Dan Larsen:  

Since graduating from East High School in 1974, I have spent the last 4 decades going to school, working, and raising a family. I went to Metropolitan State College in Denver for a year, taking lots of pre-requisite classes and exploratory electives, pursuing a “general education” Bachelor’s degree. I found the students at Metro to be extremely interested in actually learning useful knowledge that they could use to translate into good jobs and further their education. A lot of the students at metro at the time were Viet Nam vets, who were re-entering civilian life; or adult students who wanted to raise themselves up in their career marketability; or younger students who did not have the financial means to attend more expensive secondary schools. As such, they were very focused on paying attention to their class material, and doing their best to demonstrate what they had learned. After Metro, I went to Tulane University in New Orleans. The school was a lot larger than Metro, and had the prestige of being a “southern ivy league” school. While the coursework was interesting and challenging, the temptations of the New Orleans Bourbon Street atmosphere, rugby team parties, and bacchanalian roommates proved to be too much of a distraction, so I returned to Colorado and enrolled at CU, Boulder, where the only irresistible distractions were powder snow days, and Lake Eldora ski resort just up the canyon. On those snow days, I would hitchhike up the canyon carrying my boots and skis, spend 25 cents on a locker to store my hiking boots, ski up to the lifts and shake a passel of old lift tickets that hung off my parka at the lift operators, and then ski the back bowls all day, where they did not check the lift tickets. My major had shifted from a “general” BA at metro to a pre-med regimen at Tulane, to an environmental conservation BS at CU. I again became distracted, this time by a young lady who I had completely fallen in love with, and let my school work suffer. I took jobs in tile setting at the Hilton Harvest House in Boulder, and then later, after the love of my life and I parted ways, I was drawn to ski resorts where it seemed that I could always find a job, a place to stay, and a girlfriend within one day of arriving. I was working at the Summit House in Keystone when I received a phone call asking if I wanted to go build space ships in Florida. I told them I would be there Monday and shortly thereafter began my career in the space program. In Florida, I worked for Rockwell International, installing the heat shield tiles on the orbiter Columbia. This was an especially exciting and challenging job for a 20 year old. It was a running joke that the tile job was like being given a 40,000 piece puzzle, with half the pieces missing, and trying to have the bird ready to fly as quickly as possible. I got to meet John Young and Bob Crippen (the first two shuttle astronauts) when they would come through the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF) to make sure that the...Expand for more