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Alex was born in 1985 and lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is a college teacher. Alex met Laura in college and they lived
together for years, including a trip they made to Vietnam in 2014, where they lived in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) for a year. They got married
in 2019 but are divorced now. Alex lived with Laura in Brooklyn for years and he still lives in Brooklyn in another apartment with his new fiancée Lylynn, (her parents are immigrants from Vietnam and she grew up in the U.S.). He and Laura actually lived
in Viettnam for a year. He visits us occasionally because he is just hours away, so he can rent a car and they drive up for a few days.
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Lylynn
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He got his Bachelor's (2012) and Master's degrees from The New School in Greenwich Village,
New York City. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and teaches ESL (English as a Second Language) at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NY, mostly to
foreigners who work in the United States. Because of the pandemic all his classes were online for awhile, so he could do them on Zoom when he visited us.
Since he left home, Alex has lived in:
- Lowell, MA- 2005 - UMass Lowell
- Hingham, MA- 2006 - UMass Boston
- Queens, NY- 2007 - moved to Metro-NYC
- Brooklyn, NY- 2008 - got Bachelor's and Master's from The New School in Greenwich Village, NYC
- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam - 2014 - taught ESL
- Brooklyn, NY- 2015 - teaches ESL at LaGuardia Community College (part of CUNY)
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Ben was born in 1988 and lived in San Francisco, New York City, and Taipei, Taiwan for several years, and is a software engineer.
He is currently visiting friends in San Francisco where he used to live.
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With beard
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He graduated from college in 2011 with a degree in Computer Science from George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC,
which is located between The Watergate Complex and The White House. He worked for 2 years after college in Maryland, then spent a year when he was 25 (2014) traveling the world, mostly in
Southeast Asia, and visited Alex and Laura in Vietnam, who were living there at the time. He went to China, Japan, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Russia, on this trip (he took the
Trans-Siberian Railway from Beijing to Moscow). We asked him once when we would see hin again and he said he was going to a wedding in Jamaica, so we went to Jamaica and saw Ben. After his travels he worked for Twitter
in San Francisco for 4 years, then he worked on Wall Street in NYC for a year and lived in East Village, Manhattan. He left his job in NYC and came to stay with us for a short visit before moving to
Taiwan in 2021, so who knows what's ahead for him? Ben has always had close friends who are Chinese and visited Taiwan several times. When he was in college he spent several months living in
Amsterdam, Holland, on a study-abroad. We visited him there on a European trip, where he joined us in Paris and
Amsterdam. In 2020 he moved to Taiwan. After living in Taiwan for 3 years with his Chinese roomate, Dongyi, he had planned to live in Lisbon, Portugal in March, 2024 but he and Dongyi have split up and he is staying with us and
traveling the U.S. and visiting old friends. He has changed his name to Ulysse (pronounced "you lease"). Ben has gone to San Francisco and may stay there.
Since he left home, Ben has lived in:
- Washington, DC- 2007 - graduated from George Washington University in 2011
- Columbia, MD- 2012 - first job out of college
- - 2014 - took a year off to travel all over the world
- San Francisco, CA- 2015 - worked for Twitter for several years
- New York City, NY- 2019 - worked on Wall Street
- Taipei, Taiwan - 2020
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Patti is Jewish (she's not religious, and may even be an atheist like I am), which makes the boys Jewish by birth, and both our boys attended Hebrew school (a weekly event at a temple) and were
Bar Mitzvah'd (Ben's was the weekend before 9/11 before they shut down airports so people were still able to fly in from out of town). Both boys' classes took field trips to New York City to
see historical Jewish sites like the Eldridge Street Synagogue and I went as a chaperone on these
trips, and we did some other interesting non-Jewish things like going to Ellis Island (where
we listened to headphones on a tour) and the Statue of Liberty (where we
climbed up the spiral staircase to look out the windows in the crown—this was closed for awhile after 9/11 (then again during the
COVID-19 pandemic).
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Places I've lived
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I thought it would be fun to "re-visit" all the places I have lived in Google Maps Street View. (some Street View photos)
| Payette, Idaho (1948-1966) |
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I spent the first 18 years of my life in the small, isolated town of Payette, Idaho. I was surprised it made Street View.
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Childhood home |
(Center Ave.) |
1951-1966 |
– |
my parents bought this house when I was 3—we had a huge tree next to the driveway that has been taken down (see then & now)
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| Moscow, Idaho (1966-1968) |
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I spent my first 2 years away from home in college at the University of Idaho in Moscow (aerial view).
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Borah Hall |
(U of I) |
1966-1967 |
– |
freshman year I lived in a dorm that was part of a big complex |
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First apartment |
(U of I) |
1967-1968 |
– |
sophomore year I shared an off-campus apartment with 2 friends
In 2022 there were some murders a block away from here |
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Seattle (1968-1973)
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I lived for years in Seattle in a variety of places. Some of the older buildings are no longer there, or the vegetation
has changed so much I had difficulty recognizing them, but I tried to show the locations if I could find them. Addresses followed by (?)
indicate that I was unable to find the exact building I lived in (probably gone now), and it has been so many years I am not always sure
if this is even the right street. My former roommate, Ben, who still lives in Seattle, helped with some of the locations. I also found the
Bird's Eye view in Bing Maps a
good search tool.
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15th Ave NE |
(U District) |
1968-1969 |
– |
first time living alone, across the street from Cowen Park
(my apartment was main floor left in view), then basement apartment with Rainmar—friend Ben lived in another apartment in same building
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NE 54th St (?) |
(U District) |
1969 |
– |
I'm just guessing on this location; it was in that area and this sort of looks right with the hill and openness;
one memory of this place is that it was where I was living in 1969 (with Rainmar) when I received my draft notice
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N 41st St |
(Wallingford) |
1969 |
– |
foliage now hides the outside entrance to our apartment and the little cottage that was occupied by a nice young hippie couple; my roomate was Ben
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Naomi Place |
(U District) |
1969-1970 |
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lived here with group of friends (including Bill and Andy) in era of long hair and rock festivals (roommate Pat nicknamed this "Naomi House" after the address).
Pat was my first roommate when I came to Boston for college in 1973. |
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12th Ave NE |
(U District) |
1970-1971 |
– |
lived here with group of friends, same era (roommate Pat came through with another nickname,
"Excellent house") |
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"Minor Manor"(?) |
(Cascade) |
1971-1972 |
– |
the run-down complex of old buildings we lived in, and the taxi business next to it, seem to be gone |
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Franklin Ave E |
(Eastlake) |
1972-1973 |
– |
my roommate Bill usually stayed at his girlfriend's so I basically lived alone;
one great thing about this apartment was the view—we could look across Lake Union and see the Aurora Bridge (see aerial of location)
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| Boston (1973-1978) |
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I came to Boston in 1973 to return to college and I've been here ever since.
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Beacon St. |
(Brookline) |
1973-1975 |
– |
shared apartment with Seattle friend & roommate Pat when I went to Berklee |
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Peterborough St. |
(Fenway) |
1975-1976 |
– |
the beginning of 3 years of living alone in the Fenway |
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Queensberry St. |
(Fenway) |
1976-1978 |
– |
where I was living when I met Patti, and during
the Blizzard of '78 |
South Shore (1977-present) |
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I met Patti in 1977, we soon lived together and got married in 1979, and we have two grown sons, both college graduates. We've owned 3 houses
in suburbs on the South Shore.
