Paternal grandfather: Machinist, musician, choir director, Swedish immigrant

Paternal grandmother: Musician, church organist, Swedish immigrant

Maternal grandfather: RR brakeman/switchman, church elder, English descent

Maternal grandmother: Socialite, English descent

Father: Machine designer and builder, draftsman, printer

Mother: Writer, poet

Brother: Physicist, professor

Sister: Administrative secretary

Oscar: My childhood nickname

Wife: Lover, helper, fellow-worker for God

Children and grandchildren: Challenge and delight

Lyons High School, Clinton, Iowa

Iowa State College, Ames: B.S. Mechanical Engineering

Lockheed Aircraft Company, Burbank: Draftsman

USAF: Navigator, Texas and Montana

University of Arizona, Tucson: M.S. Mechanical Engineering

NASA Flight Research Center, Edwards AFB, California: Aeronautical engineer

My introduction to computers was a six-week course in Symbolic Operational Assembler Procedure, aka SOAP, at the University of Arizona in June 1960. A friend majoring in computer science had suggested I take that course because, in his opinion, computers were to be the big thing of the future. Smart fellow. So in six weeks I learned how to tell an IBM 650 computer to do simple arithmetic and other operations by sending it a series of three-letter instructions via punched cards arranged in a rigorously logical order. It was fun, but so what?

About a year after I started working for NASA, I was given an assignment that allowed me to use that short beginning in SOAP to learn SAP, then FAP, then FORTRAN itself. And for the next 27 years I wrote, modified, and used computer programs as a regular part of my job as an aeronautical research engineer working primarily in the areas of performance flight data analysis, airplane performance modeling, and hypersonic research airplane studies.

After I retired, I bought a PC and a modem, learned HTML, and -- lo, this web site.

Raised in a God-fearing Presbyterian family, I participated in all the normal Sunday school and worship service programs of the church, including catechism class and confirmation. However, it apparently never dawned on me at the time that all this church-related activity was supposed to be more important in one's life than just "what nice families did" when they were not busy doing other things. Therefore, it was something of a revelation to me when I left home to attend college and one day found myself in a dorm room with a group of Christian fellows who were talking as if what the Bible said was "the most important thing in life" and praying as if they "really meant it".

This experience induced me to start reading through the New Testament with a heightened concern about my relationship with God. While reading, I soon realized that I would have to make my own personal commitment to God as the Forgiver of my sins and to Jesus as the Lord of my life. After making that commitment, everything "came into focus" and I had a direction in life, one that made a reality of the answer to the first question in the catechism I had learned as a child: