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Personal greeting
May 2000
Personal Video |
What have I been doing since graduation from ABHS?
What have I learned since high school I’m sure some of you will have fun with this one. I am however at a loss for something clever or humorous to write here at the moment. Maybe something will come to me later. For now I can only refer you to the poem below which may explain why I am uncertain that I have learned anything at all! Favorites - poem, quote, saying, whatever… One of my favorite poems is one I read in high school English class. It’s an old poem as true today as it was a century or more ago. It expresses well the idea that the only constant is change itself. In Eternum |
The summer after graduation I
when to Michigan State University. My family dropped me off at the
dormitory and promptly moved to Alabama! (My father was in the Army at the
time and was transferred there.) It was quite a shock going from our small
high school and living at home to a campus with over 40,000 students and
no family within a few thousand miles. My designated major at the time was
philosophy but four years later in 75 I graduated with a degree in
something a little more marketable if not a bit duller – Accounting. I
stayed in Lansing Michigan for five more years working first for a local
CPA firm and then other local businesses before moving south to Florida to
be with the rest of my family who had by then settled in St. Petersburg. I
continued work in the accounting field and joined a small theater group in
the area. It was there that I met my wife, Elaine. We were married in 1982
and have two sons, Nick and Mark. I went to work for a local bank in 1983
which failed a few years later and was acquired by Chase Manhattan Bank. I
stayed with this Chase subsidiary bank for 11 years and was serving as its
Controller when it was sold. I'm now working at Treehouse as the
Controller.
Shortly
before I headed south from Michigan to Florida (about 1980) I picked up a
magazine and read an article about a new sport called windsurfing. Within
a few days of arriving in the state I purchased a board and have been
sailing ever since.
Florida’s
usually great weather has allowed me to continue playing tennis on
occasion with not much improvement over my performance on ABHS’s tennis
team. It couldn’t have been very good then either because I don’t
recall much about any of our games or scores… fortunately forgotten.
Other
interests include family history research and computers. I started
researching my family’s history about 1994 and with the help of
computers and the Internet have discovered quite a lot of fascinating
things about my ancestry. There are the skeletons in the closet of course
like several of my ancestors who died in what they called lunatic asylums
back then but then there has been the discovery of some famous relatives
as well. Early in 1999 I received a letter from Norris McWhirter, founding
editor of the Guinness Book of World Records, in which he told me we were
related by our common ancestry. We have since then exchanged a lot of
information about our family tree.
It
was my interest in family history that lead me to establishing a website
for my ancestral hometown of Maybole in the county of Ayrshire, Scotland.
See 
With
the success of the Scottish town site I am now working on a site for my
own community and neighborhood 
One
of the good things about growing older must be that somehow our
remembrances of the way things were changes slightly. The good memories
become better and the bad ones fade away! One of my clearest recollections
of high school however remains the feeling of panic a short period before
we were to present