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Morningside Path |
(Weymouth) |
1978-1982 |
– |
Patti had just bought this house but hadn't moved in yet when we met, I moved in soon after—when we were first married we lived there until it was
gutted by a fire in 1982;
it was rebuilt by the next owners, who added the additions and changed the color to green; Paula, who is still our good friend, lived next door
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Lafayette Avenue |
(Hingham) |
1982-2016 |
– |
this was the 3-story family house where our two boys grew up (we added the 2-story
addition on the right in 1991—family room downstairs, master bedroom upstairs);
after they left as adults (Alex to Brooklyn, Ben to San Francisco) we realized it was time to downsize
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Talbot Road |
(Hingham) |
2016-Now |
– |
this is our current house on Otis Hill, a neighborhood across from the Hingham Lobster Pound on Route 3A.
This is the house we bought (1200 sq. ft.) and this is what we turned it in to (3200 sq. ft.) — we can see Boston
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Locations of our Hingham houses.
The first two we moved into, then remodeled. After we bought our current house, we got an architect and builder, then
remodeled it for a year before moving there.
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Fire!
Fire photos
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Next house
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We lost our first house in Weymouth to a fire in 1982. It was on a June afternoon and
Patti was next door, sun-bathing on chairs in the backyard with our neighbor and good friend Paula (we are still good friends with Paula even though we live in different houses in different towns now), and Paula asked Patti if she if she had left an air-conditioner on because there was smoke coming
out of a bedroom window that had an air-conditioner. The bedroom was above the kitchen, which is where the actual fire was, and Patti rushed home to deal with it. When she opened the kitchen door she saw the fire (an
electrical fire that started in a wall) and it was already out of control, and our cat rushed in through the open door (to his death). I was at work in Boston and she called me and said, "The house is on fire!" and
I rushed home (I drove a car to work in Boston in those days) but the firefighters were rolling up their hoses so I missed it all. The house was burned out inside and was a total loss (see photos). It is tough to lose everything you own in a sudden tragedy like that but you recover and go on. Fortunately we didn't have kids yet, but we lost 2 cats in the fire (our dog was tied up safely
outside). Living through a horror like a fire is not something you prepare for, and the experience opened up a whole new world to us with people who deal with this trajedy on a regular basis—adjusters, lawyers, and various
emergency services. The insurance company offered to put us up in a hotel or have a mobile home in the driveway. We took the mobile home option (I expected something like a camper trailer but was shocked and pleased that they
delivered a 2-bedroom modern mobile home)
and we lived there that summer, where we had a pool in
the back yard, and talked to people about rebuilding the house but we realized we would have made the house we wanted to build by far the most expensive house in the neighborhood so it was better to move to the house we
wanted rather than build it. We bought a
Mobile home
in driveway
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Remodeled
cape house
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beautiful house in Hingham on a corner lot with a hedge (a few miles away) and moved. The fire
was many years ago, before we had children (they
were born in the next house in the 1980s), and my memories of it are pretty dim. For years we would be
wondering where something was that we owned, then would realize it was lost in the fire. (When Patti and I started living together we merged our stereo systems and stored some of the unused components and other things in the
basement, so these were not damaged in the fire and were used again in our next house.) We sold the burned-out house to a young couple who remodeled it with several additions and made it their home.
This house was the first of 3 houses we have owned.
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Idaho roots (See my Payette page for more)
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Payette in 60s |
I grew up in Payette, Idaho
and I lived there until I finished high school in 1966. There is more information about my childhood on my Payette page. Some of you may be interested to know that Idaho's in the Northwest, not the Midwest, and this map shows you that Idaho and Iowa are two different states a thousand miles apart!
My great-grandfather, Peter Pence, was one of the pioneers of the town (more
Payette history). My late cousin Bob assembled a Pence family tree, starting with Peter's son (my grandfather, Albert Loyd Pence). I have one famous relative, my
late uncle Herman Welker (married to my dad's sister, Gladys), who
was a U.S. Senator from Idaho from 1951-1957. I don't agree with his politics (he was a Joseph McCarthy supporter) but I was just a kid then so
it didn't cause me any distress. After graduating from high school in 1966 I majored in Engineering at University of Idaho in Moscow for 2 years (1966-1968). (Fortunately, I missed this excitement by a few years!)
After 2 years I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do, so I stopped going to college and moved to Seattle and for the next 5 years I
worked at Boeing and other manufacturing jobs (because I had learned to read blueprints as an Engineering major). I started playing guitar in college and had become a jazz guitarist so in 1973 I went back to college in Boston to study music at Berklee College of Music, but after a couple of years I
discovered computers and went to several other colleges and after graduating became a computer programmer, which I did for the next 35 years (I commuted
from my home in Hingham to Boston by boat) until I retired uin 2018.
Pence family tree – I try to keep this updated
Here's an interesting juxtaposition, my childhood home in 1963 and 2005 (the
 newer photo taken by my friend Barbara Wilson). You can also see it in Street View. Following high school, in 1966 I went to the University of Idaho in Moscow, where I majored in
mechanical engineering, partly because my high school guidance counselor and my SAT scores pointed me in that direction, and partly because I thought that when I got out of
college as an engineer I could avoid the draft (more about that here), which was something that
all men of draft age (18-26) had to worry about at that time.
The classic Big Potato postard I saw as a child.
 
Some Idaho links . . .
Payette links . . .
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For years I made regular trips to visit my mother, who still lived in Boise (my father died in 1993), but she passed away in 2017 so with no family there now my Idaho trips may diminish.
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1967
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1967 was a very big year in terms of style, music, and politics. I was a young adult, 19-years-old, and I was discovering who I was. I had a
great year and lots of memories of those days. I lived a pretty typical lifestyle for people of my generation,
growing long hair, doing drugs, going to rock concerts, and going on lots of anti-war marches (and ultimately a battle with the draft in 1969)
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After my first year of college I came home and when my mother asked me what I wanted to do for the summer I said go to San Francisco (a dorm
buddy had graduated from college and had a job in the Bay Area). She said every kid in the country was going to go there in 1967 (the
"Summer of Love") so I wasn't. My older brother, David, who went to UW in Seattle,
had had a summer job every year when he was in college selling dictionaries door-to-door, and he had done so well he was going to have his own crew this
year. My mother said I could work for him so I went to Atlanta, Georgia, with my brother for a summer job selling dictionaries, which I did for
about 2 weeks before I decided that where I really wanted to be in the summer of 1967 was San Francisco . So I went out to the highway, stuck out
my thumb, and hitchhiked cross-country to California. I still can't believe I did that, not knowing where I would sleep each night, but at 19 we
have the nerve to do these crazy things. (This trip took me 4 days, including 24 hours I spent in St. Louis with a college buddy.) Someone picked me up
in Kansas and said he was going all the way to California, so I thought I had it made, but his car broke down in Salt Lake City and he decided to hitchhike
the rest of the way. We split up and I was on my own again.
My college buddy that I stayed with lived in Vallejo, just North of Berkeley, but we got into San Francisco a lot and I feel like I really
experienced what was happening there (and I witnessed Haight-Ashbury during its cultural peak). Most of my experiences of
that era were in Seattle, where I lived that fall. I was only in the Bay Area for part of a summer, not really long enough to consider it
a place of residence, so there is no San Francisco section on this bio page.
