I guess I was born to be an engineer. Early on I devoured the biographies of great scientists and engineers. I once read that Thomas Edison took an alarm clock apart and put it back together to see how it worked. I tried that but no one told me about the main spring. As I was removing screws, I accidentally release the main spring. The clock literally exploded as gears, screw and other parts flew about the room. Thomas Edison I was not.

My first career choice was not as an engineer, but as a meteorologist (weatherman). My childhood was spent in Oklahoma and West Texas during the 1950’s and early 60’s. Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle anchors the lower part of the Great Plains. Weather in that region of the U.S. can be exciting. Here moisture moving north from the Gulf of Mexico meets cold air coming south from Canada. The jet stream moving from west to east mixes up everything; sometimes causes the air to spin which can lead to severe thunderstorms, hail and tornados. On many nights I slept under my bed while storms raged outside. This was in the days before satellites. Weather radar was primitive and long-range forecasts were yet to come. Severe weather warnings consisted of standing outside and looking for whatever was coming.

Spring brings severe thunderstorms, hail and frequent tornados. Summer blazing temperatures. Fall and winter can be hot one day and blizzards the next. All this fascinated me. I was even an “official observer” for the Weather Bureau for a while.

This changed when my dad was transferred to Beaumont, Texas, during my senior in high school. My parents could not afford to send me to Texas A&M (the nearest college with a meteorology department) so I enrolled in the local college, Lamar State College of Technology. Eventually, I settled for my second career choice, Electrical Engineering, which on reflection turned out to be the better career path.