Work: Retired
Spouse: Gerry VanTassel
5 Children
7 Grandchildren
Information update: 02/01/2016

Upon graduation from Central I headed for UMD with no particular occupation or goals in mind. I started with a major in Chemistry and this gave me an opportunity to work in the Chem Lab for four years, including summers. It was enough to pay for tuition and books and a little spending money. Today I would probably have to own the Chemistry building to afford going to school. I lasted 2 years with that major and then switched to Political Science with the idea of possibly going into Law. Well that was the idea anyway. So I graduated with a Pol Sci Major and Chemistry Minor - and there are not a lot of us out here.

After 6 months with Uncle Sam I was back in Duluth with no idea what I was going to do when I answered an ad for a Procedure Analyst at US Steel in downtown Duluth, and started to learn computer programming. This was a great time to start in this field and I enjoyed it. After two years I was asked to move to Chicago with the corporation, but in the sixties Chicago was a riotous place to be, so I turned the transfer down and headed down the street and got a job with Minnesota Power in their Information Systems Department. This was home for the next 26 years.

My responsibility at MP was in the Customer Information area - Billing, Meter Reading, etc. What I learned there carried me on through several careers with several companies. During this time I married my first wife, Pauline Morrow a 1961 graduate of East. We had 2 beautiful daughters and life was good. Over time things changed and we eventually divorced and worked on helping our kids with the adjustment to our new lives. At MP I worked my way to the position of Director of Information Systems. I also met a new person in my life, Gerry VanTassel, who also worked at MP. Gerry and I worked on many projects together and the resulting disagreements led to a real attraction, and so we were married in 1988. Gerry had 3 children from her first marriage, so our family grew rapidly.

Looking for a new opportunity, I retired from MP and went to work for a small consulting firm from San Francisco named Systems Programming Limited (SPL), which I had some business dealing with while at MP. They had developed the software for Utility Companies Billing systems. I had several roles at SPL as we worked to build a customer base for the product, but eventually was given the position of Director of Training, which required us to move to SPL's East Coast office. So that's how we got to Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

While in Duluth I took up sailing. I had a small boat in college, and then with a friend, purchased 27 footer and moved it to Barkers Island. We sailed that boat for 7 years and moved up to a 34 foot boat, Arriba, which we sailed on Lake Superior for 15 years. When we moved to New Jersey we were introduced to a sailing club, which had been formed by a number of AT&T people years before. Here we found some wonderful friends, and adventures. We have sailed in Tahiti, the Seychelles, Puget Sound, as well as Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Maine and the Caribbean. We intend to continue having fun on boats.

SPL grew internationally and gave me the opportunity for some international travel as well as working on projects in the US. As we became more successful we were bought up by several venture capital organizations, and finally in 2008 we were bought by Oracle Corporation. Goodbye small, flexible, take a chance company - hello Large Corporation with more rules than the US Senate. We began a process of downsizing, which occurred every 6 months. It finally caught me in February 2010. However, the company I was working with in Atlanta hired me the same day as a self-employed consultant, so I spend the last year in that role.

In January of this year I finally hung up my laptop, and we began planning our move to retirement. We sold our house in 2 days, and are scheduled to be out of it by July 16. We are moving back to Minnesota, looking in the St Paul area where we have family, and hope to be in a new home in early fall. With 5 children and now 7 grandchildren we expect to be doing a bit of traveling just to keep up with everybody. It's been quite a trip so far, and the adventure continues. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up!