I’m a Pittsburgher born and bred; I’ve lived between the Allegheny and the Monongahela all my life, except for six years during and right after college. Who could ask for anything more?
I graduated from
Antioch College in 1964. In the middle of campus was a memorial to the first president of the college, famous 19th -century educator
Horace Mann , who admonished students to “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity”. I am still looking for the right battle.
I trained to teach elementary school, probably because my mother’s unfulfilled dream was to be an English teacher. Unfortunately, I had no talent for crowd control. After a brief stint teaching first grade, I sought work manipulating words and numbers instead of little kids. I remembered what my "ex-" had told me about a strange new job he had at IBM in the early 60’s, called programming. I took a 3-month course in Assembler and COBOL at a technical school and spent 20 years explaining to everyone that no, programmers didn’t work for a radio station or decide TV schedules. For 30 years, big companies paid me to play with their giant computers. Now I’m an excellent practitioner of many skills that nobody wants to have practiced anymore.
My favorite avocation is reading; in second place is collecting books. I volunteer at my local library, working on our year-round used book sales. I have developed a comprehensive guide to charitable book sales and used book stores in Allegheny County, which I circulate to libraries, book dealers, and individuals.
Gardening, woodworking, watching TV, proofreading random bits of writing and gratuitously pointing out the errors, and playing too many computer games of Spider Solitaire occupy the rest of my free time.
I have one child, a beautiful redhead named Serena, who can teach anybody anything. She hated high school so much that she didn’t start college until almost two years after graduation, but my mother’s genes finally gained the upper hand. Serena has a B.A. in linguistics and a master’s in elementary education, which led her to three years of teaching English as a Second Language in public schools in Allegheny County. Now she tutors ESL students and conducts seminars for an agency that trains workers for local industries. She is also beginning an editing and proofreading business, so I can finally see my own genes at work. See her classified ad on my exchange page.
last revised: 06/20/05
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