History

My house was built in 1946; it's getting old and creaky. I was born in 1946; I'm getting old and creaky. So I know how my house is feeling. Still, I suspect my house will continue on into the future for a much longer period of time than I will.

I moved into my house in 1951 when I was 5, almost 6, years old. I attended a community college when I was 18. I moved out of the house when I was 19 to attend college in Richmond, Virginia. Then I moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, when I was 20 to attend Virginia Tech. 

After graduation, I moved to Burlington, North Carolina, where I worked for five years, designing missile guidance systems and trouble-shooting production problems. Sometimes I had to travel. I flew to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to several West Coast cities, and to a few places in-between the coasts. I left that job in 1974. A friend and I bought a camper van and we traveled the country, from east to west and north to south.

We went to Chicago. We went to Indianapolis. We drove across Montana. (I blogged about Montana here and here. I blogged about Denver here.) We went to North Dakota. We went to Wyoming and watched Old Faithful do its thing. We went to a World's Fair in Spokane, Washington. In fact, we drove across all the northern states on our way to Seatle, and then down the Pacific Coast Highway as far as Los Angeles. The Highway doesn't go all the way to LA on the coast, so we drove through central Oregan and then through a redwood forest in California and hit the coast again at Crescent City.

Then we drove back to the East Coast. We drove across the "southern" states, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas – close enough to Dallas that we could see the skyscrapers – but we didn't want to see a big city nor become immersed in its traffic, so we kept driving.

It would take weeks to write about all the people and places we saw – in fact, I don't think I could cover everything I saw and did if I had only a few weeks to write about it. It was historic. I suppose everyone has a time in their life that they look back on with amazement at all the places they visited and all the people they met.

At the time I made my trip around the country, there were no cell phones – hence, no cell phone cameras. And I didn't take my film camera. So I have no photos of that trip. Or rather, the images I have are in my head: images of my friend, his two dogs, my dog, and the camper van that carried us and our hitchhiking passengers. The images carry feelings for me. Sometimes I wish I had taken a camera on the trip and returned with photos, but I have many other photos that I never look at, so I don't think it really matters. 

For a while after that trip, I bought surplus electronics by sealed bid at government auctions and sold it by mail order through classified ads in electronics magazines. Much of what I bought was non-functional and I had to repair it before I could sell it. Long tractor-trailer trucks would often stop in the street in front of my house and I would load the equipment into the truck, sign the bill of lading, and send the equipment on its way.

Later, I worked in Roanoke, Virginia, designing schematics for electronics and laying out printed circuit boards – at first manually with tape and mylar, then later I performed both jobs on a CAD system. I was also the Buyer for all the electronics, so I spent a lot of time on the phone. I enjoyed both aspects of my job, both Design and Purchasing. I lost that job at the end of 2000 when the company went out of business. The world wasn't ready for self-navigating mobile robots.