1967 was also the year of the first Monterey Pop Festival, one of the first
rock festivals in the country.
After leaving the Bay Area I lived in Seattle for several months then returned to college at the U of I in Moscow. I remember the
anti-war marches they had in Moscow had people marching around in circles with signs, and I thought I was so sophisticated having been on much
larger marches in Seattle. I also had shoulder-length hair and people would come up to me and ask where they could buy drugs. I soon came to the
conclusion that life would be more fun without the responsibilities of school. In 1968, after 2 years of college, I moved back to Seattle, where
I lived for 5 years, before returning to college in Boston in 1973, and I still live in the Boston area, where I finished school, got married, had kids, and had a great career.
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Travel
We lessened our traveling during the pandemic!
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Traveling is something I've always enjoyed, both in the U.S. and abroad. My family took many trips when I was growing up in Idaho in the 50s and
60s, always by car (my first time flying was in 1974, flying home from college in Boston). Living in Idaho we usually went to West Coast locations like Seattle,
California, and Oregon, typically to see relatives—my grandparents lived in Seattle, my
dad's brother, Pete, lived in the S.F. Bay Area, and I had aunts and uncles in Eugene, Oregon. We went to Tijuana, Mexico, once on a California
trip and one time we took a ferry from Seattle to Victoria, BC, Canada. In
1956 (when I was 8) we took a cross-country car trip to New York City (saw parents' college friends, rode on a subway), Ithaca (where we saw my
mother's sister Ruth and her husband, Gordon Streib, a professor at
Cornell), Massachusetts (aunt and uncle lived in Petersham), and Washington, DC, (uncle Herman Welker, married to my dad's sister, Gladys, was a U.S. Senator, their daughter Nancy now lives in Boise) stopping in St.
Louis to see my dad's brother, Abe (his daughter Pat is now a veterinarian in metro-Boise that I see on Boise trips, and son Bert is a real-estate entreprenuer
in Austin, TX), and Colorado (saw my 1st-grade teacher who had relocated there). On this trip we drove over the
Continental Divide and Royal Gorge in Colorado. I remember my
brother, David, had a U.S. map on the wall marking all the roads we traveled on. In my life I've actually been to 47 of the 48 continental states
(never Arkansas), and I confess, I've only been to North Dakota once when my plane was diverted to Fargo after the Minneapolis airport, my
connecting airport on a trip to Boise, was temporarily closed due to an unexpected blizzard.* Speaking of missing Arkansas, I one drove from Florida, to New Orleans, then to San Antonio, TX.
This route went through Louisiana on Route 10, beneath Arkansas.
My parents lived in Boise and I visited them several times a year, sometimes attending high school reunions on these trips. My dad died in 1993 and I continued to visit my mother until she passed in 2017. It was
always a kick on these trips to get reaquainted with my high school friends who still live in the Boise area, and see my first cousins Nancy and
Pat, and many of us have stayed in touch on Facebook.
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*
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On the trip when I went to Fargo I was originally scheduled to arrive in Boise at 1:30 in the afternoon. My connecting flight to Boise
left the Minneapolis airport when it opened after the snow had been cleared, which was before I had returned from Fargo. The airline put me
on a flight to Chicago, then to Salt Lake City, then to Boise. I asked what time this plane would arrive in Boise and was told 11:30pm. I
said that was unacceptable and made up a story that my mother had been rushed to a hospital and I needed to get there ASAP. They put me on
a flight straight to Boise that arrived in mid-afternoon.
Now why did I have to lie to get this flight, which apparently was already scheduled?
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Recent trips (when I took cellphone photos)
These are mostly shown in slideshows in the different styles I used over the years.
| 2018 | Italy - we took an extended family trip to Rome, Florence, Venice |
| 2014 | Jamaica - Ben spent a year traveling around he world and we asked him when we could see him again—he said he had a wedding in Jamaica so we went there to see him and had a wonderful vacation! | |
| 2010 | Europe - Patti and I and our friend Paula, went to London, Paris, and Amsterdam, Our son Ben joined us in Paris and went with us to Amsterdam, where he lives and goes to school |
| 2009 | Washington, DC - photos from one of our many trips there |
| 2009 | Clinton, CT - our friends Jim & JoAnne have a coastal summer house |
| 2008 | Boise, ID - I used to visit my late mother (she died in 2017) several times a year and these are photos from one of those trips |
| 2007 | Florida - Patti's parents lived in Florida and we went there many times on vacations |
| 2005 | San Francisco - Patti had a medical conference and I went along to enjoy one of my favorite cities |
| 2005 | Old Saybrook, CT - Patti's brother Ed and wife rented a coastal cottage for years |
See more under Snapshots.
Other trips, many with Patti and kids
I've lived with my wife Patti in the Boston area since 1977 (we married in 1979) and we've taken many trips in North America including . . .
- Florida (Patti's parents lived in Boca Raton in retirement—also trips to Disney World, Key West, and Sanibel Island)
- California (primarily San Francisco and Los Angeles)
The first trip Patti and I took to California was the year after we married, so we always think of this as our honeymoon trip. We flew to
L.A., rented a car and stayed in Santa Monica for a few days, went to Disneyland, down to Laguna Beach, then up the coastal road, Highway
1, stopping at the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, up through Big Sur to
Carmel (where we ran into someone we knew), then onward across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito, where we spent several days at
a hotel with a balcony and a view of San Francisco), then we spent several more days at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco before
returning home.
This was our first California trip. We've been back many times, and I've been there many times before I met Patti.
- Washington, DC (many times to visit our son Ben when he went to college there 2007-2011, to visit my brother and family in a Northern VA suburb, many business trips because my Boston company had an office there)
- New York City (visited Alex in college and Patti's family, many business trips because my Boston company had an office there, and weekend trips when in college in Boston—first time was with family in 2nd grade)
- Seattle (city where I lived for 5 years, 1968-1973, been back several times—grandparents lived there so went many times growing up)
- Idaho (where my parents lived and I grew up, visited my mother many times, and attended many high school class reunions)
- Arizona (Phoenix, Sedona, Tuscon)
- Montana (Helena, saw former Hingham friends)
- Wyoming (Yellowstone Park)
- Atlanta (actually ran into a neighbor at the airport one time!)
- Toronto (rented 2 houseboats and explored 1000 Islands in the St.
Lawrence River with another Hingham family, the Bourrets, then on to Toronto)
- Carribean many times, including Bahamas, and a 1981 Club Med trip to Guadaloupe
- Paradise Island, Bahamas (several times with the kids, once to Atlantis)
New York City
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When I was going to college in Boston in the 70s I had a couple of New York City connections. My brother David and an old Seattle friend Chris
lived there. I would make weekend trips to NYC and they really showed me around Manhattan. I would take the train down from Boston and I remember
one time I reconnected with an MIT student I had met on a previous trip. Chris had an apartment just off Central Park West, then moved to the
Upper East Side, so I was really exposed to great neighborhoods. Chris took me around to all the dance clubs and one time I went to the Macy's
Thanksgiving Day Parade, not something a non-New Yorker would likely experience. My brother lived in Westchester but he had a car so we could
really get around the city. Years later I went as a chaperone on my boys' Hebrew school field
trips to New York in the 90s to see historical Jewish sites like the Eldridge Street synagogue,
one of the first synagogues in the U.S. We did some other interesting things on these trips like
touring Ellis Island, the gateway for over 12 million immigrants to the U.S. from 1892 until 1954, and going to the
Statue of Liberty, where we climbed the steep, winding steps up to the crown, not something you can do anymore.
