What is one of your favorite holiday memories?

That would be opening Christmas presents when I was a child.  We grew up in a small house in the North Riverdale neighborhood in Dayton and the living room must have been all of maybe eight feet wide by twelve feet deep.  That tiny room was packed with couches, chairs, a TV, a stereo, a Christmas tree loaded with boxes, five kids, and two parents.  Somehow it worked.  

At first, we opened presents on Christmas morning, maybe got to play with them for what seemed all of ten or fifteen minutes, and then had to get dressed, go to Our Lady of Mercy for Christmas Mass, and then downtown for brunch.  We were going half crazy by the time we returned home and had time to play with our presents, but even that was short-lived as we packed back in the station wagon for our trip to Grandpa Otto’s house in Beavercreek for continued festivities.

It took a few years, but our parents finally realized they were packing too much into one day and decided to let us open our presents on Christmas Eve.  We were so excited!  A few hours to play before bedtime and our parents no longer had to fear us waking them up too early on Christmas morning, which, of course, we usually did.  That tradition, Christmas Eve for our family and Christmas Day for parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc., continued as I raised my family.  

So if The Ghost of Christmas Past would take me back to a childhood Christmas Eve, I would be reliving my favorite holiday memory.

What are you most thankful for?

 I believe people want the best for their children from the time they say “I just want them to be healthy” and count their fingers and toes immediately after they were born.  It takes time to move on to more important matters and the thousands and thousands of decisions, big and small, that are made as the most precious part of your life grows up.  I believe most parents knock themselves, too harshly at times, for making wrong decisions, missing some event, not saving enough, etc., believing if they were perfect that their children would be too.  I’m not perfect, my parents weren’t, you’re not and my children won’t be either. That’s the reality of life.  Stop worrying about just the here and now and make the best decisions you can to help guide your children to adulthood.  Parenting is a long-term effort and worth everything you put into it.

My children took very different paths as they entered adulthood.  My son entered the work world, has started a few businesses, worked two jobs at times, and busted his butt every day.  My daughter went to college, figured out how to afford her own apartment during school, and went on to the corporate world.  She’s worked every bit as hard.  She married in her twenties and my son, in his forties, appears to finally be ready to take the plunge.  He likes big and fast cars.  She drives a hybrid.  He eats meat,  She’s a vegetarian.  He lifts weights.  She runs marathons.  As different as they are, they share a father that’s very proud of them.  They were both up to all the challenges that life threw at them and they are good, responsible, happy, and successful people.

That’s what I’m most thankful for.  More than anyone can know.

What's a gift you always wished someone would give you?

Anything that they think I’ll like.

Ever since I was a kid I loved buying gifts that I thought a sibling, parent, child, or relative would really like.  I shied away from asking for a list of things they wanted, preferring to think about the person, what they like to do and what type of gift might be something that they would appreciate and perhaps never think of themselves.  My sister said when we were younger that I always bought the most thoughtful gifts.  That’s exactly what I was going for.  I love to see the surprise in their eyes.

To this day I collect ideas all year long for the next birthday or Christmas.  It might be an off-hand comment about something someone had seen or something I notice while browsing in a store.  I try to take notice of the activities they do and look for potential ideas.  I keep a list and add to it as soon as things pop up.  Waiting for last-minute inspiration is not my thing.  Too stressful.

I have a little list of ideas in case people ask.  But at this point in my life if I really want something I buy it for myself.  Getting old has that privilege.  

So surprise me!  That’s what I’m wishing for.

What were your friends like in college?

To say I was a serious student might be a bit of an understatement.  From 1974 to 1977, my days were filled with school, a part-time job (and once two jobs), and a girlfriend, leaving no time to hang out and sometimes nowhere near enough time for a good sleep.  When my girlfriend and I broke up around the same time I started working full-time at Wright State, during what would become a 3-year-long final year, my social group expanded a little bit. 

I moved into a two-bedroom townhouse apartment in Kettering with John Sloan, finally leaving the only home I knew on Ashwood Avenue in Dayton.  John and I met at Wright State in his office after my assembler program crashed the university’s mainframe computer.  My previous assembler programs used an interpreter called ASSIST (Assembler System for Student Instruction and Systems Teaching) which shielded the system from a variety of errors like mine, but for this project, I was using the real IBM assembler and had failed to save and restore the return memory addresses properly.  John showed me how to fix that, but not after I told him it was the IBM operating system’s fault that it crashed, not mine.  Really, how could it not protect itself from a student’s silly mistake?  IBM would later fix their bug.

I started working part-time at the university as a student maintenance programmer, having built enough of a reputation in COBOL to get me noticed.  That skill began as a between-semester challenge when my CS300 program would not work properly and I convinced the professor it was an error in WATBOL, the COBOL interpreter from the University of Waterloo in Canada.  I proposed to convert my program from WATBOL to full COBOL, and had to figure out how to compile, link, and execute it, and convert all the required WATBOL input and output files to standard COBOL.  This was not at all a trivial exercise and it took a wild week of learning and trial-and-error before I could turn in a successful execution of my program.  

Working for the university had perks, a desk in an office inside the I.T. department, and the use of an IBM 3270 terminal, replacing the use of punch cards.  I had a place to drop off books, study in peace, and learn from the professionals.  But it did keep me away from other students most of the time, limiting the number of friends I would make.  But it did lead to meeting and becoming lifelong friends with Jim Nicholas, who was their systems programmer and would hire me in 1977 as his sidekick.  Jim left for the Mead Corporation a couple of years later, where I would reconnect with him in 1981 to continue our journey together.

The only real group of people I hung out with was a subset of my peer computer science students that were into dancing.  The group took advantage of Wright State’s liberal arts college to take two classes of ballroom dance, one class of disco dancing, and hit the occasional dance club on a weekend.  I like to refer to ballroom dance as the most fun you can have with your clothes on.  Why this bunch of computer science students, usually referred to as introverts with no social skills, gravitated to dancing is still a mystery, but I cherish those times and their memories.

How is life different today compared to when you were a child?

It might take a book to describe all the things that are different now than fifty or more years ago.  The ones listed here are just those that jumped from my head first.  Almost everything today is better now, but I’ll start with the one that I am grateful to call my childhood.

My world was one of the stay-at-home moms, Dad home from work promptly at 5:30 pm, a small house for seven people, and what seemed to be a large backyard, at least big enough to play whiffle ball and climb its two trees.  Although not ours, most streets in the neighborhood had alleys to access garages, mount basketball hoops, and throw footballs and baseballs without the dangers of the open street.  That was particularly true on Ashwood Avenue in North Dayton, as our street was one of the few nearby that provided a cut-through alternative to the heavily traveled Siebenthaler Avenue from both Main Street and Riverside Drive.  It was not unusual to wander the neighborhood on bikes looking for adventure or make the two-mile trek to play three hours of Putt-Putt golf for sixty cents on an early Saturday morning, starting before my parents woke up.  I would ride three miles on my bike to and from baseball practice.  My parents would attend one game per year and I was grateful.  I played because I liked the games, not for attention.  None of the above is the norm these days. 

Cars were very different in the 1960s.  Seat belts were just starting to be mandatory equipment.  Not the lap-and-chest variety used today, just a skinny lap belt.  Most people hated them and refused to wear them.  Car batteries were a common maintenance item and you had to make sure they were filled to the proper level with distilled water.  Sealed batteries would come later.  Car tires went flat quite a bit, either from just losing air to nail punctures and frayed sidewalls.  Everyone knew to watch them closely and everyone knew how to fill them with air and how to mount a spare.  Travel was viewed as a bit of a gamble.  We hardly give it a second thought today.

I grew up with one small, black-and-white television in a corner of the living room.  As the number of younger siblings grew, the TV was moved into the fireplace, replacing the hearth and providing a better viewing angle to everyone.  My Dad was a master at replacing its tubes, taking them up to Victor's drug store, testing them out, buying the right replacement, and getting them plugged back in and the set running again.  I eventually bought myself a very small television for my bedroom with money I saved from my Dayton Daily News paper route.  Still black-and-white, but all to myself.  My parents didn’t have a color TV until the five of us kids pitched in and bought one for them.  I was probably about twenty-two years old when that happened.  That’s was about the same time I came to understand the Wizard of Oz reference to the “horse of a different color.”  That horse actually changed colors as it moved through the Emerald City.  We also only had three VHF channels, ABC, CBS, and NBC, we could tune into.  It would be a few years later before I was able to watch Star Trek.  Nowadays we stream HD content from hundreds of sources to screens as small as a few inches to massive 65” and larger flat screens.  

Smoking was a big thing back in my childhood and my parents lit up with the rest of them.  Most Sundays we would drive over to my grandfather Otto’s house in Beavercreek and the adults would be inside puffing away while my siblings and cousins played outside, even in the dead of winter.  As much as we tried to convince them how badly they smelled, they continued until my mother had to give it up for health reasons.  Then she understood what we knew for years, but even she couldn’t convince my Dad to stop.  A year or two after Mom passed he met Alice and after she said the cigarette smell was disgusting, he stopped cold turkey.  Smoking isn’t allowed almost anywhere inside today and not having people smoke on airplanes is particularly great.  Cigarettes are a habit I’m glad I never started.

Finally, needles are so much better today.  Going to the doctor’s office, for whether a childhood vaccine or a shot of penicillin when I was sick, the jab of yesteryear was pure pain.  So was getting novocaine at the dentist before getting a cavity filled.  The gripping fear of the coming pain was almost as bad as the shot itself.  But over the years the needles got smaller and the stab hurt less and less.  Now it’s almost not noticeable and the dread is gone.  I might be more grateful for this progress than any of the others.

