About Me
On August 3, 2009 I had a life changing event, massive heart surgery. For the next year I struggled through the medical consequences of not having died. I have a lot of little whinny recovery stories of the type that “old farts” like to use to bore the hell out of captive audiences. You won’t find then here. You are not a captive audience.
But it is my hope that some of the thoughts which have improve my understanding of the world in the last year will give you reason to help me learn even more. I hope you will do that by providing me with the benefit of your thoughts.
So that you may know a bit about who I am, I offer you this:
In 1955 I was one of the first group of Cal Tech ROTC cadets commissioned as 2nd Lt. in the USAF.
Before called to active duty I studied aeronautics at the GALCIT. In 1957 I went on active duty in the Air Force in the Experimental Flight Test Branch at Edwards Air Force Base. When I went back to the civilian world I planned to get back into graduate school . :Until then I worked at Aerojet-General Corporation, a place that built rocket engines. An engine failure in the flight of a Thor Able Star rocket was my ticket back to GALCIT. Studying that failure gave me the a topic for my doctor thesis.
That education gave me entrée to a lot of different jobs. I was an assistant professor at UCLA, and a member of the senior technical staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses. I worked at a couple of think tanks and for one of them went to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
Ultimately, I went to work at the U.S. Army’s Ballistics Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. For more than 20 years I worked there as a GS-15, not only in the BRL but in the U. S. Army’s Human Engineering Laboratory as well.
An now I am retired.