Will Rogers
I was born at the front end of the baby boomer generation on 24 Dec 1943. I grew up in Pleasantville in the fifties, went to college during the tempestuous sixties, and satisfied most of my career aspirations during the eighties and nineties. My wife Mindy and I live in the foothills of the Adirondacks along the Raquette River just outside the Village of Potsdam, New York. Potsdam is 25 miles from the Saint Lawrence River and the Canadian border.
My boyhood home was in Chautauqua County, just west of Jamestown, NY. Most folks are generally aware of nearby Chautauqua Institution. New York State's Southern Tier is rural. I was fortunate to spend my youth roaming the wooded hills and lush valleys surrounding my grandparents' farm. A lifelong passion for the out-of-doors has never abated. In 1972, I moved my family from metropolitan New York City to northern NY. It was the realization of a dream as well as a satisfying career opportunity.
My mother's parents owned a dairy farm within sight of the house where I grew up. They were gentle, hardy folks with traditional Scandinavian Lutheran values. My father's mother, a divorcee with Irish roots, lived in town. She was pretty much the opposite. She wore crazy hats, was an avid reader of movie magazines, watched her "soaps" every day, and dragged me to movie theatres. She also taught me numerous games of chance. From her I learned to laugh often. But lest I sound like an ingrate, I likewise had kind, caring, goal-directed parents. I was the second of their four children. They, of course, are long gone and, sadly, I lost my older sister to cancer in 2002.
As I grew into adolescence I gradually spent less time roaming the countryside and more time establishing a social identity in school. In sports, I was proficient at golf but dreamed nightly of becoming a football hero. Now I understand that my plan to become a speedy halfback was simply part of growing interest in girls. Tall and skinny and prone to blushing, I achieved lesser glory on the golf links.
In adulthood, the quest for eternal youth led me to running. My health has always been excellent, although a bad wintertime fall while training for Boston left me with degenerative arthritis in my right hip. At age 58 I was forced to undergo hip replacement surgery. Now as I look back, I realize that I was a running zealot. Frankly, it consumed way too much of my life at the expense of other equally worthwhile activities. And like most athletic endeavors I've attempted, I was adequate but never truly gifted. Regardless, I spent inordinate amounts of time training for and racing more than a dozen marathons (I never just ran them). And I still take considerable satisfaction from having competed at Boston and New York on several occasions.
Spending time in the out-of-doors is still a big part of my life. Aside from hiking and kayaking, which are really just excuses for playing with my cameras, landscape photography is a primary hobby. Since retiring though, I have also raggedly taken up golf again. Recently, I joined a local golf club and am now hacking around the links three or four times a week. Yes, in the famous words of Mark Twain, "Golf is a good walk spoiled."
My indoor activities include considerable play time on the computer: processing my photos using Photoshop, researching family history, reading history and sometimes writing about it, maintaining my Web site, being a member of a listserv or two, emailing friends and relatives, and collecting toy soldiers. As it stands right now, I will need to live to be about one hundred and ten in order to complete every project.
Politically, I must admit that I'm pretty much disgusted with the process and those who participate in it. I do like Barack Obama though. Both my dad and his mother were New Deal Democrats and staunch unionists; my mother's father was a boyhood friend of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecuting attorney at the Nuremberg Trials. One of my heroes in life is Peter Seeger. During the Reagan/Bush years I actually thought about emigrating to Canada, although I must admit that the pleasure I derive from professional hockey was a primary motivating factor in the entertainment of that particular fantasy. In reality, my wife Mindy refuses to relocate anywhere colder than the Adirondacks.
For the foreseeable future, we intend to remain in Potsdam with travel to warmer climes in mid-winter.
Last edited: 13 Oct 2009