Gary Saunders:  

I periodically add to and edit this story to change the focus, so don't be surprised if you see a "recent change" notice. I was the Supervisor of the Stationary Source Compliance Branch for the North Carolina Division of Air Quality, Technical Services Section until September, 2023. I am now the Coordinator for DAQ Actions on Emerging Contaminants and PFAS . I live in Chapel Hill, just a stone's throw away from UNC. Some of you will remember that I was one of three people who ran the computer lab after school and in the evenings. Yes, I'm still into computers in a big way. Prior to joining the state agency, I was employed at several engineering consulting firms around the RTP area and specialized in energy and air pollution control issues. Much of my early career (1978-1991) was spent working for the US EPA on contract to all 10 EPA regions. I also performed work for the USAF and several of the DOE Labs. The nice thing about working for the state agency (now) is my life is more my own. When I was working for the engineering consulting firms, it was tough living out of a suitcase and having an aircraft or a rental car strapped to my rear-end all the time. Only once in all the traveling I did do I ever recall waking in the middle of the night and not knowing where I was. But being gone from home >80% of the time, as I was in 1983 and early 1984, destroys marriages as it contributed to the destruction of my first marriage. The movie "Up in the Air" speaks of being at home only 43 days...well, that was 1983 for me. My wife decided that a college student, 7 years younger than we were, was ultimately more interesting than I was, so they started an affair and she left me, divorced me and married him. With or without her, I was going to end up doing many of the things that she and I had planned to do together. As I discovered, it's hard to do that when you are traveling all the time. But the travel also took me to some interesting places and had me meet interesting people. I was in San Francisco on October 17, 1989 during the Loma Prieta temblor (I was staying at the edge of the Marina district where all those buildings collapsed and burned. The hotel I was staying in suffered minor damage and didn't have any power for several days). My son, who was back home with my ex-wife asked me "How was it, dad?" I responded, without thinking, "It brings a whole new definition to rock and roll." And I was 6 miles away when that rocket fuel plant blew up in Henderson, NV. I just happened to be passing through on the way to work at a power plant a couple of hours away. My ears rang for at least 8 hours after that. My travels for business and pleasure have taken me to every state in the US (and several US territories) as well as outside the US. I have been to more than 50% of all the counties (or county-like equivalents) in the US. By that I mean I have physically been on the ground in some form of ground transportation (even hiking) in the particular county or county-like equivalent for it to "count." The states where I have been in all the county-equivalents are Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia. After high school, I attended NC State University in Raleigh, NC and received my degree in Chemical Engineering. I did flirt with an Electrical Engineering degree for awhile but decided ChE was were I really wanted to be (the time spent on EE was not wasted, however). While at State, I spent two years in Bowen dorm and two years in Bragaw dorm. For the first year or so, I continued to date my high school sweetheart (Judy) who graduated from Wakefield HS in 1972. But with both of us away at different schools and the tremendous growth that we each were experiencing, the long distance relationship was suffering and we agreed to release each other and part. We remain friends today even though our lives have taken vastly divergent paths from what we may have thought when we were dating. Though I did not go to NCSU for their sports, our football team was pretty good while I was there (I went to the Peach Bowl to see them play in 1973) and our basketball team won the National Championship while I was there (1974) with a stunning defeat of UCLA in the semi-final game. For a campus that had eight males to every female studying was not a problem though I had my share of dates during my sophomore year until I met my future (first) wife. The woman I met at NCSU at the end of the spring semester (the end of April 1973, my sophomore year) was the same age as I but she was pursuing her degree on a fast track to graduate about a year ahead of me (Patricia Harrison, Horticulture, graduated in the summer class of '74). We began our romance during the summer school sessions of 1973 and it continued after she graduated. She took a job in Raleigh and we continued our relationship. After I graduated, I stayed in Raleigh while pursuing job opportunities locally. We eventually married a couple of years after my graduation. We were married in an outdoor wedding at the WRAL gardens in Raleigh. Although it was a beautiful wedding of our design and I remember it fondly, getting married in the July heat, even in the evening, was a challenge. Although my son and his wife laugh at the pictures of me in a white tuxedo, it was consistent with an evening wedding. But it was terribly hot in that tux. We moved to an area south of the NCSU campus, eventually bought a new solar house and started a family. That marriage lasted from 1977-1984. As mentioned above, she started an affair in 1983, a couple of years after our son was born. My son earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering at NCSU. There is a strong NCSU connection in this family. Besides myself and my son, my son's wife, my ex-wife, her current husband all graduated from State. Even my current wife attended NCSU briefly well before I arrived. I took up mountain climbing and snow-skiing in the 1985. Snow skiing was always something I wondered about even when I was in Jr. and Sr. high school and something my first wife and I talked about. I went out and learned how to ski, got pretty good at it and tried to ski whenever I could. One time, when testifying in a case in Oakland, CA, I took my skis with me so I could ski on Mt. Hood in Oregon after I was done (in the middle of summer! Is that late skiing or early skiing?). My current wife used to ski but she's given it up (too hard on the body). I still snow ski whenever I can. Though I joke that I've fa...Expand for more