Dan Culver:
CLASS OF 1968
Huntsville High SchoolClass of 1968
Huntsville, AL
Avondale Elementary SchoolClass of 1962
Birmingham, AL
Dan's Story
Avondale Elementary School: I attended Avondale only for 1st grade in 1956-1957; staying with my grandparents in Birmingham for 1st semester, as my parents moved from my father's job with IBM in NY to his new job with NASA in Huntsville.
Parents, brother and I had all been born in Alabama, but we lived in NY for 2-3 years while my father was at IBM. He said he knew it was time to move back south when my brother and I began mis-pronouncing words -- particularly "oil" -- the Yankee way. :-)
After parents were settled temporarily in Arab while looking for a house in HSV, they retrieved me and enrolled me for 2nd semester of 1st grade in Arab. I lasted only 3 days before my mother felt sorry enough about my every-morning stress-induced vomiting and diarrhea to return me to Birmingham to finish out the year. Serious trauma!
This episode allowed me to "find myself" at a very early age, recognizing that I was definitely more a "city-slicker" than a "country boy." In particular, I objected not only to the boy's bathroom big open-trough urinal (positively uncivilized!) with the unidentified "fluid" on the floor, but also to the "too-country-sounding": accents of fellow students. It was pretty traumatic in Arab, but I wasn't there very long at all.
I remember my Birmingham teacher Ms Goodall, learning to read, and helping other students pronounce words from our Dick/Jane/Sally/Spot books. The spiral notebooks had multiplication tables up to at least 9x9 on the rear cover, so I learned those at home, even though we weren't doing multiplication in school.
Then there were our post-lunch quiet sessions, when we were supposed to lay our heads down on our desks for a nap. The best I could ever do was to merely pretend to be asleep, but itchy spots made it hard to be convincing sometimes. My technique was to slooowly move to scratch the itch. I specifically remember one day where the teacher called out the names of the "good" students who fell asleep; at the end of her list, she said she "thought" I had gone to sleep.
On one occasion, we made a field trip to a chocolate milk bottling plant, where we sampled 2 different formulas. Most of the class liked one of the versions, but the teacher and I liked the other version. I told myself I was probably very mature to like the same version as the teacher.
I remember 2 girls, blonde Alice and slightly plump brunette Mary, both of whom chased me at recess trying to catch and kiss me. I let them both kiss me b/c I didn't want to hurt their feelings, but I would have preferred Sheila chase me. She didn't; instead I pushed her swing. I honestl...Expand for more
y don't remember whether I tried to touch her little bottom while pushing her swing, but that might have been a little advanced for our age. At any rate, I'm pretty sure I'm protected now by the statute of limitations.
I also remember a guy I was friends with, maybe Victor; we developed a secret language made by simple substitution of one letter for another in the alphabet. Pretty lame, written on index cards, but he may be a cryptographer for the NSA by now from our early training, for all I know.
If anyone knows teacher Ms Goodall's first name, please message me.
I attended junior high school and high school in Huntsville. The rest of this is about college and beyond.
After graduating from HHS, I attended Georgia Tech in Atlanta from 1968-1975, graduating with Bachelor's and Master's degrees, both in Industrial and Systems Engineering, concentrating mostly on Operations Research (a bunch of math with theoretically practical applications) courses. During the undergraduate portion, I worked intermittently at NASA in Huntsville as a co-op student, which required an extra year to graduate.
In an item related to the NASA experience, while introducing myself at a seminar on performance and results several years before retirement. I jokingly mentioned that less than 7 months after starting to work for NASA, "we" had put a man on the moon. The class of about 25 people gave me a standing ovation. Apparently they thought I had been Wernher von Braun's right hand man, not realizing that I was merely an 18-19 year old college freshman at the time. When I told the class the "whole" truth a few days later, they laughed hilariously, not having had enough information initially to distinguish between cause and effect.
After the second degree, I moved to New Jersey, working for what is now the Department of Veterans Affairs from 1975-1977 as a Management Engineer. Fortunately, there is no trace of a Jersey accent in my speech pattern, nor has there ever been.
In late 1977, I transferred to the VA Central Office in Washington, DC, where I worked while living in Northern Virginia/DC metro area. For most of that time I developed and enhanced computerized mathematical health care demand models (how many patients to expect at VA hospitals, outpatient clinics, and nursing homes in the future), and later in Information Technology in the area of performance management. Kind of boring for most people, so I've never really talked much about work.
I was married briefly from 1986-1988, no children. Remarried in 2009 to a high school classmate, Talitha.
I still visit Huntsville 4-5 times per year.
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