BRUCE CRAIG POST-COLLEGE POST-MORTEM ...

      During my early years in the 1940s and 1950s I experienced a rather itinerant (some might say 'rootless') youth: 13 schools in 12 years -- 3 in Los Angeles, 4 in Santa Fe, 2 in Lubbock, 4 in the Atlanta area -- not to mention 4 years of college "way up North" (as though the Civil War had just ended!). This background may have contributed to what my ROTC-oriented college classmates at that draft-prone time (in 1960) termed an "interesting take" on how to deal with the overnight transition from 2S to 1A draft status -- "Hey, just enlist as a private in the Army for 3 years!" -- which to their disbelief is just what I did ...

      Yeh, Basic Training was a hassle (even the DI's thought I was crazy for enlisting!), but things got better, and there followed a year (1960-61) at USALS at the beautiful Presidio of Monterey, CA studying Russian (6 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 47 weeks!), then two years service (1961-63) in Europe (mainly Berlin -- the Wall had just gone up), then 2+ years (1963-65) of hitchhiking and cycling around Europe (8000 km of cycling in the summer of 1964 alone), culminating in a year of living in a Paris 7th-floor-walk-up 'chambre de bonne' (1964-1965) while working as a Russian technical-translating contractor for USJPRS.

      The Army/European phase of my life (1960-65) culminated with a mid-1965 4-month hitchhiking trip across central Europe and down the Dalmatian Coast to Athens to spend a long summer making a ferry-hopping loop around a string of Greek islands (Mykonos/Delos, Santorini, Rhodes, Crete, Ios, Corfu), eventually making my way back to Paris (via ferry from Corfu to Brindisi, then by thumb to re-visit Naples, Rome, Siena, and Florence one last time), and then (after finishing things up in Paris) on to London and Glasgow to catch a 'bargain-air' Loftleidir flight back to New York. Then began my long process of phasing back into ‘tech,’ first as an analog-computer engineer for 2 years at Lockheed/Georgia (1966-67), followed by a return to my ‘native’ California to embark on a 30-year-long digital-design career (1968-1998) at the Radio Physics Lab of Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park.

      The timing of my arrival at SRI was unexpectedly propitious – Silicon Valley was just coming into existence (paving over the Santa Clara fruit orchards to begin manufacturing the first RTL/DTL/TTL ICs), and I was able to transition into hardware/software design in step with the extended 'transistor-to-SSI-to-MSI-to-LSI' evolution of the 1960s-1990s period -- not to mention major software developments, in particular the ground-breaking 1965 Cooley/Tukey update on K. F. Gauss!   This combination of hardware/software improvements meant that field data-collection efforts (up until then usually recorded directly to analog magnetic tape) began to transition into real-time digital "collection + analysis" efforts, greatly improving the quality and timeliness of the results (and serendipitously increasing the demand for such work to be done in areas of the world once considered too remote and/or expensive). This, of course, led to considerable amounts of travel, something that I (along with my wife Kathy -- a Rhode-Island-born, ballet-trained dancer and philosophy major from Santa Clara University, to whom I have been married since 1969) -- have always found irresistible (US/Alaska/Canada, Europe, Russia, Mediterranean, Far East, Indonesia, Hawaii and sundry other Pacific islands).

      Our 3 children (plus eventually 9 grandchildren) showed up in the mid-70s and beyond -- just in time to witness a 22-year project (1974-1996) Kathy and I undertook involving the 'do-it-all-yourself' design and construction of our Skylonda mountain-top home built around two recycled water tanks (10,000/100,000 gallons -- all redwood heartwood!) salvaged from a local land-grant estate (see Watertank.pdf ) and all legally approved, i.e., 66 building inspections -- 3 per year for 22 years!   Circa 2022 we are still living in it ...