PERSONAL HISTORY

MICHIGAN:

There was always water around my life. Our family bought a cottage in Northern Michigan when I was about four. "Up North", as everyone in Michigan casually described it and it was. A four mile by half mile lake with sandbars, weeds, swimming spots, public beaches, a bar you could drive to or take the boat if you felt like it. It was wonderful. Having a place on a lake probably had as much influence on me as anything else in my life. I learned to ski by seven or eight and have driving a boat since about the same. The lake in the summer made the long winters and uncertain spring and fall all part of the bargain.

Looking back at the place, it started as a very little place with a screened in porch and expanded into a quite comfortable retreat with decks (that I helped build). Waterskiing, boat racing, looking for girls, that was the life. My fascination with summers that were given to more personal time comes from that era. Hence, I always though of a profession that would allow me freedom to pursue personal interests during the summer. So here I am, all grown-up and work as a professor. My summers tend to center on working on one or two research projects and enjoying the fringe benefits of an academic career. And most important, I live near and keep pretty close tabs on our local water, the Pacific.

My family was pretty normal. We lived in Saginaw, Michigan, one of those midwestern towns with a lot of history as a lumber capital that later transformed itself into an important cog in the the automotive industry. I have an older sister in Kansas City, who is now a partner in a law firm; a younger brother in Saginaw who just left a partnership in an accounting firm and is an accounting consultant; and a youngest brother who is a marketing professor at Providence College in Rhode Island. My Mother and Father both worked, my mother as a teacher and my father as an entrepreneur who started a home delivery diaper service in the pre-disposable days. They retired quite a while ago and spend half the year in Michigan and half in Longboat Key, Florida. My parents did something right since we all made it this far even if we are all over the country.

My decision as to what college to attend was made in about the tenth grade when I went to a University of Michigan football game with my older sister and her boy friend. I looked around at the big time rah rah and decided that this was going to be the college for me. I really didn't even apply anywhere else. I got an engineering degree and graduated into a mild recession where engineers were not much in demand. I got into the Michigan business school and got an MBA and again graduated into an economic downturn which chilled MBA hiring. Thus, it just sort of happened because of economic circumstances that I began to pursue admission into the Michigan PhD program. With some luck and sporatic hard work I eventually finished and ended up teaching at Michigan while my wife, Margarethe, finished her Phd. I lived in Ann Arbor for a good number of years. I had arrived at the end of August and left at the end of July twenty years later.

Ann Arbor is a great town with a continuous array of culture, sports, events, etc. I really enjoyed my time there and still have some excellent friends living there, some of whom I have know since I was a freshman. I still have four season football tickets in the back row of the "Big House" with a dozen other long time friends. We generally go back to at least one game and then if we are lucky, we get to host people here for the Rose Bowl. Margarethe and I lived in a big farm house on the edge of town on about 100 acres. Talk about space to get out and walk around. It was an incredible living situation, though it was a bit rustic. Still the "Farm" was the scene of some memorable times. I lived there for the last twelve and a half years I spent in Michigan. Within two weeks from the time we left, the place was torn down and a regional hypermarket, Meijer's Thrifty Acres, now occupies the spot. It is kind of sad, but it was funny in a way. I had always thought that somehow I would "feel" when the bulldozers flattened the place. But guess what, I didn't have a clue until someone called me in California and said it had been demolished that afternoon. Taught me a lesson about sentimentality.

PERSONAL HISTORY:

CALIFORNIA

Margarethe and I had always liked California since the first time we came out here together in the summer of 1976. We stayed at some friends who lived in Pacific Palisades for about two weeks. When we left we both felt that this would be the place to settle whenever we figured out what we we doing. I was a PhD student and she was an MBA student, so the whole thing seemed a long way off.

Finding dual teaching positions is really quite a challenge. It is rare that one university will have an opening in two different departments, so you often have to look at metropolitan areas with multiple schools. We both had our opinions of where to avoid and we kept thinking about the prospects in California. Margarethe was eventually offered a tenure-track position at the University of California, Irvine and I came along as a trailling spouse with a visiting position at California State University Long Beach. Thankfully, there was a tenure-track position for me the next year, so we could both settle in to the academic lifestyle of teaching and research.

One small problem, where to live? On a house hunting trip to California in February, UCI had generously offered us the right to buy a home on the campus that was actually quite affordable. Alas, the house set aside for us just did not feel quite right so we told them "thanks but no thanks". We drove around a bit aimlessly and found ourselves at Crown Valley Parkway and Pacific Coast Highway and thought "now this is better". Of course we could not afford that area, but we suddenly "discovered" Laguna Beach just up the road a bit. It was instantaneous. We loved the town and resolved that that was where we were going to live.

We rented three different houses as we searched for a house to buy. We arrived in late July and looked hard until we bought a house the next May. I really learned the town and all the backroads as I rode around looking at different houses. The house we bought needed some cosmetic fixing immediately, but it was sturdy and it became our California starter home. We were living large with our ocean view home and hot tub hidden on the deck. We could sit and watch for whales as we sipped champagne. Life was fine.

Once we adjusted to the first, and second mortgage payments we began the never ending remodeling projects: a new entryway, a new kitchen, a skylight and new roof, partition the one large bedroom back into two, expand the deck and modify the master bedroom and bath. We were lucky in the sense that we had bought just at the end of a lull in real estate prices and so everything we were doing was adding value. However, we were a little unlucky when just as we were finishing the master bedroom project, the whole neighborhood, including our house burned to the ground. We had lived in that house for almost five and a half years.

After the fire, we rented a furnished house right away, but only stayed there for six months and then moved into a rather quaint cottage in the north end of Laguna. The cottage was actually quite pleasant and certainly met our needs. I described it to people as camping, but it was in a nice neighborhood and we could walk to the ocean, downtown Laguna, the grocery store, etc. It had a bit of an ocean view from the front porch and the upstairs bedroom. It was really nice, but only temporary.

Immediately after the fire we began the process of rebuilding, which by the time we had all the neighborhood approvals took almost ten months. At that point we decided not to rebuild in that location and move on to something else. We found a lot just outside the city limits on the North end of town and bought it. The lot had a great view though it proved to be a building challenge. Eventually after one and a half years getting all the necessary approvals and two solid years of construction, we finished and moved in on Monday May 11,1998. We had been in California since July of 1987, rented until May of 1988, lost our home in October 1993, and then resettled May 1998. What a long strange trip it's been.