Eric Meindl:  

Following high school, I graduated from Colby College, Waterville, ME. I then entered the Air Force for almost 5 years as a Weather Officer, taking one year of grad school at Texas A&M, then turned loose on pilots in Virginia, Thailand, and South Carolina. I got a job as a TV Meteorologist on the CBS affiliate in Tampa, FL, where I stayed almost 6 years. I still recall a phone call one evening from the late Tom Reale who was living in nearby Clearwater and saw me on the tube. Regrettably, we never did connect in person, though. From there, it was another TV job in Baton Rouge, LA. Thus, my yearbook dream of being a TV meteorologist came true soon after high school but I found it kind of boring. So I managed to get into government service as a meteorologist in 1978 in Anchorage, Alaska. My wife, Vickie, and I lived there for more than 3 years. After that government service sent us to the New Orleans area. This began a 23-year span living along the mid-Gulf of Mexico coast of the US. I transferred into a management job with the government in the mid-1980s in neighboring Mississippi, and stayed with that for 17 years until I retired in early 2004. We left the Gulf coast when H...Expand for more