Thanks to all you classmates out there who have contributed such interesting bios. So here is mine. It’s a lot quieter than Janice Birdsong’s and many others.

Like many other class mates I headed to the University of Florida after SHS. I graduated in ’64 with a degree in economics. Shortly after I graduated from UF, Margie Morton and I were married. We moved to Atlanta, the Mecca of the south, and after a year back to Florida and then to Richmond Virginia where our son John was born in 1968. The ‘60s and ‘70’s being what they were, we split up in 1972.

In 1973 I finished my PhD in economics at the University of Maryland, and took my first academic job as a professor at the University of Rhode Island. A great thing happened to me in graduate school. Despite all my previous experience (at SHS for example) I discovered that I loved math. This made being an academic a lot easier.

In 1975 (July 4th—Independence Day?), I married Ginny in Rhode Island. It’s a nice state. I especially liked being near the water but water was about all that was similar to Sarasota. Compared with Florida, Rhode Island is really closed. You have to have lived there about four generations before you‘re no longer an outsider. (By contrast, most of us SHS graduates were not born in Sarasota.) Plus it’s way too cold in the winter. So In 1979 I took a job as a professor at the University of Maryland, in College Park, a DC suburb, where we have lived ever since. The DC metropolitan area has been a great place to live.

I work in the area of environmental economics. There’s all the usual academic rigmarole—lots of math, statistics, and other dry topics, and writing—books, articles, reports—but I like it. Plus the travel has been super—all over the US, Alaska, Hawaii, the Caribbean, the Amazon and Patagonia among other places in South America, Europe. My most memorable trip involved a third class bunk on an overnight train from Jaipur to Ahmedabad in northwest India. And I once spent a week on a river boat research trip on the Amazon with 6 Brazilians, one of them a medicine man.
Ginny and I have two daughters, Maggie and Maryanna, in addition to John. Our daughters will be sharing an apartment in Boston beginning this fall. John and his wife Kara have two kids, Connor, 7 and Frances, 6. They live in Portland Oregon. So we shuttle between Maryland, Boston, Oregon, southern California where Ginny’s sister lives (and where we’ll likely retire), and Florida.

My family (Anne, Betsy, mother and father) moved to Sarasota in 1953 when I was in the middle of the 5th grade (Southside --Mrs Cromartie) and I went away to school right after SHS graduation, only 7 years in Sarasota. We lived on Bahia Vista Street, where my mother continued to live until her death at 95 in 2005. My older sister Anne plans to move in there soon. Despite the short stay in Sarasota, whenever anyone asks me where I’m from I always say Sarasota.

I’m still doing research, teaching and working full time. I play tennis and not as much golf as I want. In case anyone is curious, I don’t know anything about the stock market. See you at the reunion.