Enough about that and on to the important or maybe more interesting stuff. Family: I met Karen when we were both summer counselors for the high school “brats” attending Carnegie Mellon (as Carnegie Tech became). A chance meeting with her on the sidewalk just before Thanksgiving in 1967 led to our marriage in summer 1968. I remember little of the ceremony since I had a fever of 103. Jennifer was born in 1972 and George 3 in 1975. As we did in grad school, our brief summer vacations were spent with a grad school friend at a lakeside camp in Vermont where I got interested in sailing, the stars, canoeing, picking wild blueberries, and the outdoors, and also found out I was afraid of heights. Family tenting was something we enjoyed, and that led in 1986 to a work associate inviting us and our sailboat to a camping weekend with the Sylvan canoe club, which we joined that fall. Going caving with another work associate led to my joining the Pittsburgh youth hostel and learning white water canoeing. In the mid 80’s I also suffered frightening but not life threatening heart problems (work stress) that prompted me to “loosen up and relax” and start enjoying life before it became too late. About that time, Karen decided to get a Ph.D. in English and with her fully occupied, I became more involved in the outdoors and developed interests in teaching canoeing, wilderness canoeing in Canada, winter canoe trips to Florida, Mississippi, Georgia rivers, with a bunch of new friends, etc., thereby learning outdoor skills and places to visit to share with Karen after she finished her thesis in rhetoric. Karen is now a senior lecturer at Carnegie Mellon English Department teaching and administering the technical and professional writing masters program there.

Joining the canoe club resulted in other significant life changes: 1) Do you remember the high school assembly in which someone played a carpenter’s saw? His instructions on playing were on the mark, and I played a little bit in college, but really came out of the closet with it in the 80’s at Christmas programs at the canoe club and at work. Then I actually got a book and a tape of some good saw playing and taught myself how to really play the saw. The piano accompanist got her neighbor, an amateur cabaret singer, involved, and we three performed at a few nursing homes. I was still using Dad’s Diston Keystone crosscut saw that I picked up in the garage at lunch after the assembly back in high school. It has been replaced by a Sears Craftsman and then by a “professional” musical saw. This may be something I end up doing in retirement. 2) Our daughter met her husband at the canoe club, and I’m to be a grandpa in a month.

Mom and Dad moved to Florida in the early seventies. Mom died there but Dad is still going strong. The 1999 family photo shows my sister Julia, my wife Karen, our daughter Jennifer, and the three Georges. Our son George is an industrial designer for a small firm near Boston. Jen is a staff research assistant in the Psychology department at Carnegie Mellon Univ.