Short JHSilver Bio for EHS Alum Site I was born in Enid, OK on February 9, 1939 at about 2:30PM on a Thursday. However, being very small at the time, I don’t remember very much about that day or the first year or so. But, there are some vague memories of when I was about two or maybe three. Anyway, most of my early memories take place not in Enid, but in Columbus, OH, where my family spent most of WW II. My dad worked for Failings and was liaison with the Army Corps of Engineers. One of the things my brothers and I like to do, that you couldn’t do in Enid, was walk two blocks to the Columbus Army Depot and watch the German prisoners on the other side of the fence. After the war, we returned to Enid where I remained until high school graduation. And since many who might read this were part of my experience from grade 1 to grade 12, no need to go into details. In fact, in the interest of keeping this short than the reader’s attention span, I will only mention a few episodes from the last 60 years… Just one week after graduation, I was off to Marine boot camp in San Diego, which was a different experience for an 18-year-old, and, especially for a relatively undisciplined 18-year-old. As it turned out, I had many interesting experiences as a Marine including time in Southeast Asia where some guys in black pajamas had a bad habit of shooting at us… Anyway, after leaving the Marines, I returned to OK, eventually got my math degree from OU and settled down to working in the real world. Over the years, I was fortunate enough to have a number of interesting jobs. Here are some in no particular order. These included working for the National Sever Storms Lab in Norman where I was somewhat involved in helping build the world’s first doppler weather RADAR, providing computer programming support for weather research, and building circuits for the proto-type of what eventually became the rainbow weather RADAR that you now see on every TV weather report. One of the more interesting jobs was working for North American Rockwell in Anaheim, CA, where I ran a test and development lab for the Minuteman III ICBM guidance system. This was very interesting and very classified. Mostly, over the decades, I worked on large mainframe computers. This included working for IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, and consulting for the State of California in Sacramento. After retiring from IBM and Intel, I retired for the third time in 2010. This time I stayed retired, and in 2015 my wife and I moved from Sacramento to Santa Rosa, CA to be near our grandchildren. Mostly, I spend a lot of my time reading and writing, with an occasional round of golf. Currently, I am working on my second book, and my first book is out there on Amazon and few other places. On a more personal and emotional level, I have to say that the 60 years since high school graduation went way too fast, but overall it has been a good life, and like many, if not most, sometimes tempered by tragedy, but always blessed.
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