|
Today's Featured Biography
Millard Petty
Currently living a comfortable middle class life in the suburbs of Boston, MA.
I'm mostly retired (still work a day or two most weeks) from a career as a computer/software/systems engineer and so my wife Anne and I spend as much time as we can travelling, reading and generally puttering around.
Boy, that sounds boring! My life has had a lot more juice in it than that.
So, let's see .... Fifty years ago, my best friend Georg and I left the confines of good old Casper for college life on the east coast. He to the tri-cities area of New York and me to Cambridge, MA. Many firsts happened to me on that trip: my first time out of Wyoming (a couple of camping trips to Colorado don't really count), first time on an airplane, first time in a city, first time in a taxicab, first skyscraper, etc. Plus, at the end I got plunked in with, literally, the smartest people in the world. I experienced just a bit of culture shock.
I adjusted as best I could. My academics were fair to poor but I was surviving. Made many new friends. At the beginning of my sophmore year, my father passed away - another jolt to the system. Then dope and anti-war protests hit the campuses of Boston hard. I fell into all that readily and deeply.
The next few years were a blur of communal living, trying not to flunk out, demonstrations, dope, Velvet Underground, riots, bleakness, driving a cab, cooking on the line, in and out of school, getting robbed, hooking up with a woman, having a kid, getting things together again, finishing school (except thesis), splitting up, sharing custody, having my mother move in, getting a real technical job, other girlfriends, too many black russians, buying a three-family, being a landlord, finally getting my degree, picking up a Masters and on and on.
I met Anne in the late eighties and we got married in 1990. The older generation, my mother, her father and grandmother, all passed away within a year or so and then we were on our own. Anne is a great step-mother to my son and my best friend and lover. My career job, designing and implementing simulation, diagnostic and control systems, was generally interesting and going just fine. All in all, life was good.
And no, the other shoe hasn't dropped yet. In '95, I started an Internet Service Provider business with my son and his friends. It went great for a while but fell on hard times. That business is still going; now mostly transformed into a technical services company. My son moved to Manhattan several years ago and is a computer consultant. He has a daughter who also lives and works in Manhattan. After living in New Hampshire for a few years, about 20 years ago Anne and I bought a house closer to Boston.
We are both retired now. During the summer we spend long weekends at our cottage on Cape Cod. In Winter we go to Florida for a month or so. We try to take at least one international trip each year - usually Europe or the Caribbean - plus a couple of trips to New York and another one or two trips as the spirit moves us. Books, movies, plays, the gym, puttering, volunteering, our cat Tatiana, and the internet/service business occupy what time is left. Our health is still pretty good so we can do what we want.
And now it is 50 years later and I'm looking forward to going back to Casper and seeing the old school and classmates from what seems like another world. But we have the same teachers, the same classes, the same school, the same home town and especially the same music to bring us together again.
VIEW ALL BIOGRAPHIES
|
Indicates an included photo