 

Would you prefer to have an adventure, or read about one?

While there are a few adventures I would prefer to read about, for example, anything that triggers my selective fear of heights, having an adventure is far better.  How to get those adventures takes some thought, which I’ll demonstrate with a couple of examples.

My first trip to Europe is one type of adventure, one where you’re so completely thrown into a new environment that it’s overwhelming.  When Jeff and I landed in Paris we picked up our rental car, destined for our hotel.  We did a half-circle around the périphérique, exiting at the proper spot, landing on the streets of Paris without a clue where the street signs were located.  Using our map and counting intersections and roundabouts, we miraculously found the hotel.  After checking in we decided to walk to the Eiffel Tower, again figuring to use our obviously excellent map skills to locate.  After a few blocks, we noticed that the street signs are located on the sides of the buildings, about ten feet or so off the ground.  That discovered, we continued our journey to the tower and decided to buy a couple of bottles of water.  We ordered “deux eau”, or “two water”.  In rapid-fire French, the lady behind the counter replied with something like “gasse, non-gasse?”  At first I had no clue, but it only took a few seconds to deduce within the context of the situation that she was asking if we wanted sparkling or still water.  I replied “non-gasse”, Jeff held out some money so she could pick out what she needed, and we were on our way.  After a couple of days, I wanted nothing more than to fly back to my familiar, comfortable home.  On the third day, we were driven to Châteauroux, a city in south-central France, for a business meeting and towards the end, we were asked to help solve a computer problem involving a modem.  With the help of a translator, and probably a ton of good fortune, we were able to resolve the issue.  On the way back to Paris, my apprehension subsided and I was looking forward to the rest of the trip.  That’s good because the next day involved a meeting in Bristol, England and ended at a hotel bar in Vienna, Austria.  A longer story for another time.  Getting thrown into a totally unfamiliar environment and fighting your way through it will inevitably end in memorable adventures.

I learned a lesson about over-planning trips through what I first thought was an unfortunate event.  I was by myself in Napa Valley on a Friday day off and I had a list of wineries I wanted to visit.  But a network problem at work kept me on the phone all morning and by the time I was able to break free, more than half the day was shot.  Looking at my list, I decided I would first go to the ZD winery and taste their excellent chardonnays.  Having little time left, I needed to eliminate as much travel time as possible, so I asked the lady that poured the samples for a nearby recommendation.  I went to that unfamiliar winery, did a tasting, and asked for more recommendations.  This server pulled out a Napa map and began circling her choices.  She even called one of the wineries to see when they were going to close.  I followed one recommendation after another until the day was done then drove back to the hotel, reflecting on just how wonderful my day had unexpectedly become.  From that moment on, I don’t plan a trip, wine country or not, with a schedule that leaves no room for adventure.  Now a wine trip starts with what type of wine (e.g. merlot, champagne) we’re going to focus on, and each day starts with a scheduled, private tasting around 10:00 am in the direction we want to travel.  From there the rest just happens from tastings to lunch to dinner.  Leaving time for adventures was a lesson well-learned.

What are some of your favorite smells?

I like many aromas but some of the best are the ones that can only be truly appreciated when they are totally immersive, when every breath brings another wave and you’re compelled to breathe through your nose.  I played golf years ago in Florida on a course that doubled as an orange grove.  The sweet smell of fresh-squeezed oranges was everywhere.  Then on my first visit to the Hawaiian island of Maui, I walked out of the hotel room to be greeted with the smell of bananas and noticed the banana trees were planted all over.  Finally, we took the lavender tour at Matanzas Creek Winery in the Bennett Valley region of Sonoma.  The stroll through lavender fields was awesome and when we ended the tour at the drying barn’s open barrels of lavender seeds, the aroma was overpoweringly delightful.

Other smells are not in-and-of-themselves pleasing, however, they invoke a happy memory or perhaps just a feeling of a happy memory.  The smell of certain burning plastics brings back one of those happy feelings.  I seem to faintly recall a toy, sort of a boy’s version of an Easy-bake oven, that molded plastic into various shapes.  I have no memory of what I made or what I used it for, it’s just a feeling, but obviously a very good one.  Others I recall quite vividly.  I used to love to assemble model airplanes, meticulously gluing together dozens of parts.  The smell of that type of glue takes me back and makes me smile.

Perhaps an odd observation, but I find myself sniffing first when meeting people or turning the corner into a new room.  Scents travel and often are the first sense we can employ to gain a little recognizance ahead of an unfamiliar situation.  This might be a primal reflex, but I’m not an expert.  I’ve just caught myself over and over sniffing first and seeing, touching, or hearing later.  Maybe it’s just me, but it’s what I do.

Walking in the front door of the house and being greeted by waves of baking bread or a Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing dinner are awesome aromas.  Waking up to the fragrance of hot cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven. The first inhalations from a morning’s freshly brewed coffee.  

During COVID I lost my sense of smell for a few days.  Only when you’re missing something can you really appreciate how much you treasure it.  Coffee was just warm brown water, losing all of its appeals without its scent.  I hope that never happens again.

 

If you could thank anyone, who would you thank and why?

That would be a very long list of family, founding fathers, entrepreneurs, and managers that led me to where I am today.  From my German immigrant ancestors, the writers of the Constitution, computer hardware and software pioneers to those people that gave me a chance and trusted I would deliver.  But I give the nod to the question posed to Joseph Gayetty of New York and his 1857 introduction of a product I’m so thankful I don’t live without.

The 2020 pandemic caused panic buying of everything from cans of Spam to packets of yeast to lots of paper products.  It made everyone step back for a minute and decide what they could not live without.  While Spam is not considered by many, except myself and the entire state of Hawai’i, a delicacy, it’s shelf-stable for 3-5 years.  I wonder who has hundreds of cans they now regret buying.  Why yeast was gone is a mystery; it’s not like most people bake bread all that often.  Maybe the thought was you could make your own pizza dough and avoid contact with an infected delivery driver.   Paper products make sense, particularly toilet paper, for obvious reasons, and maybe tissues for blowing all the feared COVID snot from your nose.  Stocking up on paper towels, while I use them quite a bit, should have been a lower priority, but those were scarce also.  Maybe a poorer substitute for TP?  Trying to figure out how people think (or don’t) is not terribly useful in the grand scheme of life.

Back to Mr. Gayetty.  He is credited with introducing the aforementioned toilet paper to America.  You can read up on all the ways we cleansed ourselves before then, but none of them are in any way appealing.  Perhaps the best and most common dual-purpose idea was the Farmers’ Almanac, which for over one hundred years, was used for both reading and wiping.  Readers would punch holes in the corner of the publication so it could be hung next to the “throne”.  In 1919, the publishers began punching a hole in the upper-left-hand corner to help out.

Like many of the world’s greatest inventions, it took time to get it right.  Gayetty’s sheets would take thirty-three more years to become the now-familiar perforated rolls and another forty years after that before they were manufactured without any splinters.  Yikes!  

Thank you, Joseph Garrity, for the most indispensable product in my life. 

What have you changed your mind about over the years?

Swiss cheese.  That’s the first thing that came to mind.  When I was a kid, Swiss cheese smelled so bad I wouldn’t get close to it much less add it to my sandwich.  I avoided Swiss cheese until my thirties and only then due to an experience in Paris, France.  My co-worker Jeff and I were sitting out at a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées and he ordered us a plate of cheeses to go with our glasses of wine.  The cheese was fabulous and far “stinkier” than the Swiss of my youth.  I realized that my taste buds had changed, or perhaps weakened, over time, along with the rest of me, and I needed to revisit tastes, smells, sounds, etc. to see what else my older self now appreciated.  Getting older is the first key component of mind changing.

People.  Like most people I grew up in a sheltered environment, meaning people that were raised in similar economic, religious, and moral backgrounds.  Not having a greater perspective, I naturally thought most people were more or less like me.  While I think I had a great childhood, it didn’t prepare me for the greater world.  I have since learned, generally the hard way, that this absolutely not true.  There are some really bad and stupid people in this world.  There are reckless drivers weaving their way at one hundred miles per hour through four lanes of traffic.  There are people that seemingly have no control of their emotions or their actions.  At a recent petit jury selection, where about forty people were present, randomly selected from throughout our county, maybe one or two others dressed in anything that I thought was appropriate.   Most looked like they were pulled for a lineup.  I no longer just think someone will be anything like me.  I make no assumptions.  Getting experiences outside your little world changes your mind about things.  Lots of things.

Left-handed.  I grew up right-handed where the logical, left side of your brain is dominant.  But along the course of life, I began to perform some tasks left-handed.  It started quite logically.  If I could eat with a fork in my left hand, I could simultaneously use a knife with my right hand and avoid all that wasted switching time.  This reduced the time it took to eat and get excused from the table to resume playing or watching a TV show.  It takes a bit of practice to get that other hand to cooperate, but it’s really not that bad.  I became a switch-hitter in baseball and could shoot baskets with either hand.  I would throw a baseball to my daughter right-handed, but left-handed to my son. Sometime in mid-life, I decided to use my computer mouse with my left hand, really improving its fine motor skills.  For the most part, I tend to use whichever hand is closest or has a better angle.  I believe this constant drive to be ambidextrous fundamentally changed my mind, bringing out the right brain’s more creative side and achieving a better balance.  Perhaps this, more than the others, has literally “changed my mind”.

