Fifty years.  My gosh, hard to believe.

Where have they gone???????

Well, lessee……………………..

6 years went to working my way thru the Screwyversity of Minnisnowda and keeping my student deferrments up to date.  After graduation, with a degree in speech/theatre & radio-television production, I continued my employment as a technician and part-time director at KMSP-TV, channel 9.

Toward the end of ’67 I received……HORRORS……..the DREADED DRAFT NOTICE!  So, of course, I called Alice E. Johnson (remember good ol’ Alice E.?).  She assured me there had been no mistake.  Can you beat that?  24 years old, out working in my field, and I got drafted.  They were scraping around under the barrel.

Soooooo, long story short, to beat the draft, I enlisted.  Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

I got to spend a couple of months at such garden spots as Fort Campbell, Kentucky (armpit of the contiguous 48), and Fort Lost-In-The-Woods, Misery…………errrrrrrrr……..Missouri.  Then about 8 months at the Pentagon; then 11 months, 11 days, 8 hours, 45 minutes and a few odd seconds (not that I was really counting) in a popular vacation land in South East Asia. I suppose it was there I actually had my 15 minutes of fame:  “starring” (type-cast again) in the famous -- perhaps infamous -- “pot spot”. Coming back from Viet Nam, I was able to wrangle an assignment back in the Washington area (Defense Intelligence [oxymoron] School), and I’ve pretty much been here ever since.

After I got out, I took what turned out to be a Summer job with NBC/WRC-TV as a studio technician.  That led to a job with a company that did background graphics projection.   Turned out to be propitious timing.

Among the projects I worked on with MacNeil & Lehrer and the then-nascent PBS were the weeks and weeks on end of Watergate hearings and Nixon impeachment proceedings.  Hated ol’ Dick Tricky, but sure made a lot of money  off of him.

When that job wound down after a few years, I sort of took a year off and tennis bummed for the summer (amazing how one could make due on unemployment back then), and ski bummed in Vermont for the winter.  Then reality reared its ugly head, and I had to return home and take care of some things.

I freelanced in photography and television for a couple of years, and then took a job with Howard University’s new PBS station.  There, I became very involved in Labor Union activities, serving on the Executive Board and as Assistant to the President for Howard University Affairs for many years.  I was also awarded a Washington Chapter NATAS Emmy for individual achievement in lighting for some show I lit.  I stayed at Howard for 25 years -- still don’t know how I managed that -- and retired in 2006.

Now I spend as much time as possible fishing Chesapeake Bay, maintaining my little boat and still recovering from the great plumbing disaster of 2010.  I like being retired.  Some days I can just sit on the porch and watch the world go by.

Here’s a picture from my birthday last year -- I’m the one without the stripes.

If you’ve bothered to read all of this, you may now take a nap.

One final thought:  I do not recommend cervical spine surgery on a recreational basis to anyone.

SEE YOU ALL SOON………………………