The Incomplete Autobiography of
GryEyes911

Picture Montana in December: snow everywhere, cold and dismal. Edwin and Nancy are awakened at 5 a.m. by the Department of Highways' snow-plow roaring past their bedroom window. Too early to get up, too cold to get back to sleep.

I was born nine months later on August 30, 1953.

By then, however, they'd moved back to the West Coast, so I entered this world kicking and screaming in a delivery room at St. Francis Memorial Hospital in Marin County, California. Chubby, blue-eyed, blonde. (Like kittens, babies' eyes are often blue at birth...that's a fact.) Mom was a diabetic, so I was a BIG baby.

We lived above a Television & Radio Sales & Repair shop, which my father operated. I had all the big boxes any kid would ever need to make play-houses or simply in which to hide or store stuff. My sister would help me cut holes in the biggest boxes, while I would sit inside 'em telling her where I wanted the door and windows. Sometimes, though, she'd just close the flaps shut and walk away....

We get along MUCH better now.

Those boxes come in handy when you move a lot. Wherever we settled, though, my dad had his radio equipment room. He was an amateur radio operator -- his call-sign was K6LCF -- so I had a great start as a techno-junkie interested in communications.

One of my earliest jobs "to help daddy" was to test vacuum tubes; I was fascinated with this process and I also got to keep any of the bad ones. They had such interesting shapes and sizes and some of them almost looked like little alien people with multiple, short, stubby legs. I think they were the Olmstead family version of PlaySkool toys.

As a HAM, my dad did a lot of volunteer search and rescue stuff for the local police departments, so I've had positive and exciting contact with law enforcement for as long as I can remember. Radios and cops; who'da thunk I'd grow up to be a Communications Supervisor for a major Law Enforcement agency, huh?

Actually, my earliest career aspirations were inspired by what I saw on television. I am a Child of the Media (check out "The Idiot Box" Revisited for an in-depth understanding of this concept, if you will....) so of course I wanted to be like the people I saw inside that wonderful contraption.

First, I wanted to be a cowboy. Errrrr...... cowgirl. Whatever. I had my own cowboy hat, chaps, boots and plastic revolver in its low-slung holster on a belt. My mother had to peel me out of them nearly every night because I would want to sleep in them... I'm not sure if "Rawhide" or "Bonanza" were the triggers for that desire, but I do know I didn't want to grow up to be like Miss Kitty in "Gunsmoke." I didn't know WHY, exactly, but it didn't look anywhere near as much fun as riding the range on horseback.

For a time, I desperately wanted to be a ballerina, but I have no recollection why... I DO know that I never mastered "fourth position" because I wasn't graceful. Chubby ballerinas have some disadvantages, ya know?

Nurse was next. I specifically wanted to work for Dr. Kildare; my mother really liked him. I was given my own little first aid kit and bandaged the dog and cat until they ran like hell every time they saw me carrying it. That fascination with medicine didn't totally fade away and it probably helped me pass the EMT course about 15 years later.

I learned to read when I was very young; you don't even want to know how young I was when I began to amaze my dad's friends by reading from the newspaper. I was proud of being able to read and would show off any chance I was given. I distinctly recall one night of being challenged to read out of the dictionary... and I didn't think it was fair there were all those weird characters that supposedly "helped" you pronounce the words. I guess a little bit of a girl stumbling over big words was cute, or something.

Every trip we made was an opportunity to practice speed-reading, too. We didn't just play license plate games - I was expected to read as much as I could of every bill board on the side of the road before it zipped away as we passed them at my father's normal driving speed. Good thing I had keen eyesight and could start reading signs some distance ahead of us through the windshield. I seem to recall wondering why books didn't spell words as compactly as did those signs: "Nite" seemed easier to read aloud than "night."

I did develop a huge reading vocabulary as a result of all this focus on the written word. I am still able to read and understand many more esoteric words and phrases than I can speak aloud! (As a little kid, I thought it was horribly unfair that "photography" wasn't pronounced "Foto-graphy.")

Scrabble was my FAVORITE game - and it still is! At least you didn't have to pronounce the words, you could simply show the page in the dictionary to prove their existence and justify their use.

(Check out this snazzy feature: Daily Words.)

Yes, reading is a wonderful skill.

When my mother introduced me to Science Fiction, there weren't any female role models in the astronaut arena, but Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury all opened other vistas for me to explore. Later, I discovered Andre Norton... who I didn't know was a woman for the longest time. That's neither here nor there, I guess. But "hard" science fiction was what whetted my interests in the sciences.

And, growing up in a house with a ham radio operator and observing communications contacts with people all over the world only served to whet my appetite for exploring other universes. Fill a garage with radio equipment, show your kids sine waves on an oscilliscope, explain amplitude and frequency modulation and show 'em your QSL cards, and you, too, will probably develop at least one techno-geek out of the batch. [grin]

"Electronics Engineer" was my father's chosen job description and there were always gadgets in our garage(s) wherever we lived. Some were quite arcane and others were pretty basic; public address systems, speakers and microphones were a large part of what he tinkered with all the time. It made for some interesting experiences in my childhood, as a matter of fact.

My dad held classes in Morse code, so other people could get their amateur radio licenses, too. There were actually record albums to teach code, not unlike the "Escuche y Repitame" Spanish courses; unfortunately, I memorized the albums instead of making a language I could use right away. Once we figured that out, I got individualized instruction and it wasn't long before I had my own Novice Class license! I wish I still had my QSL card collection, now....