What is your definition of love?

Like many other powerful words in the English language, love has been used to describe those strong feelings you have about your football team, pair of jeans, or flavor of ice cream.  That description of “love” is better described as “I really like this one the most”.  But my definition treats it as a noun, not a verb, and is a real thing that lives deep inside you.

I believe love is formed when a person opens their heart to another and lets that person become a part of them.  Open long enough and carefully nurtured, that person becomes an internal part of you, as important, if not more, than yourself.  You want for them everything you want for yourself, safety, happiness, security, and more.  You will put yourself in danger so they’re not.  You’ll put their feelings ahead of yours.  They become a part of you.  When you lose them, it’s unbearable, at least for a while, because you’ve lost a part of yourself, not just them, and you miss that dearly.  

Are you more like your father or your mother? In what ways?

This is a really tough question.  I clearly look like an Otto, my mother’s side of the family, as does my sister and youngest brother.  I got my hairline from my grandfather Maurice Otto.  My Dad was six foot tall, had dark hair, and weighed a constant 150 pounds, none of which describes me at all.  My mother was about 5’2”, had blond/brunette hair, liked Manhattans, and was a frequent visitor to her chiropractor.  So while I’m 5’9”, the rest is a perfect fit.

My Dad was a pretty smart man, being an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Dayton.  I think I have similar smarts, at least those kinds of smarts.  My SAT scores for math and science were right at the top, calculus was my favorite college course, I dropped philosophy and couldn’t manage better than a “B” in English.  Computers and programming came easily, all that logical stuff fit neatly inside my brain.  

As I was raising kids I came to the realization that Dad primarily taught me to be responsible and my Mom taught me to be happy.  To me, being responsible is how you treat other people, and being happy is how you treat yourself.  They are not opposites but work together.  I don’t see how you can truly be happy if you treat others badly, but living your life solely for others without ever considering yourself is foolish.  That balance is who I think I’ve become.

By the slimmest of margins, I think I’m a bit more like my mother.  That probably wasn’t true in my 20s and 30s, but as I grew older, Mom’s wisdom was the guiding light I used to navigate all sorts of personal and professional challenges.  

Best of all, I had both of them.  And I miss them dearly, even after all these years.

 

What was your best boss like?

I’ve had the fortune of working for not only some very excellent bosses throughout my career but also the companies themselves.  The relatively few moments I spent in malfunctioning companies made me appreciate how building an organization that is morally rich is really hard but the benefits to its employees and customers are enormous.  You’re engaged, excited to start another day at work, and know you make a real difference.  These companies listen more than they talk, push decision-making down to the people that know best, and never push their responsibilities or blame on others.  My best bosses exemplified these attributes.  

Most of the CIOs I reported to did not have technical backgrounds but understood it well enough to make good decisions.  The CIOs that did understand Information Technology knew they weren’t the experts but recognized when the experts did not appreciate the bigger picture.  Their biggest value was knowing the right people throughout senior leadership, what was important to them, cultivating relationships, and understanding the politics.  This was critical as the 1980s and 1990s were filled with centralizing data centers, consolidating software, and combining staff to reduce costs.   Standardizing the technology enabled the organization to work together instead of being siloed.  Imagine a corporation with a dozen email systems, multiple domain names, and then trying to sync it all together.  Companies with good CIOs brought email and many other disparate technologies stacks together more quickly and they benefitted sooner.

The best bosses are easy to recognize.  They are the ones that you remain in contact with and look forward to the next time together.  Friends for life.

What is the longest project you have ever worked on?

Mead Corporation’s implementation of the SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system began in the year 2000 with a four-year timeline and a $125 million budget.  Mead had looked at ERP systems a couple of times earlier in the 1990s and decided then that the company wasn’t culturally ready for a single, process-oriented system like SAP.  But late in the 1990s, multiple divisions began requesting funds to implement their own ERPs, different ones, of course, and corporate had already purchased an ERP called PeopleSoft, so another look was taken and SAP was the ultimate decision.

The key focus of the project was change management, from executive management to division leadership to the employees that would transact in SAP every day.  Four years is not a long time to implement a $4 billion company and executives tend to lose their enthusiasm towards the end.  To jumpstart the project, a preconfigured SAP system was purchased from Monsanto, the chemical company, which was also in a continuous process manufacturing business.  Eighty percent of what Monsanto configured for “Source and Support” processes, for example, accounting, finance, and purchasing was adopted by Mead and led to the first implementation only nine months after the project launched.  That implementation was at the Coated Board division, selected because it produced paper, a critical proving ground to show that SAP would work in our core paper businesses, but also less risky than the larger and more complex white paper business.  After implementing Source & Support, the project would follow up a few months later with the “Order Management” processes, for example, accepting orders, manufacturing and shipping the products, and collecting money.  All this was supported by process training, local expert (“Super Users”) training, and finally just-in-time end-user training.  We were within a year of finishing the project when the MeadWestvaco merger occurred, extending the timeline a couple of years, but at that time I took on the newly-created Chief Technology Officer role, and while still involved, I was no longer officially on the project.

My role during the project was the SAP Technology Director, having the BASIS, ABAP, and Data teams reporting to me, and I reported to the Vice-President in charge of the SAP project with a dotted-line reporting relationship to the CIO, my previous manager.  The BASIS team was responsible for the installation and support of the core SAP software, the ABAP team wrote programs, interfaces, and reports for the team, and the Data team extracted, cleansed, and loaded data from legacy applications into SAP.  I worked a lot with the I.T. organization and to meet the project’s aggressive timeline we had to use what we knew best, IBM mainframes, the DB2 database management system (DBMS), and Windows servers.  The “usual” technology stack back then was an Oracle DBMS on large UNIX servers, but we had almost nobody on staff familiar with those, much less an expert.  To support the large DB2 virtual memory requirement for SAP, Mead bought three of the first 64-bit mainframes that IBM rolled off their production line, and while that was a somewhat risky move, we encountered only a few manageable issues.  We had to figure out how to manage an application with over 100,000 tables and indexes.  We had to move to an integrated, once-a-month, four-hour data center outage, perhaps the most difficult change management effort.  We had to create real-time, queued, and batch integration architectures and address locking and performance issues.  

It was a very energy-filled, fast-paced, and continually challenging project which resulted in lots of great memories and lasting relationships.  

 

What do you consider one of your greatest achievements in life?

Completing the 1985 Nationwide/Bank One Marathon in Columbus, Ohio stands above the rest.  While my time of three hours, fifty minutes, and 22 seconds is nowhere close to being great, it put me at 177th place in the group of 509 men in the 30-34 age group, almost to the top third in the field.  

The marathon is the only running event where I would stand at the starting line and wonder if I would complete the race today.  The question at the beginning of half-marathons or shorter races was how long would it take me to finish.  I attempted three marathons in my early thirties and only completed the 1985 start.  The other two I stopped around seventeen miles due to physical problems.  The first “failure” was due to improper running shorts causing a chafing issue.  The other one was knee pain that was bad enough to make me worry if continuing to run would cause permanent damage.  But in all three races, I was in great physical condition and had the super-low body-mass index of a marathoner.  But a marathon, as I learned the tough way, is just as much a test of mental toughness as it is being in shape.

The 1985 race was ideal for me.  The temperature began in the upper 60s and rose steadily to the upper 70s.  While most people would like it at least ten degrees cooler, I’ve always liked the warmer weather.  I think my muscles like being warm and staying loose.  The race started out in the usual fashion, the singing of the national anthem, the single gunshot, and waiting until the pack in front started to move.  First a walk, then a slow jog, and as the pack spread apart, into race pace.  Like me, the other middle-of-the-pack runners knew we needed to “take it easy” for the first half of the race, and on this day, that was a pace of around 7:15 per mile, which at the halfway mark I knew was a mistake and that’s when the mental toughness had to take over.  For the next seven miles, I had to run at a much-reduced pace, walk and drink a full cup of water at every opportunity.  When I hit the 17-mile mark and the course turned east away from downtown Columbus, I had to push through the desire to call it quits.  But at the 20-mile sign, when I realized that I had “only” 6.2 miles to go, the length of a 10K race, I knew I could make it and the doubts were lifted.  While I continued to run cautiously, noting multiple runners pulling up with leg cramps from dehydration, I didn’t walk the rest of the way.  Each mile crept by as I tried to run as smoothly as possible.  Finally, the finish line was in sight.  Unlike the shorter races, I had no final kick at the end.  More than just wanting not to cramp up, I was out of gas.  But as I crossed the finish line, and out of nowhere, I jumped as high as I could and pumped my fist in victory.  As I was suspended in the air, I realized that this was probably the dumbest thing I could have done and prayed that my legs wouldn’t buckle or a hamstring pop on landing.  As my feet made contact with the ground I felt muscles on the edge of failure, but they held.  I felt like I had run my entire life and this was the first time I ever stopped.  I also realized that “I did it” and that could never be taken away from me.  

This achievement took it all.  Many months of training, usually alone, with many runs of sixteen or more miles, in the cold of winter and the heat of summer.  Overcoming the doubts, pushing through the countless exhausting training runs, and getting back out there the next day to do it again.  That just gets you to the starting line.  The battle has just begun.  You have to give it everything, head to toe, to claim victory.  I did that once.  Can’t take it from me.

Do you have any notable ancestors?

To the world at large, none of my ancestors have done anything that I’m aware of that would be notable in any famous sense.  However, to me personally, a few stand out for their bravery, skills, and traits that ended up being very much a part of me and who I became.  