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Washington, DC
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We've gone to Washington, DC, many times when our son Ben went to George Washington University (2007-2011), and to visit my
brother and family in a Northern Virginia DC suburb (late brother, David, worked for the Census Bureau in Metro-DC). We usually
stayed in boutique hotels within walking distance of the Mall and GW. I've also gone
there many times on business trips and I remember once when there was unexpected freezing rain and my rental car had no ice-scraper so I had to use
a credit card to scrape the windshield. I remember another winter trip when an unexpected snowstorm was closing airports on the East coast and I
had to high-tale it back to Boston before the airport was closed. I was on the plane at the Washington aiport that taxied out to take off, but
they kept running out of de-icing fluid and the plane would return to the gate and let us off to make phone calls (this was in the days
before cellphones!). This went on for 4 hours and I was riding in coach, and the people in business class were getting drink orders, and one guy
was feeling guilty so he came back and took drink orders from us in coach.
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Florida
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We love taking Florida winter vacations when it's cold up North. Patti's parents retired to Florida in the 70s from Connecticut, where Patti grew
up. They bought a house with a swimming pool in Boca Raton on a golf course. We would go there every year with the kids on school vacations. We
also went to Disney World and Epcot a couple of times, Key West a few times (taking a nice drive through the Keys),
Sanibel Island a few times (driving on I-75 through Alligator Alley through the Everglades to get to the Gulf Coast from South Florida), and several other Florida vacations (see photos below). Patti's brother, Ed,
and his wife, Andi, were snowbirds, living half the time in Connecticut and half the time in a condo on the beach in Boca (Ed died tragically of
pancreatic cancer in 2015). My aunt and uncle (mother's sister and husband) lived in Gainesville, where he taught at the University of Florida. I
saw them when I was a kid and we saw them once in Boston, and we attended a memorial service for them in Gainesville when they died (miraculously
a day apart). He had been a professor at Cornell for decades, where we saw them on a New York trip on 1956, before moving to Florida in semi-retirement.
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SLC tornado
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We were in Salt Lake City in 1999 visiting our friend Sheri who lived there (she was our au pair in the 80s and is now married with kids) when
an unexpected tornado ripped through the city causing millions of
dollars of damage. We happened to be downtown right where this tornado came through and fortunately got into a building and watched it go by.
I remember earlier looking down the street at the Delta Center building noticing a cloud of smoke coming off, which then separated from
the building and realizing it was not a fire I said, "It's a tornado!", which my kids mocked me saying for years.
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Las Vegas
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Patti had a medical conference in Las Vegas in 2013 and I went for the fun. We stayed in the Mandarin Oriental hotel on the Strip, which is non-smoking and has no casino. We did all the usual tourist
things including going to a Rod Stewart concert at Caesar's Palace. We also visited the Wee Kirk o' the Heather wedding chapel, where my
parents were married in 1942.
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Business trips
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From 1988-1994 I worked at Carter Rice, a Boston division of International Paper. We had many offices I frequented including
Boston (my oiffice), New York, Washington (I went there regularly), Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Harrisburg (PA). Because so many people traveled
to the New York office rather than pay for hotel rooms it owned a condo on Park Avenue so when I went there and stayed over I just walked
down 5th Avenue past the Empire State Building to the office across from Madison Square Park (that's the Flatiron Building in the center of the photo).
I also went to Chicago on trips for this company (I remember once buying a half-frozen, deep-dish, Chicago pizza and
nervously having it in the overhead bin above my seat on the plane coming back to Boston!). I made trips to other IP locations including
Kansas City, Milwaukee, Charlotte (NC), Denver, and Providence (by car). On a trip to San Antonio I was at a conference at the River Walk and stayed in a hotel across from the The Alamo (which I've seen a couple of times). On that trip I rented a car and drove up to Austin, so see my 2 cousins, Nancy Terry
(who later moved to Boise where I've seen her several times) and Bert Pence.
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Club Med
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Patti and I have gone on many vacations to the Caribean, including once around 1981 a trip to a Club Med resort on Guadaloupe. On
this trip President Carter was staying nearby and his motorcade would go by our restort. Since the Club Med resort had a heavy French
influence the regular beach was topless and there was also a nude beach. They had a great house band that played in the dining area and I
remember between sets they played their rendition of Stevie Wonder's "Another Star." We made several other trips to the Bahamas, once
staying at the Atlantis hotel on Paradise Island off Nassau and once years before staying at a hotel which became part of
Atlantis. (It was strange when we stayed at Atlantis to see our old hotel be a separate wing.)
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Mexico – (map of trip, see locations mentioned below)
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Map of trip
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In fall 1972 (I remember the year because it was November and everybody voted absentee for McGovern for President) I went to Mexico for a couple of months with 3 Seattle friends—Randy Scofield,
Pat Stanton, &
Bill Schaefer. Randy, had a new pop-top VW Westfalia camper and we stayed in American owned campgrounds
(little pods of America with showers and laundries) at various locations around the country. (I remember our sleeping arrangements: Randy, who owned the van, slept in the pop-top, Pat splept in a small
hammock strung over the front driver/passenger seats, and Bill and I slept in the back.) On the way to Mexico we went to Tulsa, Oklahoma to pick up something for Bill at his parents' house, then went through
Dallas, TX, and we saw Dealey Plaza, where JFK was shot. We entered
Mexico at Nuevo Laredo, went through Monterrey to Tampico and Tuxpan on the Gulf Coast, travelled over to
Mexico City, then up for a week at San Miguel de Allende in the mountains. They had this custom where in the evening in the
square the males would walk one way around the block and the females would walk the other way, to encourage them to mingle. We did this and met some women! Then we went over to Guadalajara (where my cousin's
father was the editor of the English speaking newspaper), then over to San Blas on the Pacific and then down to Puerto Vallarta, where
we saw the beach cove where the movie "Night of the Iguana" was filmed, then up the coast, spending the night
on the beach in Mazatlan, where we saw lots of American surfers. We spent many nights and days at many of these places. We finally reentered the U.S. in Arizona, then over to California then up the
Pacific Coast (stopping at Tower Records in San Francisco where I spent my remaining vacation money on records) and back home to Seattle.
More info on my friends . . .
- Bill Schaefer was my roommate several times and one of my best Seattle friends. He passed away from cancer in 2009
- Pat Stanton is retired from Oracle and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area
He was a programmer when we were roommates in Seattle in the 60s and we shared an apartment when I came to Boston in 1973 to go back to college
He came to our wedding in 1979 and we visited him and his wife in San Francisco in the 80s
- Randy Scofield lives on Whidbey Island, North of Seattle and we are Facebook friends
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Cross-country car trips
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I've made 4 cross-country trips by car, all originating in the Northwest; 3 were round-trips, the last time was a one-way trip to Boston for college (and I am still here and now retired, after
college, working, getting married, and raising a family and owning 3 houses):
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- First trip was in 1956 with the family when I had just finished 2nd grade. On this trip we went to:
- New York City (my first subway ride), where we saw college friends of my parents
- Ithaca, NY, where we saw my mother's sister Ruth and her husband, Dr. Gordon Streib, a noted gerontologist and a professor at Cornell
- Petersham, Massachusetts, where my mother's other sister was married to a Unitarian minister, Dr. Leon Hopper
- Washington, DC, where my uncle Herman Welker (dad's sister Glady's
husband) was a U.S. Senator from Idaho. I have memories (probably faulty and fabricated) of seeing JFK as a senator and Nixon as Vice-President
(and also a neighbor of my relatives) in DC.
