Upon graduating from the U of M with a BS in Aeronautical engineering, I went to work for the NASA Flight Research Center on the high desert of southern California at Edwards Air Force Base.  Little did I think about employment opportunities when selecting my major; I had never been to western Minnesota much less observed a mountain.  My first project at NASA was performing research analysis on the B-70 which was a Mach 3 intercontinental nuclear bomber prototype.  Thankfully it was canceled prior to being put into service; the country would have gone broke long ago building and maintaining them!  I subsequently obtained an MS in Mechanical Engineering from USC.

The highlight of my career was developing and flight testing flight-path control laws for the SR-71 (reconnaissance aircraft) for operation at Mach 3 and 80,000 feet.  My swan song at NASA involved the development and flight test of an adaptive performance optimization system, with variable wing camber, for subsonic transports.  My research at NASA involved writing and publishing untold dozens of research reports (public domain) and presenting results at technical conferences.  It was a great and exciting 35 year career at NASA and I retired in 2000 so that I could still enjoy other things in life while still in great shape.

My wife and I have been married 47 years and have two children that we are very proud of.  Early on we bought a place on the Gunflint Trail in the northeast corner of Minnesota and built a log cabin there.  We did not get back to it as often as we would like but the time we did spend there was special and reinvigorating.  It was a great jumping off point for canoe trips with my son and brothers.  But too warm and buggy to spend full summers there so we had a home built on the shore of Lake Superior in Hovland which is about 20 miles from the Canadian border.  We moved up here as soon as we retired.  Living in Hovland is like living in a perpetual vacation paradise but we do get away for “vacations” and have been to the Arctic, Antarctic, and points in between.

A few years back a guy in town told me his wife went to North High.  To my surprise, she was in the class of 1961 and lives down the highway a couple of miles from us.  Another neighbor at the end of our road was in the North High class of 1959 and his sister was in our class, small world.