The two that were most impactful were my great-great-grandfather Franz Heinrich Moorman and my great-grandfather Eugene Adelbert Otto.  Both immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1800s and I admire that they, like many other European immigrants, decided to leave their parents, siblings, and homeland, most likely never to see them again, and make the dangerous 4,000+ mile trip to the United States.  People often say that I’m lucky to live in the United States, but the reality is that these two Germans are the reason I live here.  Their dream became my reality and the reason I speak English instead of German.

The majority of my Moorman side were farmers.  They settled and many continue to live in Mercer County cities such as Coldwater, Maria Stein, and St. Henry located about eighty miles north of Dayton.  I might have been a country boy if not for my grandfather Leo Albinus Moorman, who came to Dayton for a job working in the management dining room of John H. Patterson, the founder of NCR.  He moved just before the Great Flood of 1913 and my Uncle Ray recalls that he always talked about how NCR built boats to rescue people from the flood.  Sadly, the only memory I have of Grandpa Leo was as a five-year-old watching him laying on a bed in the living room of his west Dayton house on Lookout Avenue during the last months of his life.

When I was a little boy I had a passion for baking which my mother was very nice to let me explore.  What I would not find out until much later in life is that my Otto ancestors, back to the mid-1500s, were bakers, so perhaps I am genetically inclined to get out the flour from time to time.  Among the favorites I make are homemade pie dough, bread dough, pizza dough, and challah bread.  One of my cousins, Gene Otto, opened a bakery/coffee shop in Olympia, Washington, making our ancestor’s passion his everyday work.

One of the break-the-ice lines I use when starting a speech is “I’m the son of two actors, an engineer, and a cheerleader.  Obviously, both my parents were actors and that’s how they met, but if you think my Dad was the engineer and my mother the cheerleader, you’re wrong.  My Dad was both.”  My Dad was a cheerleader at The University of Dayton where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.  Mom was an accountant and aspiring actress.  They met at The Dayton Blackfriars’ Guild, married in 1950, and continued their acting passion for about another ten years, even including me for a potential part as a ring bearer in one of the plays.  It was many, many years later that I realized that they were the reason I like to talk in front of an audience.  I am an actor at heart.  Only my brother Martin took acting to the same level as our parents, performing in local theatre groups.  But our other brothers, Greg and Dave, don’t shy away from public speaking or performing.  It’s in our blood.

 

What is one of the most beautiful places you've ever been?

I’ve often said that the three most beautiful places are mountains, beaches, and golf courses, with the most beautiful place I’ve ever been capturing all three. The runner-ups, just the most notable of a very long list, include golfing at Pebble Beach, sailing in St. Marteen’s Great Bay, dinner at the Flagstaff restaurant in the mountains overlooking Boulder, Colorado at dusk, and standing at the highest point of the Alta ski resort, southeast of Salt Lake City, Utah, gazing at the slopes below. In each case, I had to pause, take in the scenery and commit it to memory. The place that takes the top spot is playing golf at the Wailea Golf Club on Maui. The course is built on the side of a mountain with majestic views of a deep blue Pacific Ocean. It boasts beautifully manicured fairways and greens and a layout that demands you concentrate fully to play a good round. I remember how hard it was to focus, the vistas compelling me to gaze upon them and ignore the golf. I don’t remember what my score ended up being, but the views will last forever.

What have been some of your life's greatest surprises?

My earliest memory of a great surprise was my grandfather Maurice Otto taking me to Arby’s on Salem Avenue.  There may have been my Mom or another sibling or two there, but all I remember was the gigantic Arby’s sign shaped like a cowboy hat and how amazingly delicious the roast beef sandwich tasted.  Not that my family ate out a lot or favored fast food, but I knew enough to be shocked at the taste.  It’s still my favorite fast food sandwich to this day.

My first trip to the Hawaiian island of Maui was full of the beautiful ocean and mountain scenery I was expecting, but the shocker was the awesome aromas of the resort.  I remember walking out of the hotel room the first morning and experiencing the fragrance of bananas wafting through the air.  Everywhere I went whatever tropical fruit trees were planted imparted their essences into the air.  Nowhere else I’ve ever been has matched that aromatic scenery. 

I walked into yet another Information Technology Leadership Team meeting in the summer of 2001 and I was the last one to join.  The buzz in the room was unusually busy and my colleagues began asking me what I thought.  “Thought of what?”, I replied.  “The merger, of course”, they explained, not really explaining anything.  I was the last one on the team to learn that Mead and Westvaco were merging and I was dumbfounded, my safe little world all of the sudden filled with questions and unknowns.  That began a crazy seventeen-year stretch of changing companies and managers that, in the end, worked out very well for me.  

The Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany was a bucket list item we knocked off the list in 2011.  We did the usual combination of a two-hour nap after arriving at the hotel after the overnight flight, followed by a walk, dinner, and back to bed for a long night’s sleep at 8 pm.  Waking up refreshed and settled into the GMT+2 hour time zone, we headed to the train station to take the short trip to Oktoberfest.  We knew we needed to exit at “Theresienwiese", but did not have further directions.  We just figured we follow the crowd, many dressed in traditional lederhosen or dirndl dresses, but as we exited the escalator we were shocked to see we were already inside Oktoberfest, the beer tents, rides, food vendors, and shops right in front of us.  It took a few minutes to soak it in before we set off exploring.

When I retired in August of 2018, the folks in the office gave me a nice send-off and I was focused on my life’s next journey, one not filled with alarm clocks and deadlines.  My wife scheduled a little retirement party a few weeks later and drove me blindfolded to the destination, which turned out to be Jimmy’s Ladder 11.  Maybe that should have tipped me off that something was going on, but when they walked me up to the second-floor party room, I was truly shocked, to the point of tears, to see so many of the people I worked with over the years there to greet me and wish me a happy retirement.

We hold an annual summer party, inviting around two dozen people for a late afternoon cookout, their favorite beverages, and conversation well into the darkness.  I was deep in conversation with friends during the 2021 party when my daughter Laurie and her husband Rodney, now residents of Charlotte, North Carolina, walked over to me.  I looked up, and while I certainly recognized them, my brain initially rejected what I was obviously seeing, seizing up for a couple of seconds before realizing they had made the seven-hour trip to surprise me.  And an absolutely wonderful surprise it was!

Has anyone ever rescued you, figuratively or literally?

I credit Dr. Zimmer, my long-time chiropractor, for rescuing me from severe pain, one of the two miracles in my life.  During a vacation in California, I threw my back out and spent an agonizing day laying in bed, barely able to roll over.  It was the day before returning home and the next morning things were no better and I realized I could never make it down the stairs, drive the car to the airport or tolerate a four-hour plane ride to Ohio.  As I laid there trying to figure out what to do, I thought about the position Dr. Zimmer sometimes puts me in while adjusting my back, that being laying on my side, bottom leg extended, the top of my foot on the other leg tucked up behind my knee, and turning my shoulders in the opposite direction.  This position forces my lower back to push forward.  I assumed that position and laid there for forty-five minutes.  Then I got up, all pain gone, carried two suitcases down the stairs, drove to the airport, and flew home.  Dr. Zimmer, plus some divine intervention, gets the credit for my California rescue.

The Department of Justice gets some credit, along with a pair of CIOs, for a substantial financial rescue late in my career.  I was on track to retire when I turned sixty-six and the house would be paid off.  But then Verso attempted to buy NewPage and become a much larger paper company.  The DOJ stepped in to evaluate their anti-trust concerns and this dragged the acquisition out for about a year.  Needing to retain talent, a few individuals, including myself, were offered a nice chunk of money to stay around.  Finally, the DOJ decided that NewPage/Verso would have to sell two paper mills before they approved the merger, and Catalyst Paper bought the Rumford, Maine and Biron, Wisconsin mills and was allowed to select people from the Dayton Head Office to staff the I.T., customer service, logistics, and other head office requirements.  I joined Catalyst Paper at that point and was given a nice signing bonus to make sure I stayed around a while.  Thanks to the DOJ for helping pay off the house early and allowing me to retire over three years early!

The only actual save-my-life rescue moment I know is through a story told to me later in life.  I was probably three or four years old when my parents walked me toward the deeper end of the pool at the Trotwood Aquatic Club.  They didn’t realize how short I was and before long I was completely submerged.  Someone, their identity I don’t recall, got my parent’s attention and they yanked me up and out of the water, allowing me to breathe again.  Some things in life should happen before you get old enough to remember, and I’m happy this is one of them.

What was an unusual compliment you once received, but really appreciated?

While I was working at NewPage Corporation in the Information Technology strategy role, Tom Anderson once told a small group of people, with myself included, that “For most people, we’re trying to get them to think outside the box, but for Paul, we’re trying to get him in the box.”  I guess that fulfills the “unusual” part of the question.  I’ve never heard anyone being described that way. 

For most of my career, I was tasked with creating or managing change.  A large part of that is getting people comfortable with that, whether providing the resources, motivation, or atmosphere to move an effort along.   The biggest part of the atmosphere aspect is reducing or eliminating the fear of failure.  A part of being “in the box” is that it’s a safe place, where you do what’s expected of you and not rock the boat.  It’s doing what you know and perhaps learn one or two new tricks, but nothing where the blame can come back on you when something inevitably goes wrong.  