- Next trip was in 1967 after a year of college, with my older brother David, for whom I was going to work selling dictionaries door-to-door,
which he had done as a summer job when he was in college, so successfully that he was able to recruit his own crew. We went to Nashville
(for training, where I had guacamole for the first time and discovered I love avacado) then to a suburb of Atlanta to sell. I got my fill
of this in a few weeks and hitchhiked cross-country to San Francisco (the place to be in 1967, the "Summer of Love"), getting one long ride in Kansas with a guy going to San
Francisco, until his car broke down in Salt Lake City and we split up and I resumed my hitchhiking, getting a ride in Nevada with a
Canadian woman who had her kids in the car. On this trip I saw a college roommate in St. Louis and connected and lived with another college
friend when I got to the Bay Area. I didn't find the permanent job I had hoped for and went back to Idaho and my 2nd year of college in the
fall.
- Next trip, around 1971, when I lived in Seattle. I went with my younger brother Ed (who was in college) to Bill Monroe's bluegrass festival in Indiana (I was a guitar player and jammed with several
famous bluegrass musicans including fiddle-player Kenny Baker and later
played in a bar in Nashville with mandolin-player Roland White (brother of Byrds'
guitarist and all-time best bluegrass guitar player Clarence White), then
onward to North Carolina, down to Florida, then back through New Orleans and San Antonio (saw The Alamo) and ultimately
California. I remember I had an older car and we kept putting used tires on it when the ones on it wore out and went flat (the things we
did in our youth!).
- Next trip was in 1973 when I drove from Seattle to Boston to go back to college. A Seattle friend rode with me on this drive but he
chose to stay with friends in Detroit so I drove the rest of the way alone. I remember I spent my last night in a hotel in the Poconos in
Pennsylvania. When I got to Boston I moved in with my Seattle friend, Pat,
who had gone on the Mexico trip with me. I had that car for a
year in college and got so many parking tickets it finally got towed. (This trip was one-way and Boston has been my home ever since.)
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Walking
 Something I have always really enjoyed is walking. Now that I'm retired I go for regular neighborhood walks with our dogs, Casey and Quinn.
When I was working, at lunchtime at my job at Safety Insurance in Boston, where I worked the last 24 years of
my career (I retired in 2018) my colleague Margarette and I walked a 3-mile loop from our office that took us around the Boston Common and Public Garden at a brisk pace, not quite a
power-walk but it did help to keep us in shape. I also do daily dog walks.
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Walk for Hunger
Walk for Hunger route
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I have participated in several fundraising walks, which lets me do something I really enjoy while earning money for good causes. I do the Walk for Hunger
with my regular walking partner and dear friend
Margarette
(we did this 20-mile walk together 20 years. every year from 1999 until I retired in 2018). The first few years (when we were so much younger!) at our rapid pace we completed it several times in just
4 hours (that is walking at 5 MPH for 20 miles!). We go a little slower as we got older but we still passed a lot of people.
The money-collecting for sponsorship was done at work, where the company matched my pledges. I wish good luck to
Margarette if she continues.
Our walks . . . (I've finally started taking selfies of Margarette and me!)
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I've also done fundraising walks for AIDS, Cancer, Alzheimer's, and ALS.
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 Project Bread, The Walk for Hunger
 Walk to End Alzheimer's
 AIDS Walk Boston
Dog walks
Smartphone
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Smartphones have really changed our lifestyles, although I read that kids who grew up with smartphones and tablets can't relate to older technology
that was common before they were born. I currently have a Samsung Galaxy S9
Android cellphone (I love this phone!). I perviously had a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini for 4
years and most of my descriptions here are based on that. I have had various cellphones since 1995, starting with a series of flip-phones,
but in 2011 my son Alex gave me my first smartphone, a Droid X. I used
it for several years before replacing it with my Samsung in January, 2014 (purchased for 1¢ on a Staples promotion!). I got my S9
when it came out because I assumed the previous model, the S8, would be discounted, and when I went to Best Buy to get it they gave me a $300
discount on the S9 so I bought it! One of the things I like best about having a smartphone is having a computer in my pocket at all times, so I can
(besides make phone calls!) use Google, email, texting, Facebook, GPS, and of course, listen to music.
Lest anyone think the smartphone has complicated my life—before I had one I listened to music on an iPod and read books on a Sony
Reader (and before that I carried a paperback). Now I do both on my phone so I've done away with 2 extra digital devices I used to carry
around— so having a smartphone has actually simplified my life. Airlines now allow you to read a smartphone on planes in
Airplane mode and when I travel I don't take a laptop anymore, only my smartphone.
I listen to music on my phone with earbuds when I walk our dog, Casey, twice a day. I use
wireless earbuds that have to be charged.
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My favorite apps . . . (This list created when I had my S4 Mini—some things have changed since I got my S9.)
- Contacts — for making phone calls and texting
- Google search
- Google calendar
- Gmail (also accesses Contacts)
- Text messaging
- Facebook
- Web browser — I keep shortcuts on my Homescreen to many websites I visit frequently, like CNN.com,
Boston.com, and the ferry & commuter train schedules
- Android weather — I can always see the current outdoor temperature on my notification bar and get a forecast
for Boston and other cities I visit
- Maps — How did I ever exist without this?
- For reading...
- FBReader — easily reads EPUB and PDF formats
- Amazon Kindle — some Kindle epub books are protected and have to be read here
- My eBooks — I used to carry books to read, then a Sony Reader, now I just read on my phone (see more about this on my Books page)
- For music (using earbuds)...
- Samsung Music player — I used to use an iPod but since my cellphone is always with me I use this app to listen to music (works on Bluetooth in my car)
- iSyncr — copies music & synchronizes playlists from iTunes on my PC to my music player on the cell
- Shazam — identify any song you hear
- Radio FM — this app is liking having a transister radio in your pocket
- Purchasing...
- LevelUp — scan my phone to pay for food (includes selectable tip %)
- Starbucks — scan my phone to pay
- Notepad — I keep lists on my phone that used to be on pieces of paper in my wallet
- Voice Recorder — when I want to leave myself a quick note, especially if I'm driving, I just speak into my phone
- Silent Boot — I added this app so that when I restart my phone it doesn't do the default chime melody
- Mute — a single click on this app will toggle off/on the sounds of my phone so it will be silent if I am at a movie or in a meeting
Do not disturb
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This is a setting on my Samsung phone that keeps telemarketers from calling me. You can have it set to only ring your phone from a call
from someone in your contacts. Other calls go to voicemail without ringing your phone, and telemarkers typically do no leave messages. If someone
you know calls that is not in your contacts hopefully they will leave a message and you can call them back. This is a great feature! You can find
it in Settings under Sounds and Vibration. Be sure you have it set to allow calls from Contacts. Please beware that there is also a
setting under this to silence media and alarms, which I discovered when I couldn't listen to music on my phone. The latest iPhones have a similar
setting called "Silence Unknown Callers".
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External battery charger (This is not needed for my current S9, which has a stronger battery than the S4 Mini did.)
