1982, Certification Educational Media 1985)] are all important. I was a Boy Scout and did the full load... Philmont twice, Eagle by fourteen, Vigil, and three summers working at Scout Camp. I was a Nature Staff guy. Somebody must have understood me because my Vigil name is "Inquiring One" and it is right on the spot. To this day I'm the guy people bring stuff to to find out how it works or to see if it can be broken.
My father was a hard working tool & die maker/mechanical engineer who loved to take pictures on road trips. I developed a love for photography from him to the point of building a dark room in his basement. Being red/green color blind did make color printing a bit of a challenge but black & white was great. Since then I've dabbled in every format between 4x5 to digital. I think I now have more cameras than shoes.
After graduation at Mizzou I spent two years in graduate school working on a Master's Degree in Chemistry. The more I worked the less I really wanted a job in research, so I opted to be a high school chemistry teacher. I was hired to be one of eight in the spring of 1972 by the Hazelwood School District at their only (at the time) high school. That move, photography, technology and my outdoor background pretty much shaped the rest of my life.
During the summer of 1973 three of us took off for the mountains for two months of road tripping, day hiking, and backpacking. We made it as far as Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. Along the way I fell in love with Glacier National Park and made a fair number of friends there. I returned to Glacier the next two summers and pretty much spent the entire time there, even to the point of having a post office box and checking account. Since then I've been back at least ten times and I think that by now I've spent over 350 nights in and around Glacier including a month in 2013 as an AstroVIP. My interest in astronomy comes from spending nights out in the Canadian and Glacier wilderness and looking up, wondering at what it was I was looking. I got hooked and bought a Celestron 8. I suggested to the NPS that they start an observing program to no avail. Now the AstroVIP program does it...surprise!
I spent the summers in the mountains and returned every year to work at Hazelwood. After two years there I met the lady I eventually married. She had worked there for four years. My only defense was that it was a big school, almost 8000 students and more than 300 on the faculty, with different starting and stopping times. We dated for a 1 1/2 years and got married. Glacier lost a bit of it's charm and we got caught up in growing a family. As the two kids grew up I had less time for the telescope and travel. Family meant we needed more of everything so both my wife and I went back to school for a Master's degree and then thirty more hours to "top out" on our district's salary schedule. Some where along the way the telescope ended out in the garage. The son followed my Boy Scout career and ended up working for the BSA for two summers. He even took the telescope one year. He graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue in 2005. He has a house between Baltimore and Washington DC and has one of those "I can't tell you about it or I'd have to kill you jobs." The daughter followed me too. She graduated from Mizzou in 2010. She fell into a job in retail at Target, then moved on to be a benefits coordinator at a dental office and is now the office manager.
I had to learn Fortran back at Mizzou to pass a Physical Chemistry lab course that was required for graduation. Once in Hazelwood I quickly became a feature at the school's PDP-8. I was one of the first purchases of an integer based Apple II and the trend continued for years. I supported my spending habits by programming for a variety of people and actually made a bit after the purchases. The background in photography, media, computers, and technology helped me land a job as a Media Consultant for Hazelwood where I spent eight years dealing with issues as diverse as cooperative learning to configuring sendmail for 1600 people in the district's modem pool that I set up on a Sparc20. I've always had the ability to "think out of the box" and it really helped. Along the way I was selected as Hazelwood Central's Teacher of the Year (hey... it is the biggest school in the state) and the St. Louis Suburban Media Director of the Year. I have it on good authority that I was one of the first people to SLIP into the Internet in the pre version 1.0 days of Netscape and got into Linux when you still had to do the install from twenty 1.44mb floppies.
Today we are retired and life is good. The most important thing to know about me is that I am a photographer first.
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