Steve Cochard:
CLASS OF 1969
Haverford High SchoolClass of 1969
Havertown, PA
Steve's Story
Life
Things sure worked out better than I'd imagined they would when I was in high school.
We live in just outside of San Diego, CA, in Rancho San Diego. The best weather in the world, can't think of any place other than here to live.
Married with 3 kids. A great wife, Sharon, who is a radio talk-show-host here in San Diego. Oldest son Jason, graduated from USC Film School and is making movies as a cinematographer. #2 daughter, Alyson just got married,graduated San Diego State University as a history major, and is an incredible singer, even sang at Carnegie hall 2 years ago. #3 son, Greg is in computer science at San Diego State University and is the techsuport mgr and network admin at our company.
Hobbies are similar to high school...anything with an internal combustion engine! Classic cars and hot rods, have an '07 Vette and a 65 Vette with a "purpose build" motor by #3 son any myself. Aviation: got pilots license after leaving Adobe, have a Piper Arrow aircraft. Use it for business, pleasure, and to visit the kids in L.A. Music, still play sax... tenor and alto, play in jazz big band in San Diego named Downbeat, I lead a jazz quartet , and pre-jazz played in rock & roll bands for number of years. Went back to college and studied music theory and jazz theory. Have home recording studio to record #2 daughter, for jazz quartet and for lots of other local musicians. Do photography, build furniture, travel (been to 48 of the states...aircraft helps). Since '05 thru'08, have been crew member on the HMS Surprise, a 1700's British Frigate war ship (a tall ship). It is the actual ship used in the Master & Commander film with Russel Crowe. We (the crew of 50 it takes to sail her) restored it to sea-worthy condition and have been sailing it around the pacific to various events.
College
After realizing that driving trucks and digging ditches wasn't going to be much fun for the rest of my life, I decided to go to college...something I never thought I'd do...more school?!
Went to Delaware County Community College, since no "real" college would take someone with my grades:) Signed up for the Engineering curric and found that I loved it. Transferred to Penn State, University Park and got a BS degree in Structural Engineering. From there went o...Expand for more
n to Bechtel Power Corp, designing and building nuclear power plants.
Workplace
After college, went to work for Bechtel Power Corp. The largest engineering and construction company worldwide. Worked on design of nuclear power plants out of their San Francisco and Gaithersburg offices and in the field. Projects were Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in Mississippi (a foreign assignment:) and then to the Limerick Nuclear Station in Pennsylvania.
Got the computer bug in 1978, and left Bechtel for the software industry in 1983 and moved to San Diego, CA. Short version of this is I had the opportunity to be involved in the birth and growth of the computer revolution. I was the director of engineering, product management, quality assurance, and software metrics at Adobe Corp (the Photoshop people). And was VP of other software companies out here, I Wrote 14 programs for Mac and Win, many of them best sellers, and designed, managed, directed tons of others. Left Adobe in 1995, and retired...for a while. Bought an airplane.
When the internet "thing" happened, wrote another program and sold it to Sierra Games, soon to become Vivendi Universal (as in Universal Studios, now known as NBC-Universal). Program was a web design program that enabled anyone to build their own websites. Was named Web Studio. Retired again.
When Vivendi decided to concentrate on only games, I bought Web Studio back from them and started my own software company to develop and market it: Back To The Beach Software....always wanted a company with one of those weird high-tech names. It is a family, life-style-company that enables us to do what we want, enjoy business without the stress of company politics, commuting, etc. Go see what we're doing at webstudio.com and buy something while you're there :)
And for the latest update, my daughter Alyson made me a grand-father Thursday, May 14th, 2009. My grand-daughter is named Reese and is beautiful! Alyson popped two more kids, Tessa, and a boy, Tray.
At this point I think I've had enough fun since High School and during my Engineering career . This time I'm really going to retire. With all the things I've been able to do over since school and now. I've had at least 2 full lives now. Time to let someone else have the fun. , Steve
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