I’ve completely changed how our network was designed, challenged deeply held “in the box” beliefs, was part of the team that went from day one to first SAP go-live in ten months, pushed Internet and mobile technologies, and made a one-a-month, four-hour SAP outage a reality.  I did this, obviously with the help of many talented people, by taking risks, seeking the true issues, and figuring out how to get people to understand, calm down, and begin moving.  Then getting out of their way.

I really appreciate Tom’s compliment.  It sums up how I approached work every day, being that guy who took risks, saw things differently, and enabled people to grow, enjoy their jobs, and make a difference.  

What are you really hard on yourself about?

I’m really hard on myself when I do something stupid.  Not any stupid, but the kind where I’ve told myself what to do or not to do and I go ahead and do the opposite.  For example, I’m doing some kind of task and it has become obvious I need to stop what I’m doing and regroup.  But no, I continue on until I start shouting at myself to stop, often several times, before my body listens to my mouth.  It’s that kind of stupid I can’t stand in myself.

Conversely, I’m generally not hard on myself for being wrong, unless that wrong is really stupid.  I’m notorious for poor navigational driving skills.  I turn on the wrong street often and even drive by my own house on occasion.  Being in Information Technology all my adult life, I’ve written many errors into programs, misconfigured hardware more often than I care to admit, and have had to take a whole different approach when a decision turned out to be poor.  I personally think admitting you are wrong is a strength, so much that I wrote on my office’s dry erase board “It’s good that I don’t mind being wrong, because I’m so good at it.”  It’s much easier to manage people when they see you as imperfect.  They don’t worry as much about being wrong at times. 

I’m also hard at times when others are stupid, for example, a football player that just needs to take a knee to seal a win, but instead tries to score another pointless touchdown and in the process fumbles the ball, the opposing team recovers and wins the game.  I just can’t stand losing because I, or others, haven’t thought about the current situation and planned out the proper response.  That’s what really steams me.

What famous or important people have you encountered in real life?

By far my biggest encounter was basketball legend Michael Jordan.  I had just finished a round of golf at the Wailea golf course on the Hawaiian island of Maui and was in the pro shop searching for a golf shirt to take home as a reminder of those beautiful 18 holes.  As I was browsing, all noise in the pro shop abruptly stopped as if everyone left at the same time.  As I looked up to see what was going on, Michael casually walked by and headed to the desk to get checked in for his round.  The place stayed quiet until Michael was out the door, then the noise returned, of course, louder than before.   

The second NBA encounter was Larry Bird, another legend, and this one occurred in an airport, Philadelphia probably, but not totally sure.  If you’re not familiar with Larry, he was a 6-foot, 8-inch forward with one of the best shooting touches ever.  When you see him on television he appears to be slim, at least in comparison to the other beefy goliaths trying to guard him near the basket.  Larry has a very distinctive face and when I saw him at the airport I knew it was him.  But what amazed me was how large he was, nothing like the skinny rail I expected.  Larry had wide shoulders, appeared fifty pounds heavier than I ever imagined, and was a real hunk of a man.

During one of our frequent trips to California with IBM, our group of five played Half Moon Bay, a golf course located along the Pacific ocean thirty miles south of San Francisco.  We had to break up into a threesome and a twosome as the course did not permit a group of five to play together.  I went out first in the threesome and my buddy Jim Nicholas went out second in the twosome.  A couple of holes later Jim circled back to me and said they had been paired up with another twosome, which included Jerry Rice, a Pro Football Hall of Famer, and the best wide receiver in NFL history, and a pretty decent golfer.  On the back nine, we noticed that this group behind us now numbered five.  A course ranger came up to us and asked if Jerry was in that group of five, which we told him he was, and they were allowed to continue.  I guess the rules that applied to Jerry were different.  As they played the 18th hole our group watched Jerry, now very comfortable playing with Jim, stand in the middle of the fairway, arms up like he was signaling a touchdown, telling Jim to hit his shot “through the goalposts”, laughing and smiling the entire time.   

What is one of the stupidest things you've ever done?

Not all stupid things end up having bad consequences, and very fortunately so in my case.  Back in my twenties, I had a Yamaha 400 motorcycle which I enjoyed immensely.  This was before drivers were distracted by their mobile phones and potholes seemed few and far between.  I was a very careful rider and was very good at anticipating danger, knowing that, regardless of fault, I would end up badly hurt or worse.

I rode my motorcycle to a family picnic one day, somewhere out in the country west of Dayton, if my memory serves correctly.  Rain moved in and I decided to ride home through it.  But there was so much water coming off the road that I decided to put my feet up on the handlebars to keep them somewhat drier.  So I’m flying down a country road at fifty miles per hour, tires hydroplaning and I’ve raised my center of gravity and given up some amount of control.  It took a few minutes to piece all this together and reverse this stupid decision.  

But I was smart enough to stop riding motorcycles after my daughter was born, realizing a whole lot more than myself was on the line at that point.

Who are your favorite artists? What makes their work so compelling to you?

My favorite print, photographed by Gary Crandall, is an image of a male mallard duck floating on water.  I bought this years ago from a store in Park City, Utah during one of several skiing trips I took to the Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons southwest of Salt Lake City.  I had been searching for a lone duck print for years and when I spotted Crandell’s work, I immediately went to a store clerk and said I wanted it, without bothering to ask how much it cost.  I didn’t care, I was going to buy it no matter what.  The most compelling feature of this duck picture is the gently falling snow landing on the duck and surrounding water, adding to the story that a duck, as I’ve often thought of myself, is someone that is calm on the outside while paddling like crazy below the surface.

My second favorite print, photographed by David Whitten, is a bright white picture of aspen trees standing in several feet of winter snow.  It reminds me of the several snowmobile excursions I’ve taken in the mountains around Park City, usually on an off day between skiing Alta, Brighton, Snowbird, Solitude, or other northern Utah slopes.  A typical snowmobile trip took a couple of hours, a combination of high-speed races across large meadows and guided, single-file forays dodging aspens and other high-altitude species.  Those peaceful moments cruising through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world had me on the lookout for a print to bring back those memories, and when I found Whitten’s aspens, also in a Park City shop, I knew I found the perfect memory.

I’ve read a lot in my life, particularly in my younger days, and science fiction was always my favorite genre.  Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Scott Adams, and David Eddings were among my favorite authors, with my first choice being Raymond Feist.  I’ve read about twenty-four of Feist’s books, including The Riftwar Saga, The Empire Trilogy and The Serpentwar Saga series, and more.  All author’s ability to write books containing hundreds of pages of deep storylines and interesting characters amazes me, knowing how hard it is to write just a few pages before getting stuck.  My all-time favorite book, and the only one I’ve kept for decades to re-read, is The Number Of The Beast by Robert Heinlein.

I was fortunate to have grown up during the best decade of music, the 1970s.  Picking a favorite group or individual is tough, but I’ll choose Chicago.  There were few groups that were truly unique and Chicago, with their eleven members including Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, and Walter Parazaider on trumpet, trombone, and saxophone respectively, and one of the best voices ever, Peter Cetera, playing bass.  Having any horn instrument represented is rare, but having three in a rock band is remarkable and if you get to see Chicago in concert, you’ll be amazed at the energy they still bring.  

There are only a few athletes that I would put in the category of being an artist, but those that compel you to watch them time and again are special.  Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins is one of them, playing a hard-nosed game with incredible eye-hand coordination that’s beautiful to watch.  Pro golfer Pill Mickelson also comes to mind as he’s a master at the short game with an unbelievable imagination, making impossible shots look easy.  But my all-time favorite is ice skater Peggy Fleming, the 1968 Olympic ice skating champion.  I really respect those people that were first, changing the course of a sport or an industry, and like Star Wars and Jaws did in the movies.  Peggy’s beauty, style, and perfection would be copied by skaters for decades, and yes, improved upon, but she started it all, at least in the mind of this 12-year-old boy staring at his parent’s black-and-white TV screen.

You came of age during the Vietnam War. Share some of your impressions of the war from your teenage/young adulthood. Did you, your parents, or your siblings have strong opinions about the war and/or the draft?

The biggest concern I had was with the draft, as you might expect for teenagers at the time.  The actual reason for the “war” (not really, the U.S. never declared war) and why it was needed didn’t really concern me, I was focused on high school, getting ready for college, working, and camping.  Nobody I knew cared, at least not until 1969 when the first draft lottery took place.  

My older brother, then seventeen years old, would face the draft in 1970 and while he probably would avoid the draft using a college deferment, it wasn’t a sure thing.  For the next couple of years, we would listen to the news as they selected the birthdates that would be chosen first, hoping for a high number and dreading getting a low number.  As I recall my brother was fortunate to have pretty high numbers, and we shared a sigh of relief each time.

I turned eighteen in October 1973, nine months after the draft ended in January.  I never had to nervously sit and wait for October 8th to be called.  

When the draft started a whole lot more people paid attention, demonstrations became heated and more people wanted to understand why our country was involved in a conflict halfway around the world with no end in sight.  The draft was probably the biggest reason, in my opinion, that we eventually called it quits in 1973.  The all-volunteer soldiers that powered the military from 1964 through 1969 were one thing, but being forced to fight was another, and people needed a really good reason to do that, which clearly wasn’t there.

The other lasting memory was the disrespect shown to soldiers as they returned home.  Today you hear “thanks for your service” all the time, but in the 1970s all you heard was contempt and disdain.  I remember how mean people were, releasing their anger on these young men who were following orders, not the politicians and senior military staff who gave those orders.  Cowards berating soldiers.  That’s pretty low.

Are you an extrovert or an introvert?

