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I started college at University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana where I met Natalie Naslund from Normal, IL in 1966. I remembered her name from the alliteration and we were married 6/1/69 between her first senior year and my second senior year.
She is the nicest, kindest person I have ever met and it is her patience and love that has made our marriage strong.
Since our marriage we have lived and worked in Texas, California, Arizona, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Minnesota, Indiana, and Michigan. Adding in Illinois we have lived in seventeen cities in ten states and our lives have been enriched by a greater knowledge of the great diversity of our country from geography and climate to ethnicities and social structures , to customs and food.
Our wish is for our country to live up to the best of our aspirations and principles and to pull together for the common good instead of pulling apart fighting for our individual self-interests.
Our greatest joys have been our children; their growth into wonderful, caring, responsible adults; and our travel both before and after we started our family. We have traveled by car, station wagon, or minivan to all of the states except Alaska and Hawaii and all of our children have shared in our travels to at least 45 of the states. We especially enjoyed visiting our many wonderful national parks and twice we were able to take one-month family driving vacations to the west. Our children were just expected to take long trips with no complaining and did so despite car seats, booster seats, and being crammed in the back seat.
We did not have children until 1983 mainly because I kept changing jobs and going back to school (as you will see if you read my education and work history below).
I earned my B.S. in Social Studies and English Secondary Education from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge in 1970. I am grateful that I was in the South when racial attitudes were changing and that my example could be a very small part of that change.
After graduation, I served in the US Air Force as a Deputy (ICBM) Missile Combat Crew Commander in Tucson, AZ; volunteered for an Early Out program; and left active duty as a 1st Lieutenant at the end of 1972. Serving 24-hour alerts with the responsibility to launch a nuclear missile gave me insights into the grave dangers of possessing nuclear weapons and belief that they are immoral weapons which should be abolished.
After a two semesters of of teaching social studies and English (one in Baton Rouge, LA and one in North Fond du Lac, WI), I returned to college using my GI Bill benefits. I earned my B.J. in photojournalism from University of Missouri. Columbia in 1975.
I was Chief Photographer of The Journal in New Ulm, MN 1975-77 and then I moved to graduate school at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis to combine my interests in photography and education.
During my studies at U of MN I worked at the grad assistant in charge of the photo lab and I later taught the beginning photojournalism course. I left my studies without finishing and defending my final professional project to take a job teaching photography and journalism at Worthington (MN) HS and CC in 1981. When that position was eliminated by budget cuts, I moved to Concordia College in Moorhead, MN as Chief Photographer in 1983.
We found "Minnesota Nice" to be an accurate description of the interpersonal interactions in the state. However, we never heard the heavy accent spoken in the movie "Fargo" although we lived across the river in Moorhead, MN; in three small towns; and in a Minneapolis suburb during our nine years in Minnesota.
I earned my M.A. in Photographic Communication from U of MN, Minneapolis in 1984 and moved to teaching photography and acting as chief photographer at Angelo State University in San Angelo, TX. In 1986 in moved to Ball State University in Muncie, IN as an Assistant Professor teaching photojournalism and communications graphics.
In 1989 in moved to Lansing (MI) Community College where I taught photography and photojournalism. We started working with digital photo technologies in the mid- 1990's and we became an all-digital photo program in 2005. I parked my 35mm film cameras in 2004 and have only used Digital SLR cameras since then. I retired from full-time teaching in May 2012 (after 23 years) although I returned to teach two photojournalism courses in Fall 2012.
My wife Natalie went on to earn a M.Ed. in Remedial Reading (U of AZ) and additional certification in Learning Disabilities in Minnesota. She taught full time for eleven years in Arizona (in a two-room, one-teacher school house in the mountains above Tucson), Louisiana, Missouri, and Minnesota before we started our family and taught half-time for thirteen and one-half years after our children were born.
She was able to fulfill her fondest desire - to be a full-time mother for as long as possible. She was able to be a full-time mother from the birth of our first child was born in 1983 until our youngest child completed fourth grade in 1998.