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A constant need with a smartphone is to keep the battery charged. I charge my phone overnight so it is always fully charged at the beginning of
the day. When I had my S4 I also used a 10000mAh external battery charger that had a short chord that was plugged into the phone.
The S4 had a 1900mAh battery so this was basically a battery that was 5 times bigger hooked up to the phone. I haven't needed that with the S9
but I might still use it on a cross-country plane trip.
Anker PowerCore 10000 (size about 2½ x 3½ inches)
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Tips (Mostly written when I had the S4 Mini so not all relevant anymore.)
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There seem to be apps for everything now. When we had a frozen harbor in Winter 2015 and the commuter ferries were not running I took the
commuter rail. To pay for parking I used an app associated with my credit card instead of having to stuff 4 dollar bills into the slot for my
parking spot. (I pay for parking by the month at the boat in a private parking lot, but the MBTA lot also uses this dialup app.) You can get
airline boarding passes sent to your phone which get scanned at the airport. In Boston (my town) the MBTA (local transit system) has made the
passes that previously only came on plastic cards available for smartphones in this fashion. Certain businesses, like Starbucks, that use cards
to scan for purchases now offer apps that do this and you don't have to pull a card out of your wallet every time. I anticipate more and more
things coming this way.
There are many websites with good smartphone tips like how to maximize your battery, or using the Cloud, so I won't list those here, but here
are some things I do on my phone.
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- Create folders on your Homescreen (longpress, select Folder) to group related app icons and keep screens simple and uncluttered. I have
folders for Camera (Camera, 2 Gallery apps), eReaders (FBReader and others), Music (several music players and
support apps), Social (Facebook, Messenger, and Twitter), Files (file management apps), News (news apps like CNN and others), Web
(browser apps).
- Google - all my contacts are Google Contacts, and I use Gmail for email, so transfering to a new phone is not an issue
- SD card — I try to keep as much as possible on my SD card for portability. In Manage applications if you go into an app
there is an option to "Move to SD card."
- Home button — you can customize the Home button. I use an app called Home2 Shortcut to set a
double-click to run an app called Mute to
instantly silence the phone's speaker when I got to a movie or a meeting. Now I can silence it instantly!
- Holiday schedule — I keep an image of a 12-month calendar of my company's scheduled holidays on my Homescreen (I stopped doing this when I retired)
- Flight schedule — when I travel I put the flight schedule on my Homescreen for quick reference (and also boarding passes)
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Supposedly smartphones manage memory in efficient ways and like to have frequently used apps (meaning the last app you used) running in the
background so they can start up faster, but my preference is to kill apps when I am not using them so they don't use up memory. The way to do
this is on my Android (iPhones have a similar method):
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- Press the lower-left button to display running apps
- Press Close all to stop them
Ringtones
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Some notifications require setting a ringtone—but when I don't want to hear my phone ring I use a silent ringtone, silent.wav. For instance, I use this on Gmail, where I still get an icon in the Notification bar for new
email but the phone doesn't audibly ring. For text messages, I get a notification icon and the ringtone on my phone is the little iPhone SMS chirp.
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- Ringtones — get ringtones I have created here
Android vs. iPhone
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I have had 3 Androids and never owned an iPhone, so I am not entirely familiar with the iPhone, but I have noticed things
that I definitely like better about the Android.
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 Homescreen |
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The iPhone homescreen looks very busy (I see people scrolling for apps all the time), while the Android homescreen
is very simple and easy to manage. On an iPhone it appears that every installed app has an icon on the homescreen(s), but on the
Android you only have homescreen icons for things you want there. All installed apps are in the "Apps" folder and you can
add any of them to one of the homescreen panels, or remove them from the Homescreen without uninstalling the app.
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Replaceable battery |
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My S4 Mini had a replaceable battery but my current S9 doesn't (and doesn't need it)..
One of the best features of the Android phone is the replaceable battery. I keep a spare battery fully-charged in a battery
charger, so I can swap batteries whenever my battery is low. When I travel I have an external battery pack to recharge my phone, or I use the
available electrical outlets in many terminals, and more planes are putting USB ports at every seat.
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Universal buttons |
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My S9 phone still has these buttons but they are different from what I am describing here. (I really miss the Menu button!)
 My Android phone has 2 touch-sensitive buttons
below the viewable screen, on either side of the Home button, which are hidden until you press on the phone where they are located.
There is a Menu  button on the left and a Cancel  button
on the right. These buttons work in pretty much every app on the phone. Press Menu and you get the app's menu, press Cancel and
you go to the previous screen, either in the app or it closes the app if you are on the first screen. I have become so dependent on these that
when I am on someone's iPhone I tend to press in these places for that functionality that I am used to on my phone, only to discover
that the iPhone does not have these features.
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Backing up
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I want my contacts, photos, and music to be backed up so they are available should I ever get a new phone. You
can back things up to the cloud, for instance your Google drive, but here is what I do:
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Contacts |
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When I enter a new contact it is associated with my Gmail account and automatically backed up to the Google server (so I guess it is on the Cloud).
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Photos |
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I have my photos in albums so I copy these to my PC.
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Music |
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All my music is on my PC in iTunes so I can reload it from there.
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Listening to music
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I listen to music using earbuds that I always have with me.
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I'm really enjoying a present from Patti, a Bluetooth cap that enables me to listen to music off my phone without earbud wires connecting to
my phone in my pocket. Because this is a knit cap I guess this is only a cold weather option.
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Where I stand
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"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."
— Kurt Vonnegut
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I'm a liberal and I love this Facebook posting...
"What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party? I'll tell you what they did.
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Liberals got women the right to vote.
Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote.
Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty.
Liberals ended segregation.
Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act.
Liberals created Medicare.
Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.
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What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those
things—every one!
So when you try to hurl that label ('Liberal') at my feet, as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, because...
I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.
I was born in 1948 (I'm a baby-boomer) and I was raised in a household similar to the one I raised my kids in, where my parents taught me values that I retain to this
day. My parents were both college graduates (Dad was a banker, Mom was a teacher) and during WWII my dad would not carry a gun and was a non-combatent in the Army medical corps. In my childhood home my dad (who had gone to
Stanford law school but became a banker) subscribed to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker magazine so I grew up with a much broader view of life than what was happening
in the small town we lived in. The Treasure Valley has a very large
Japanese population, probably resulting from internment camps in WWII, and in the 1950s my father quit (or refused to join) the local Elks club because they wouldn't allow Japanese to join. In our very
conservative community my dad stood out as a liberal rebel and I proudly inherited that trait. I will always remember the impression that was made on me when my mother was out of town (at her father's funeral in California)
and my dad took us to see Gregory Peck in "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee's story of bravery and justice in small-town America, and I have hopefully passed these values on
to our sons—values like integrity and charity, and a desire to participate in a kinder and gentler world, and to help create a more humane and just society. I was raised in
a very non-violent household and even though I played sports like football in high school I have always lived a very non-violent life amd take a non-violent stand on all issues.
During WWII my dad was in the army like everybody else's dad, but he was in the medical corp where he wouldn't have to carry a rifle. We had some old army stuff that I played around with as a kid and I assumed his wartime
experiences were like all the other dads. Later when I realized he had non-violence views like I did I got more respect for him. We didn't go hunting like other families I knew did and he didn't preach non-violence but we
lived that way.