I think the actual question is how much time does one spend being extroverted versus introverted, as everyone is some of both.  According to my last Myers-Briggs personality profile, many years ago, I’m fifty-two percent extroverted and forty-eight percent introverted.  That made perfect sense to me as sometimes I need to interact with people and other times I just want to be left alone.  I know that if I’m scheduled to present to an audience for a few hours, I need to schedule some alone time afterward.  The reverse is also true.  If I spend a morning alone in the office working heads down, by the afternoon I’ll be wandering the halls looking for someone to talk to.  As long as I maintain a balance I’m good, but too much of either will cause me to feel tired and uneasy.

My complete Myers-Briggs profile is ENTJ, having Extraverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Judging attributes.  The direct opposite, ISTP, is characterized as Introverted, Observant, Feeling, and Prospecting. There are fourteen other combinations and all sixteen have their unique set of strengths and weaknesses.  For ENTJs, we’re efficient, logical, efficient, and ambitious, and they make natural leaders.  Pretty spot on, in my opinion.

But the way I like to describe myself is a combination of “others-future”, meaning my first evaluation of a situation is how it will play out and affect others in the future.  While I will eventually consider how it will affect me and how it will affect myself and others in the short term, that’s not my major concern.  While something might seem good right now, for example, feeding the ducks at a neighborhood pond, the longer-term effects on the animals becoming dependent on humans to get fed override the enjoyment of the flock swimming over and enjoying some bread crumbs.  

What do you like most about each of your siblings?

 My only older sibling, by about three and a half years, Greg could have easily ignored me but instead included me when I’m sure others would not.  My second-floor bedroom, in an unairconditioned house, was pretty warm in the summer, so I asked Greg if I could move down to the basement with him, and he agreed.  The other major inclusion Greg allowed was to go camping with him and his friends at their Bus, which they bought and parked along the Stillwater River west of Troy, Ohio.  A little leary at first, the group accepted me and found that having someone to drive them into town for more beer Saturday night was very useful. 

My sister Mary Rose was the only girl and just fifteen months younger than myself, so it was natural for us to grow up playing together and I remain closer to her than my other siblings.  Like our mother, Mary Rose is very sweet, kind, and giving of herself.  At one point when I suddenly needed a place to live, she opened her home to me and let me work through my situation.  Mary Rose is the thoughtful one, always the one to host family get-togethers and never forgetting to call and wish us a Happy Birthday or a Merry Christmas.  

Martin is the musician and actor of the family.  All the boys seem to have inherited our parent's desire to perform, and while all of us like getting up in front of an audience to teach or perform, Martin has taken it way further than the rest of us.  Our parents met at the Dayton Blackfriars Guild where they both acted on stage, and like our parents, he’s active in a theater group in Tucson, Arizona.  Martin, like Greg, is a lefty, and also plays guitar right-handed and jams far better than Greg or me.  

David is the youngest, two years younger than Martin, so they also grew up together, but unlike the nice brother/sister relationship I had with Mary Rose, Martin and David were quite often at odds with each other and argued quite a bit.  He’s the real programmer between us, so while I performed smaller efforts, David has delivered and supported very large and complex programs, including external websites.  

What is the most valuable thing you learned from being a parent?

I think I paid closer attention to my children than anyone else ever, in fact, I’ve told many people that the key to parenting is exactly that, paying attention.  When you know what’s going on and you know your children, the rest isn’t rocket science.  What that taught me that’s so valuable is how very different people are from each other and how they change over time.  My son and daughter are very different people, wonderful in their own unique ways, with their own set of challenges, skills, and preferences.  Maybe I should have known that’s how people are, but I never paid close enough attention to notice until it was my job to be a parent.

I began really listening to people in order to find out how they viewed the world, their work, and their ideas of fun and happiness.  Not at just one point frozen in time, but how they changed as they grew older and wiser.  It was particularly useful at work and as I got a deeper understanding of each person, I developed a sense for what they were not saying, leading eventually to being able to “read a room”, fill in the gaps, and help calm nerves.  In some of the very large and critical projects, that saved as much time as it did wear and tear on people’s nervous systems.

Children move from phase to phase as they grow up, which is good because just about the time you were sick and tired of their current behavior, they change and go on to the next one.  Each phase requires something different as a parent, sometimes cracking down, other times cheering on, but you need to always be listening and thinking for new ways to help.  You also learn what’s important and what’s not.  The importance usually involves really permanent, poor choices.  But most bad choices are temporary in nature, just bumps, not cuts.  Let them take their bruises and deal with the consequences.  Dealing with little problems while they’re little teaches them to deal with the bigger ones that surely await. 

The last thing to share is one of my favorite sayings, “No is a complete sentence.”  As a parent, I really don’t have to explain why all the time.  Life is full of choices, but whether you’re going to take out the trash isn’t one of them and I’m not going to argue about it.  When I just say “No” you may not like it, but I’m not going to change my mind or elaborate.  Perhaps giving you the chance to figure out why I said “No” is a good exercise, because life is full of telling yourself “No”. 

There is nobody on Earth that loves and cares more about their children than their parents.  If you think your parents are tough, just wait for life in the real world.  No one wants you to be happier, successful, loved, and safe than your parents.

Did you work while you were in college?

 I had at least one job the entire time I was in college, paid for all my own tuition and books, and took out only $1,200 in student loans.  I lived at home and my parents furnished me with room and board and paid for my car insurance.  Everything else, like a date pizza or a movie, was on me.  Between school and work, I had little time for anything else.

I began college still working at the Sherer’s Ice Cream store on North Main street, which matched the busier summer ice cream season with having that time off from school, allowing me to work a lot of hours and bank money to help out during the school year.  It also allowed me to really focus on school since I had been at Sherer’s for a couple of years and everything was routine.  

About a year into college my friend John Sloan made me aware of a weekend, third-shift computer operator job in the Third National Bank data center where he worked.  It was really appealing to get a job in my field of computer science, and while leaving Sherer’s was sad, I knew it was the right choice.  Their IBM mainframe ran the DOS/VS operating system instead of Wright State’s MFT, and the exposure to a different system was valuable.  There’s not much to do on Saturday and Sunday nights, so I could do some homework or toss a frisbee with the guard.  I did get to run the check sorter and I was amazed how fast the machine could read the MICR codes and the mainframe process them.  

I picked up a second part-time job at Wright State’s administrative computer center as a maintenance programmer and for one quarter I worked both jobs, which along with a full course load, a girlfriend, and almost no sleep between Sunday afternoon and Monday night, was more than I could take.  I decided I had to quit the Fifth National Bank job, but before I could I was fired.  It's a long story, but it taught me how serious banks are, which later in life would seem obvious.  

The student programmer job came with an office and a terminal, two valuable resources.  I could leave my books in my office and take only what I needed to class.  Instead of using the IBM 029 card punch machines, I would type my programs directly into the computer, a huge time saver that was also more accurate, run them ahead of normal student’s jobs and view the output online.  

I spent a year or so fixing existing programs before getting the assignment of writing their first online student admission system.  I developed four 10,000+ line COBOL programs using the IMS DB/DC database and data communication framework, debugged it, and rolled it out.  This was a real-world project, I did it as a student, and it really gave me a lot of confidence.  But my career interests were leaning in a more highly technical direction where “the real action” was happening.  

As a student programmer, I met Jim Nicholas, their Senior Systems Programmer.  Jim hired me as his assistant and I learned from the best.  I did have to cut back my senior year classes to two per quarter, but it was worth extending my degree to get this type of opportunity.  Jim and I worked together at Wright State for a couple of years before he accepted a systems programming job at The Mead Corporation.  I then became the senior guy at the ripe young age of 24.  I hired Steve Silver as my assistance and completed the in-process IBM/SVS to IBM/MVS operating system upgrade.  

I left my Wright State job in June of 1980, just two months shy of completing my undergrad, for a systems programming job at Hobart Corporation in Troy, Ohio, for more money and to leave the political world of academia for the business world.   But I would only be at Hobart for eight months before Jim made me aware of an opening at Mead, which I applied for and accepted, reuniting Jim and me for another twenty-five-year stretch and a lifelong friendship.

Are you good at crafts or building things? What's something you've made and are proud of?

Since I’ve mainly been an I.T. guy, building things is sort of what we do, which I’ll demonstrate in a bit.  But for actual physical objects, there are two that come to mind.  First is a baby blanket I crocheted for my daughter.  No fancy stitching, just the basic one, and I used a multi-colored yarn to make it look interesting.  I spent hours and hours at night looping and pulling yarn and I’m quite proud of the result.  The second thing is the recent basement remodel, replacing almost everything including ceiling tiles, doors, and paneling, replacing the old shag carpeting with vinyl flooring, and applying a fresh coat of paint.  This was by far the biggest home project I’ve ever tackled, I learned a lot, and in the end, it’s a hell of an upgrade.  I also know my limits; I don’t tackle plumbing or major electrical projects.  Basically, anything that can ruin my house if done wrong I leave to the professionals.  But with YouTube videos as a resource, I take on many more tasks than I used to.

I mentioned in response to a previous question that I wrote a new online admission system for Wright State University, and while those were by far the largest programs I’ve created, four other creations contain fond memories.  First, and as part of the admission system effort, I wrote an online screen generator for IBM’s BMS (Basic Mapping Support).  Instead of coding punch cards to describe a screen with field positions, lengths, validations, colors, etc., my program was visual.  The programmer would bring up my blank screen and enter field names and labels where they wanted them to be, then attach the other attributes to them.  Using the card approach, a single change to one field’s length may require dozens of changes to other fields to keep the screen nicely aligned.  With my program that could be done in a few keystrokes.  Nothing like it existed anywhere at the time and IBM came in to take a look at what I had done, interested in possibly buying it.  While that never came about, I was pretty stoked that they had been interested.

