My wife and I were both members of the inaugural 1970 graduating class of Royal High School, Simi Valley, CA

While I was at Mudd, Lois went to St. Vincents Hospital, Los Angeles, CA, to study nursing.

We've known each other since 7th grade, having been in many of the same classes, but we were only casual friends. In early 1973 (junior year of college), a mutual friend played matchmaker and convinced me to call Lois for a date. It was instant romance since we had so many common friends and experiences. We became engaged in December 1973. I graduated from Mudd one weekend, Lois graduated from nursing school the next weekend, and we were married the following weekend on June 15, 1974. As this is being written in late 2024, we have just celebrated our 50th anniversary.

Lois spent 34 years as a registered nurse, working in the high pressure areas of ICU and ER. Her career choice meant that, no matter where I wanted to work, she could walk into the nearest hospital and be instantly offered a job starting the next day.

I earned a Masters in Electrical Engineering at Rice University, Houston, TX, with a thesis on a software algorithm for digital compression of speech. While it's now an everyday occurrence to have computers understanding or producing speech, in the early 70's, digital speech was a big area of research.

My original plan was to get a doctorate, but we weren't happy living in near-poverty in uber-humid Houston. Also, fellow masters students were getting multiple job interviews and offers, while doctoral students weren't getting interviews. So we left academia to get decent paying jobs. I tried to get a job back home in California. Failing that, I accepted a good offer in telecommunications at Rockwell International in Dallas, 250 miles north away from the Gulf. The primary job function was writing software to control various telecom instruments and systems. Having degrees in physics and electrical engineering allowed me to understand the underlying telecom transmission and reception issues, thus giving me a big advantage over my peers who just had generic computer science degrees. I spent 30 years in various telecom companies either writing software or managing groups of software engineers.

From 1981 to 1983, Lois and I, along with baby Jason, moved from Dallas back to Southern California (Thousand Oaks) so I could join a start-up company. The company's schizophrenic efforts were split between creating a downhole steam generator for tertiary oil recovery and creating a utility load management network. It was fascinating work, but the start-up was losing funding and going under two years later. Tired of the high cost of living, smog and crowds in SoCal, we moved back to Dallas in 1983 with toddler Jason and new baby Bryan. We've been in Dallas ever since.

There were two notable highlights of those 30 years.

From 1976 to 1981, I was one of about 25 engineers spread across three companies who worked on a secret military telecom project - Packet Radio and ARPANET - led by Dr. Vint Cerf. Fifteen years later, the ARPANET was declassfied and renamed the Internet, and the Packet Radio was the predecessor of our current mobile phones. I don't make a grand Gore-esque claim that I invented the internet or mobile phones, but I'm proud to have been part of a small crew that helped bring them to life.

In 1983, as a result of the work on utility load management, I was awarded a patent (4,583,090) for a unique trinary communication system.

In 2002, I founded the website QuickScores.com while working full-time as a software manager for Anritsu, a large multinational telecom company. QuickScores is a SaaS (Software as a Service) website for sports organizations. QuickScores provides online registration, team building, schedule creation, scorekeeping, standings and playoff brackets. For the mathematically inclined, a general purpose league scheduler is an operations research problem requiring nonlinear programming. Totally different algorithms are required to create and optimize the different types of schedules - standard round-robin, double header leagues, traveling leagues, interdivision leagues, and Bjerring leagues. QuickScores can create some types of schedules that no other scheduling competitor can match.

In 2005, I decided to leave the security of a big company and go full-time with QuickScores that, at that time, was grossing 15% of my corporate salary. Lois thought I was having a crazy mid-life crisis. Fortunately, the gamble paid off. In 2008, Lois retired from the hospital to became the second full-time employee of QuickScores, handling invoicing and some tech support. In 2009, our son Bryan (BS Computer Science and MBA) joined QuickScores as the third full-time employee along with a few contractors. QuickScores now provides services to a growing list of about 900 different sports groups spread across nearly all the US states, ranging from YMCAs, basketball tournaments, and local soccer leagues, to the recreation departments for cities and counties.

In 2021, I decided to hand the reins of QuickScores to Bryan. I very happily still work half-time as a programmer, focussing on ever-more complicated scheduling algorithms. Lois enjoys being fully retired.

In 2019, Bryan and I founded the much smaller SaaS website FlagMapper.com as a spin-off of some volunteer work done for my Richardson Rotary Club.

The following picture from 2023 best shows the whole family. Two sons, two daughters-in-law, and three grandsons. (We only begat boys.) Lois was a little traumatized in high school because she felt her 5'10" height made her taller than all the boys. She steadfastly denies that I was 6'1" in high school. She now loves looking up at 6'3" Jason and 6'8" Bryan.

I survived a lengthy bout with cancer in 2020 and 2021. Three years later, I'm still working on rehab. Having graduated from bedridden to wheelchair to walker, I now use a cane half the time and walk unassisted the other half. I hope to be back on the pickleball courts soon.