Both of our sons have graduated from college and are doing good things with their lives. Alex has a Master's degree and is a college teacher in New York City. Ben graduated in Computer Science and worked for Twitter as a programmer in
San Francisco for 4 years, then lived in New York City and still worked as a programmer, and then moved to Taiwan. We are proud parents! Both boys have traveled around the world many
times and lived abroad. I'm just glad neither of them had to deal with the draft as I did.
Coming of age in the 1960s civil rights have always been very important to me. When I evaluate a candidate who is running for public office, the first thing I look at is his stance on social issues like women's rights and
gay rights. If the candidate fails on those I don't care what his positions are on everything else, he will never get my vote.
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Draft resistance
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I lived in Seattle in the late 60s and because I wasn't going to college and had lost my 2-S student-deferment draft classification (this was during the Vietnam War) I got drafted in 1969, and because of my beliefs (I was very anti-war!) I was a draft resister.
That was my reputation for awhile.
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Political Compass
Guns
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I think guns are a horrible thing and have no place in our civilization. I am opposed to them being used for anything! I hate to admit it but when I was a teenager I belonged to the NRA. We used to go down in the basement
of the Bancroft Hotel in my hometown, Payette, Idaho, and shoot rifles at targets. I think this was just a teenage thing
and it didn't last—it was mosly an excuse to go out in the evening and do something. I have never owned a gun and don't think I have ever known anybody who did. My friends used to go hunting with their fathers so perhaps
they did. I never went. I don't want guns to be in my life.
I was totally shocked when Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted. Give me a break! This guy showed up at a rally and killed 2 people with an illegal gun.
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- Black Lives Matter
 We have this sign in front of our house.
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- All lives matter - the idea that some lives matter less is the root cause of all that is wrong with the world
This is one of the most poignant postings I've ever seen on Facebook.
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- Greta Thunberg, who sailed across the Atlantic in support of fighting globel warming
Another very poignant Facebook posting
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- 2016 Presidential Election
 Donald Trump sounds just like Archie Bunker
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This section was created when Trump was still in office. Those were bad times! I'm writing now in 2022 and Biden has replaced Trump as President. I expect better times are ahead.
Trump is such an idiot. I can't believe people take him seriously. Trump is certainly the worst President in my lifetime, perhaps the worst President of all time. Sadly, it says a lot about the horrifying reactionary
forces in our country when the first black President is followed by a President publicly endorsed by the KKK and the American Nazi Party. A top Nazi leader says, "Trump will be a 'real opportunity' for
white nationalists." As President-elect, Trump appointed fellow racist, xenophobic, misogynist, anti-Semitic nationalist, Steve Bannon, as his chief White House strategist and senior counselor (Bannon was arrested on
federal charges later). Trump has said he wants to unite the country, but "As long as a champion of racial division is a step away from the Oval Office, it would be impossible to take Trump's efforts to heal the
nation seriously," said Harry Reid. Trump keeps saying he "inherited a mess," but the only mess he inherited is his struggle to function as President. He was in way over his head. When George W. Bush became President
I thought we had hit the bottom of the President standing for good things, but then came Trump.
Trump's main mission as President was to undo everything Obama accomplished. I am afraid I took it for granted when Obama was in office, but now I realize how wonderful we had it. Trumpsters are always saying the 8 years of suffering under Obama are over. Boy do they have it wrong. This is so racist. What they really mean is 8
years with a black President.
During his campaign Donald Trump made so many mistakes (here are 37 Fatal Gaffes That Didn't
Kill Donald Trump) that it is amazing that he made it all the way to the White House. Every time he put his foot in his mouth I expected to hear that he was dropping out of the race. I can't believe that people
still took him seriously. The Access Hollywood tape should have completely disqualified him but people were still too stupid and voted for
him. And like many, if not most, people I expected Hillary Clinton to win. What a blow that was!
Big winner of 2016 was George W. Bush, who will now no longer be the worst President in U.S. history.
With Trump's goofiness I am expecting to get many more items to put on my Political satire section.
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- Obama
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Artist Shepard Fairey created this great portrait of Barack Obama.
"I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign. The political messages involved in your work have
encouraged Americans to believe they can change the status-quo. Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or
on a stop sign. I am privileged to be a part of your artwork and proud to have your support."
— Barack Obama to Shepard Fairey, February 22, 2008
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I live in Massachusetts, a very blue state, and am happy to be around others who feel the same
way. I have always found the anti-tax view of conservatives to be selfish ("I don't want the government to take my money to help
others." Compassionate conservative? Give me a break—what an oxymoron!) and was offended by the right-wing trying to turn Obama's
"spread the wealth" comment during his first presidential campaign into something negative. Obama is the best President we've
every had and his changes have compensated for 8 years of Bush's policies. And then Trump tried to
undo everything Obama accomplished, and many in the GOP supported him.
Obama Accomplishments – here is a list I made after he had served 2 years
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This cartoon appeared in The Boston Globe after the GOP retook control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 mid-term elections. In
some convoluted logic the voters think the Dems failed because in 2 years they couldn't fix the problems the Republicans took 8 years to
create.
click to enlarge
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- Adjust, don't conform
Windsor Mt. School
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"Humaneness is one of the hallmarks of being a liberal." — Walter Cronkite
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My social and political views are very liberal, which is the essence of logical thinking and humanitarian concerns. During my formative years
in the 1960s I was mostly surrounded by people with the same values, but as I got older and moved away from the college setting I came to
realize that I had been living in a somewhat sheltered environment, and in order to co-exist with some of the others I met whose views were
very different from mine I would have to keep some of my opinions to myself (though I would not have to change my values). I thought this
philosophy was stated very well in the slogan at the progressive New England boarding school my wife Patti attended, the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts (closed
in mid-1970s): "Adjust, don't conform."
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- Pacifism & resistance
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"My pacifism is not based on any intellectual theory but on a deep antipathy to every form of cruelty and hatred."
— Albert Einstein
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I have always been a pacifist but my commitment to my beliefs was really put to the test in 1969 during the Vietnam War when I became a draft
resister. Like millions of other Americans I opposed the war for political and moral reasons and participated in many antiwar marches and
rallies in Seattle, where I lived. After a couple of years of college I took some time off which resulted in the loss of my student
deferment, and when I received my draft notice I responded in the spirit of what we used to chant—"Hell no,
we won't go!"—I was a draft resister. Taking this stand
put my personal freedom in jeopardy for a period of time, but finally, after an anxious year involving lawyers and an FBI investigation, I
was able to put that episode behind me (with no court or prison time) and move on with my life. I was far from alone in my war
resistance—the Justice Department identified 570,000 men who were draft evadors (none of whom I've ever met).
This was a big part of my life for years, but now it is ancient history and I never think of it. Most people I've met don't even know about this because that war was so long ago.
My draft resistance – a serious and stressful episode in my life
 An interview with a Vietnam draft resister 35 years later – this could be me
A "fan" letter – from someone who does not agree with my views
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- Peace Symbol explained
When I was in high school in the mid-60s, I subscribed (with many thanks to my open-minded mother) to the Berkeley Barb, an underground newspaper loosely associated with
students at UC Berkeley. Something I learned in one issue was the history of the Peace Symbol  , a superimposing of the semaphoric signals (nautical signal flags) for the letters "N" and "D," standing for Nuclear Disarmament, and created in 1958 in the UK.
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This is somewhat esoteric knowledge and I presume if people have any association for the symbol they just know it stands for peace. Now I see
it on clothing and other items as a "fashion" icon and realize that many very young people might not even know its meaning. Oh well,
it will always symbolize an anti-war theme for me.