Also while working at WSU, I wrote an assembler/VTAM program for the staff that types various input from the university’s departments onto punch cards.  My primary purpose was to learn how VTAM programming worked, but also demonstrate to the staff how we could speed up data input and perform some field validation to avoid much of the input that had to be corrected from being typed incorrectly in the first place.  This was not a really big effort, but the payback came during my interview with The Mead Corporation.  The Manager of Technical Services, Shafter Pierce, asked me if I knew anything about VTAM programming in Assembler, as they needed to add VTAM support to their homegrown Fast Response online system, which only worked with TCAM, a similar but different communications frontend.  I answered, to his dismay, that I did and explained what I had created at WSU.  He probably thought that it was more likely that I was lying to get the job, but the in-depth answer I gave him left him no choice but to acknowledge I really knew how to program that.  In my first year at Mead, I was given the task to add VTAM to Fast Response, which I did, the hardest part was figuring out exactly where in the millions of lines of Fast Response code to add my stuff.  This is one of the biggest examples of something I did just because I wanted to learn something but then turned out to be really valuable in a future project.  Seems to happen to me a lot.

My last programming example is the creation of three digital filing apps for the last two companies I worked for, Catalyst Paper and ND Paper.  Damage Claims, Customer Service, and Accounts Payable all maintained many onsite filing cabinets, and a lot of offsite storage, for the many business documents they used to process orders, payments, and claims, but also needed to be kept for legal records retention requirements, generally seven years.  Damage Claims was the first, and like the others that followed, the need for a digital solution was driven by running out of filing space, which would have caused more office space and filing cabinets to be acquired at considerable expense.  After meeting with them, I quickly determined that everything they received, forms, photos, etc., was already coming in electronically, most through email and their attachments, but also from SAP, their ERP system, websites, and a few others.  I put together a proof-of-concept demo system using Google App Script, which I had never used before, and rewrote it in Microsoft Powershell to make it more maintainable.  After I retired, the Customer Service and Accounts Payable teams received permission to bring me in as a consultant and write similar systems for their needs.  All these efforts resulted in the avoidance of more filing space and in some cases reduced the number of existing cabinets they needed,  These systems also made document sharing easy and one of their favorite features, responding to the constant requests from internal auditors for documents, turned a typical request from a few hours to a few minutes.  But by far the biggest feature, and certainly well-timed, was the ability to work from home as easily as being in the office.  That wasn’t seen as a big benefit, more a nice-to-have, but then the COVID-19 lockdowns required everyone to work at home for over a year.  Without these systems, they say they don’t know how they could have done their jobs.  

Finally, the most boundary-pushing project I took on was for a graduate-level Operations Research class.  We had learned about linear and integer programming and how they could be used to find the absolute best solution to many business problems.  For one class assignment, we had to find a suitable problem, gather data and build an optimizing model.  At that time I was managing the Network Services group at Mead and they were acquiring the Zellerbach distribution business to add to their Mead Merchants business unit.  Zellerbach had 30 offices, including about 5 regional hubs.  My data group’s task was to install networking circuits to all the offices with a second circuit into the hubs to provide redundancy.  We created our parameters including a maximum of four drops per line and a maximum of 50% line utilization, which we based on sales volume compared to the existing Merchants locations.  We turned over our requirements to AT&T to design the most cost-effective solution, but then I realized that maybe I could use this for my college project.  After a week of contemplation, I figured this would make a great project.  I had to write two PL/1 programs to generate every combination of cities that fit the restrictions, which generated a 30-row, 20,000+-column integer program for our mainframe-based linear programming software.  I used distances between cities from our mainframe MileMaker software as a substitute for line cost.  The model was configured to find the shortest total distance that met all the requirements.   I submitted it to run at night and woke up the next morning with it still executing.  I figured out at the program was spending most of its time swapping pages of memory to and from disk, a result of this being a huge matrix to solve.  But as a systems programmer, I knew how to keep the swap dataset in memory, made that change, and submitted it again, and saw that it fixed the problem.  It took several iterations to get a final network solution, and some of those tries demonstrated how close I was to bumping up against the maximum model I could solve.  I turned my solution over to AT&T to price and compare it against their world-class INOS network design tool’s solution.  My design beat theirs by $100 per month.  Not a lot, but a win!  I packaged up all the documentation for the assignment, about an inch thick, and submitted it as required at the final exam.  The professor was looking at the various assignments turned in while we took the exam, usually spending 30 seconds to a minute on them.  When he came to mine, he read for 5 minutes, got up from behind his desk, walked around the room, still reading, and walked out the door down the hallway, returning several minutes later.  I figured he was impressed and I would get a good grade, which I did, an A+.  

What is the best job you've ever had? What made it such a good experience?

In the early 1990s, I was promoted to Mead Corporation’s Manager of Network Services, part of an organizational realignment as personal computers had become a predominant technology.  I had global responsibility for the corporation’s voice and data networks and quite a large budget.  There were about a dozen people on the team and we were living through some of the biggest technology changes ever including the Internet, local-area-networks, and mobile phones.  In addition to all the new stuff, we had to maintain the legacy technologies including coax-connected mainframes, multi-point AT&T wide-area networks, and voicemail systems.  While there was a lot of new technology to absorb, I enjoyed the bigger challenges of getting the group to embrace new ways to approach their work.   A few examples, really smaller in scale, demonstrate the type of challenges that made this my all-time favorite job.

Our CIO gave us the assignment of correcting, and then owning, the company’s pocket phone directory which had been published very poorly by the previous ownership group.  We quickly figured out where the disconnects were and republished the directory, but for the next year’s version, I was determined to fix a lot of other issues with it.  I was very insistent that we would publish the best directory ever and the team changed almost everything about it.  Instead of printing it on glossy paper, they used a matte that was easy to write on without smearing.  Instead of a hard, glued binder, they made it spiral-bound, making it easy to lie flat.  Instead of portrait orientation, they made it landscape, much easier to fit names, titles, and phone numbers on a single line.  Those were three of the bigger changes, but there were many others.  When it came time to publish, I insisted, several times, to get the entire Network Services team together for a couple of hours, eat some pizza, and try to find errors.  The first error was found on the first page, a mistake on one of our Board of Directors, shocking the project lead.  After two hours we had made it through only half of the directory, found at least one hundred errors, and had to schedule another two hours to complete the review.  I knew that our group because we interacted with so many people in so many locations, had a more broad knowledge of the organization than anyone, and would find lots of mistakes.  It was a great team-building exercise on top of putting out the best-ever directory.  

Another voice team story occurred during a PBX replacement project.  Since the last replacement, we had built up a large closet full of handsets, mostly those that did not have a display on them or were unique in one fashion or another.  I was determined not to have that happen on my watch.  I told the group that we would only offer two phones, both being beige and having a display, the only difference was a larger one for inside sales, administrative assistants, or others that needed lots of buttons.  They thought I was crazy, that I didn’t understand that the executives had a lot of preferences, and having only two selections was going to bring their wrath down on them.  But after we held an open house so everyone could see the phones and make their selection, they found that no one cared.  Everyone was fine with only two choices, even the executives.  They really had more important things to do.

As part of Corporate Information Resources embracing the challenges of the PC/LAN future, somebody would have to pick up responsibility for shared printers, and with every other manager clearly not wanting it and its history of problems, I volunteered Network Services.  I figured this would be a fun challenge and our group had the distinct advantage of being able to monitor and capture all the data flying back and forth to the printers, giving us plenty of information to get to the root cause of most problems and implement fixes.  We quickly upped the amount of RAM on the printers based on our insights, and that resolved the largest number of issues.  But we also tackled the human side, the biggest one being that nobody could walk up to a printer and know how to print to it.  So for every printer, we attached a clear plastic pouch to its front, then inserted a printed label that contained the printer name, model, and other information the typical end-user would need to know.  Sometimes just listening and doing the simple things based on those insights makes people trust you.  And that goes a long way.

There are so many other stories, trips to IBM’s networking center in Raleigh to tackle some big network design challenges and trips to Europe to install networks that involved long and intense days to accomplish.  We endured several extra-long return trips to the U.S., heading to California or Utah for a conference or meeting, making for some very long and tiring days.

Lots of work, loads of fun.  Funny how those go together.

What is one of the most expensive things that you've ever bought for yourself?

There really are not all that many things that I would consider expensive that I’ve bought solely for myself; most of those I’ve either shared with someone or bought for someone else.  But I think the purchase that best answers the question was my 1997 Pontiac Firebird.  It was just the base model with a 200 horsepower V-6 engine, 5-speed manual transmission and silver paint job.  I bought it from the now-closed Rodgers Pontiac on South Main Street in Dayton, Ohio, and the test drive was memorable, at least for the salesman.  We took it out and I headed over to I-75 to feel how it handled on the highway.  But instead of gunning the engine as the salesman expected, I just smoothly merged and went a few miles at the speed limit.  I really just wanted to test the car for comfort, but I guess most forty-year-old men looking at buying a sports car are having a midlife crisis and want to feel the power.  That wasn’t me.  I found the Firebird’s seats to be extremely comfortable and that sold me.  

