David Perkins:  

After we all graduated from High School in 1963 I worked most of the summer at at odd jobs. In the fall I enrolled at Western to get my college education! I was shocked at how NOT prepared I was for college. There were several classes that I had to take a second time as I really was not prepared for what I had stepped into. After the first year I worked at Mammoth Cave National Park for a while and since I had not done so well that first year in college... I decided to take a break and travel. With no money to travel with... I joined the Navy to see the world. My first experiences were not so noteworthy but after I got the hang of it, so to speak, I actually decided to make the Navy my new home and I made a career of it. Along the way, I came back to Smiths Grove and married my sweetheart, Annette Lowe, and took her with me to several neat places like Chicago, a drive all the way across the USA, a couple of years on the island of Guam and over four years in Hawaii. Along the way we had a couple of really great kids, a Son named Johnathan and a daughter named Sarah Virginia. Annette and I parted ways in the early 1980's and I finally retired from the Navy in 1984. I went straight to work for the Northrop Corporation to support a project they were working on that was to be set up in Saudi Arabia. In 1985 I went to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and lived and worked there for about a year. Then we transferred to Jeddah, a city on the West coast near the Red Sea where we continued the project for the Royal Saudi Navy. I honestly had a blast there as I love scuba diving and the Red Sea was such a wonderful place to dive. Our contract ended in late 1986 and I transferred to a division of Northrop located in Annapolis, Maryland. If you've ever heard that defense contracting is a nerve wracking job... you heard right. It's always a deal of will we get the next contract or... if we don't, who will loo...Expand for more