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- War is immoral
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who
hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." — Dwight D. Eisenhower
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War is a hostile and barbaric action that is the result of a total failure of diplomacy (or as Isaac Asimov put it,
"Violence is the diplomacy of the incompetent."). I
strongly oppose war and I do not support our leaders who get us into wars when they cannot work out problems with
other nations using non-violent methods. I do support the men and women in the armed forces because they are honorably
putting their lives at risk for the security of our country, and they are not responsible for the failure of our
leaders' diplomatic efforts. We have a military to protect our freedoms if our country is ever threatened or attacked
by another nation (which is why we call it the Department of "Defense"), but when our troops are sent to
preemptively attack the citizens of another nation on their own soil as we did in Iraq, we are invading them,
and I say, "Bring our troops home!" (I can't believe our National Guard is
being sent to foreign countries to participate in war—isn't the mission of the NG to protect the homeland?)
This is from A Grandfather's Last Letter To His Grandkids on Huffington Post. I thought it was pretty good advice.
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"Don't join the military or any organization that trains you to kill. War is evil. All wars are started by old men who force or fool young men
to hate and to kill each other. The old men survive, and, just as they started the war with pen and paper, they end it the same way. So many
good and innocent people die. If wars are so good and noble, why aren't those leaders who start wars right up there fighting?"
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 War Resisters League – "There is no way to peace – peace is the way."
 Nonviolence.Org – "War is just a racket." – Major General Smedley Butler, USMC
Letter To Bush – I received this chain letter after 9/11
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Dailai Lama says it so well
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Winston Churchill quote
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Jimi Hendrix — Power of Love
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- Liberties & rights
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"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, that you can't even passively take part; and you've got
to indicate to the people who run it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
— Mario Savio
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It is everybody's right to live free of arbitrary, unnecessary rules, and we should all be able to openly express
our personal freedoms. Unfortunately, we do need laws to protect these freedoms because not everybody is respectful
of the rights of others, but if you want to engage in a non-harmful activity there should be no law restricting you.
Free Speech Movement Archives
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement
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- Gun control
I'm tired of firearm enthusiasts saying the Second Ammendment gives them the right to own guns. The Second Amendment states
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"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not
be infringed."
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"Yes, a well regulated militia, not a personal arsenal free-for-all!"
— Jon Stewart
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When this was put in the constitution in 1791, the most lethal weapon was a single-shot musket, not the semi-automatic handguns and assault
rifles that anarchists have today. Possessing something that makes killing this easy is too dangerous to be considered a "right" and this
savage, barbaric activity should not be allowed or encouraged in civilized society in the 21st century. Compared to
other countries, the gun situation in the U.S. is really out of control.
In one recent year, gun deaths by country:
| New Zealand | 4 |
| Japan | 19 |
| England | 54 |
| Australia | 57 |
| Switzerland | 66 |
| Canada | 151 |
| Germany | 373 |
| U.S. | 11,798 |
And for those Americans ranting about taking on the government if they try and confiscate guns, who exactly are they planning to shoot?
Soldiers? Police officers? Maybe their neighbors' kid who joined the National Guard?
Personally I see no need for guns in society and would love to live in a world that had no guns. But that is unlikely, and after mass shootings
in several locations like Columbine, Aurora, and Newtown it is clear we need to have some regulation of guns.
 The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
 The ACLU on Gun Control
 Put reason back in America's gun debate
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 "Eric & Patti")
I met Patti in 1977 when she had just bought a house, a 3-bedroom
Cape in Weymouth (a Boston suburb) and I still lived in an apartment in Boston, but I moved in with
her in 1978 and we got married in 1979 in Waltham, a suburb
West of Boston.
Here's Patti walking her dog at
Whitman's Pond at the end of our street. When our youngest son graduated
from high school in 2007 and went to college in Washington, DC (Alex was already in college in New York City), we stayed in our large, 3-story, 10-room Victorian house
where we had raised the boys for several years before we decided to downsize and bought our current house, which is relatively smaller but still large (3 bedrooms, 3½
baths). I am retired now and spend most of my time here in Hingham and I don't miss commuting (by boat) into the city every day. For 35 years my daily routine would consist
of—get up, drive to the Hingham Shipyard, take a commuter boat to Boston (see photos), work all day, take the boat back to
Hingham, and drive home. Since I retired I am glad those days are over and my life is much simpler now. I became friends with people I saw every day on the boat but sadly we haven't stayed in touch since I am not on the boat
anymore. Here's the building where I worked in Boston, where it says 20 (the address was "20 Custom House Street", which was a side street so everybody used the front entrance to the building on Broad Street.
MY_WTC – I posted this 2000 family photo to this website (showing the WTC towers the year before they came down)
Stanley Clarke - School Days – I made this in 2006 from a DVD I own
My Facebook profile – I joined in 2009—more bloggish than my website, with frequent updates
 "0.34 a gallon!"){kind=small}
which I put on my car.
Yootech Wireless Charger
ThermPro digital thermometer
My family of origin (all dead now)
, Patti, Ben<br>(Grandma, Eric's mother, died in 2017 at age 98!) "Pence family, 2015")
Human Rights Campaign – working for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights
Wedding distractions – Brian McGrory, The Boston Globe¹, 2/13/2004
Where Is My Gay Apocalypse? – Mark Morford, SFGate, 3/5/2004
Human Rights Watch: Women's Rights
A Woman's Right to Choose – at the Center for Reproductive Rights
National Do Not Call Registry
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
CDC's Tobacco Information and Prevention Source (TIPS)
ericpence(at)gmail.com
Tips.Net: Household Tips, Handy Hints, and Thrifty Ideas
&comment=Picture taken by my good friend, <a
href='Margarette_N.html' class='green'><i>Margarette</i></a> "Eric in his 70s")
My VAX records){kind=small}
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, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse&comment=(aerial of Paris for desktop background -- now changed to Hingham Harbor aerial) "New computer")
)
 is on the left "Payette, Idaho, 1960s"){kind=small}
, Pat Stanton "Mexico trip, 1972")
![](picture.html?image=pics/windsor_mt_school.jpg&topcap=Windsor Mountain School&comment="Adjust, don't conform" "Windsor Mountain School")
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 in <i>rush hour</i>){kind=link}
 to job in Waltham&comment=State Route 128 (what we call it) is same highway as Federal Route I-95){kind=link}
'>
<span style='color:black'><i>much older</i> now</span>){kind=link}
 map showing locations of Payette, Kuna, and Boise){kind=link}
){kind=link}
&comment=On Lafayette Avenue (see <a href='lafayette_house.html' class='black'><i>photos</i></a>) in <a href=
'picture.html?image=pics/lafayette_loc.jpg&topcap=Our house in Hingham Square' class='black'><i>Hingham Square</i>){kind=link}
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, Patti (Mom), Alex, Laura, Ben (brother)<br>Alex said no ties at his wedding){kind=link}
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&comment=and after remodeling (bottom)){kind=link}
){kind=link}
![this map](picture.html?image=images/idaho_iowa.gif&topcap=U.S. map showing Idaho and Iowa&comment=Check out this great <a href='picture.html?image=images/idaho_t-shirt.jpg&topcap="Iowa" on an Idaho t-shirt' class='green'>t-shirt</a>!){kind=link}
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