The best feature of the car was its t-top roof.  You released a latch on each side, removed each half and stored them in the trunk.  It made the car look and feel like a convertible and I got quite a few “cool car” comments.  One of my favorite Friday summertime habits was cutting a cigar at work around 3:00 pm.  After gnawing on it for a couple hours, I’d leave work, light up as soon as I left the building and walked to the Firebird.  I’d put the t-tops in the trunk and enjoy a nice ride in the country, puffing all the way home.  

While most cars I bought were shared in one fashion or another, only I drove the Firebird.  Not because I was selfish, but no one else knew how to drive a stick.  That made it exclusively mine, and it remains the favorite car I’ve ever had.  

Thinking back, what do you admire most about your mother?

My mother grew up in a family with three sisters, two older and one younger, and a brother four years her senior.  She lost her Mom when she was just twenty-four years old, still three years away from marrying my Dad.  They would have four boys and one girl over a ten-year period, which included two miscarriages.  She was an accountant and an aspiring actress and gave up both to raise her family.  Being way more familiar with being around girls, I imagine raising four boys was so very different and I’m glad she had at least my sister as a female companion.  She passed away a few months after my two youngest brothers graduated college and Dad retired from General Motors.  We had Christmas in 1985 together, never imagining it would be our last, and she slipped into a coma before New Year's Eve.  We stayed with her in the hospital and she never woke up.  Late on Sunday, January 5th we left, needing to get ready for work on Monday.  It was so like Mom not to want to be a bother to anyone.  She waited until she was alone to pass away.  People told me that she had an express lane to heaven, that’s how nice and sweet she was.  I couldn’t agree more.  I lost my Dad on July 25, 1989, just three and a half years later.  Not many people lose both of their parents by the time they’re thirty-three years old, and I envy those children that have their parents to talk to way later in life. 

Later, as I became a father and like many others look to their parent's voices, living or deceased, for guidance, I reflected on what my parents taught me.  It’s almost impossible to recall specific events over three decades, but after I pondered for a while, I boiled all their parenting into two themes.  My father taught me to be responsible, to keep promises, respect others and understand the consequences of my actions.  My mother, and to answer the question posed, taught me to be happy.  Not specifically the how’s or what’s, but that I had to consider that my choices could not always be selfless, that some of the things I did had to be what I wanted and that I had to find the right balance in life that would make me both happy and responsible.  My parents never specifically said it this way, but that’s what they did and why I admire them so much.  Their own sense of values and morality was worth far more than any expert’s book.

Being responsible is the collection of actions that guide your choices when it comes to dealing with others.  Being happy is the collection of actions that guide your choices when it comes to dealing with yourself.  Taken together they form the twin goalposts for my life.  So while their time on earth was relatively short, and I miss them dearly, I was so very fortunate that they were my parents.

Tell me about your college graduation. Did you attend? What do you remember about the setting, the people, and the experience?

I graduated from college, Summa Cum Laude, at the end of the Summer quarter of 1980, or six years after my start in September of 1974.  I did not attend the graduation ceremony for a number of reasons.  

First, I really don’t like graduations or other similar celebrations.  I had to attend my high school graduation for the sake of my parents but skipped the party afterward in favor of going to the “Bus” campsite.  School was not where most of my social interaction occurred and I never developed an affinity to high school.  It was simply, for the most part, a place to get an education.  Running track was the only sport I played and even as people may view it as a team sport, it’s really a group of unrelated events, except a few relays, so if a couple of other teammates also ran my event, the two-mile, we only saw each other at the beginning and end of the race.  

High school was also complicated by the 1973 merger of my all-male Chaminade and the all-female Julienne, replacing the laid-back culture of Chaminade with the confusing and frustrating regiment brought by the nuns of Julienne.  While they might, or might not, have a good understanding of teaching girls, they failed miserably at relating to boys and our more aggressive nature.  To say my senior year at Chaminade-Julienne was rough is an understatement and I couldn’t wait to get out of there.  Giving the nuns the satisfaction of my presence at the post-party was not going to happen.

Second, attending a college commencement after six-plus years meant that I would know absolutely no one, as the class that started alongside me in 1974 had either graduated or quit long before 1980.  Large graduations always occur after the Spring quarter, and a Fall ceremony would have far fewer graduates.  Getting a diploma in front of a small and unfamiliar group made no sense.  I was happy to just receive it in the mail.

Finally, by the time I graduated I had been working full-time for over three years, first at Wright State University and then Hobart Corporation.  I had been married for over a year, had a wonderful, brand-new darling daughter, and was fighting a court battle to get my wife’s son from her parents.  Yes, that’s as weird as it sounds.  So graduation for most is an ending of school and a beginning of a job search and it’s a good time to reflect on the past and imagine the future.  Since I was already well past all that, what was the point of spending some money for a cap and gown, pretending to be excited about an event that held no real meaning for me?

What's a small decision you made that ended up having a big impact on your life?

I joined The Mead Corporation in 1981 as they expanded their Technical Services group.  My role for the first year-plus was mainly being a backup as all the major areas had senior people already in place.  That made me more easily available for other assignments and perhaps that helped as this story unfolds.  

John Langenbahn had just become CIO and in 1982 he and the executive management decided to merge the Cincinnati data center, which housed three board-focused divisions, into the Dayton data center, instead of buying them a new million-dollar mainframe.  The project was announced on a Friday in Dayton with a follow-up meeting scheduled for the following Friday in Cincinnati.

After the first meeting I mentioned to somebody that it would be cool to lead the project, so my small decision was to speak up.  But being the new kid, and all of 27 years old, I never thought anything would actually come of it.  The following week as we converged in Cincinnati, one of the managers congratulated me as they had heard I was going to be leading the project.  I told them that I hadn't heard that, but I was gung-ho to do it.  During the first part of the meeting, I was announced as the leader.  I have no idea why my boss or his boss didn’t tell me, or even ask me, prior to the meeting.  Over the next three months and working crazy numbers of hours, we successfully moved the three divisions, one per weekend, to Dayton with minimal issues.  

A few weeks after the project was finished I and my right-hand guy on the project were called up to the CIO’s office.  We were sweating bullets as we rode the elevator to the 25th floor along with our boss and his boss, wondering why the CIO wanted to see us.  Had we screwed up something and were going to get our asses chewed off?  We were relieved to find out that he just wanted to thank us and give us a spot bonus of a couple of thousand dollars, a big deal back then.  I think we were happier that we just weren’t in trouble. 

I believe that leading such an important project was the initial catapult to the rest of my career.  Shortly after I was promoted to Section Manager, later to Network Services Manager, then ERP Director and Chief Technology Officer when Mead and Westvaco merged.  Without this opportunity, I might have just stayed a happy technologist, never entering the ranks of leadership. 

Maybe because I just decided to open my mouth, not realizing that the right person took me seriously, did my career take off.  

Tell me about your introduction to golf - what inspired you to try it, when and where did you learn, and who taught you?

I started playing golf when I was about thirteen years old. I bought myself a few golf clubs and one of my Dayton Daily newspaper route customers took me to Kitty Hawk Golf Course to get me started.  I really liked playing sports of all types, so in some ways, this was just another one to try, but it was watching Jack Nicklaus playing on TV that provided the real spark. Jack was the longest hitter on tour, but his ability to hit long irons was especially exciting.  Probably because I wanted to “be like Jack”, I’m pretty good at hitting a 3-iron, unlike most men my age that have four or five woods in their bag to avoid the longer irons.  Two of my original clubs were Jack Nicklaus signatures, including the wedge I still use, having had it re-shafted and regripped numerous times.  Not many people have a fifty-three-year-old club in their bag.

Most of what I learned about golf came from those TV broadcasts and the rest by playing lots of rounds over the years.  There are a lot of rules to golf from who hits first to where you can and can’t ground your club to different types of hazards.  You also learn that searching for your ball next to a pond in Florida can lead to an unexpected encounter with an alligator.  Fortunately, the gator was not looking to eat at that moment.

I taught myself the mechanics of the swing from where I wanted to place the ball in my stance based on the club I was using and how I wanted to hit a shot.  Being the analytical type, I figured out that the golf ball doesn’t know that I want to hit a low ball or that it knows I’m keeping my elbow tucked in.  The golf ball only responds to the clubhead and as it’s striking the ball it has a direction, velocity, and acceleration along all three axes, and a spot on the clubface where it contacts the ball.  Knowing how to manipulate those ten variables teaches you what you need to hit a high fade or low ball into a wind, not that actually doing those things is easy, but it’s better trying to convince your golf ball verbally.  Learning to hit shots from a sand trap took a while, mainly because Kitty Hawk had bunkers filled with heavy and packed brown sand, and the only way to hit the ball was chipping it.  When I started playing courses with light and fluffy sand, chipping failed miserably. I learned on TV that the proper sand shot did not involve hitting the ball, instead, you hit the sand and the sand propels the ball up and forward.  You enter the sand two inches behind the ball and make a full golf swing, adjusting how hard you swing to get the distance you need.  I now refer to green-side bunkers as “my happy place”, I’m that confident that I’ll put the ball somewhere near the hole.

I’ve been fortunate to play a number of gorgeous golf courses including Pinehurst, the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, Wailea in Maui, Firestone in Akron, Bay Hill, TPC Sawgrass, and Innisbrook in Florida, and Valhalla in Kentucky.  But playing Pebble Beach stands out as my favorite with its epic views of the Pacific Ocean trying to distract you from focusing on your next shot.  I get to relive that experience yearly when the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am is broadcast, remembering the good shots, the ones that ended up over a cliff, and the birdie I made at the par-5 fifteenth.