Marinus Blomme:  

I was born in The Hague Netherlands in 1951, and emigrated to the USA in 1956, moving to Lombard, IL. Started Lincoln School kindergarten shortly after, knowing very little English (well, mid-western American), but learned enough to get by in a couple of weeks. Then Lombard Jr High, and Glenbard East. I was barely graduated in ¿69; I had enough class credits, but I just didn¿t care about our US History class (nor did the teacher like teaching it), but got the lowest passing grade the teacher ever gave out. I didn¿t care for many of the other classes (English, Literature, History, Social Studies) but excelled (and was mostly bored) in math and sciences. For English and Literature I had Mrs. Chester for all 4 years at GE; she and I didn't quite see eye to eye as to what was and wasn't literature (especially in the class called American Literature, since it was really US Literature). In her class about once a week she had a reading period where we were supposed to read 'American Lit' and I was reading Issac Asimov. At the time, Asimov had only 100 books to his name, but she looked at the book cover and said, that doesn't look like an American author. One of the most prolific 'American' (albeit foreign born) authors ever, and she had never heard of him. In the sciences, I would read through the text book in the first few weeks, not pay much attention in class, but ace the tests. Tried College of DuPage for a semester, but was doing a full time job at the same time, and as it was a spread campus (at the time), didn¿t do so well at the classes. Later I found that I was not a classroom type of person, unless I was teaching it. I seem to learn best by doing. Moved to Maine in ¿71, but had a terrible time finding work, until Sanders Assoc. in South Portland ME, but they closed that facility in ¿73. Landed a fairly good and steady job at Wang Laboratories in (then) Tewksbury, MA at a buck more an hour than my top pay at Sanders. In the ten years I was with Wang, moved from a bench tech, to the manager of a software group developing a network for the Wang PC (¿83). When I was given an equipment allotment of just ONE PC for NETWORK development, I saw that Wang Labs was no longer a forward looking company, and quit. That week Wang stock was at the highest it ever was, and plummeted from there. Six months later, it was half that value (I don¿t think it was because I left). I joined a small company (I doubled the size) and have been there ever since (it¿s been 25 years now, although it¿s changed its name twice). No kids, no wife, and I like it that way. Between my two sisters, I have (currently) ten nephews and nieces, and that¿s enough repopulation. I¿ve come to realize that I¿m a somewhat friendly, reasonab...Expand for more