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Ronald A. Duff Home Page

Me and my grandkids, Jeremy, 4 years and Daniel, 6 months.

Thank you for visiting my home page. Especially those of you who found this page as a result of vacationing at My Litchfield Beach Condo which is located at Litchfield Beach and Golf Resort. I don't know if you went there for the golf, the tennis or just to be on the beach, but I think you will have to agree that Litchfield By The Sea is a beautiful place to be. If you have visited there please bookmark this page and return periodically and I will try to develop a separate page on which to place any news of the resort, or that area in general, which may be of interest to you. If you have visited Bridgewater 526 then you probably recognize my 4 year old grandson, Jeremy. Now I have another grandson, Daniel, who was born on July 13, 1998. Again, thank you for stopping by and thanks for vacationing at Bridgewater 526.

CLICK HERE, to take a picture tour of Litchfield By The Sea.

I was born in Bluefield, West Virginia, a long time ago. When I was born my dad was recently returned from World War II and we lived with his parents in the train station in Maybeury, West Virginia, where my Grandaddy was the station master. Maybeury is a small coal mining town in McDowell County, in the heart of what was then some very busy coal fields. When I was 7 years old we moved to Charleston, West Virginia, where my father worked for the State Employment Service.

I now live in Muskegon, Michigan, where I work in a hospital, as a perfusionist. I know by now that you are probably asking, "What the heck is a perfusionist?" Well, a perfusionist is the person who operates the heart-lung machine and other life support equipment during Open Heart Surgery. We also operate other types of life support systems as needed but our primary duties are in the heart surgery area. Perfusion has always interested me, ever since I was 12 years old and saw my first Open Heart Surgery on television. All I ever wanted to do after that was to run those machine I saw on TV. Six years later I went to work in an area hospital in Charleston, West Virginia, the city in which I grew up. I worked in the clinical laboratory and one of my duties was to go into the Open Heart Surgery Suite and draw blood for testing. Not long after that I began my training as a perfusionist. To learn more about perfusion you can visit the American Society of Extra-Corporeal Technology web site or search perfusion on LYCOS, YAHOO or ALTA VISTA or your favorite search engine.

After working at Charleston Area Medical Center for many years I moved to Muskegon, Michigan, to assist Dr. Steven Demos in establishing the Open Heart Surgery Program at Mercy Hospital, and later re-named, Mercy General Health Partners. You may visit Dr. Demos' surgical practice web site by clicking HERE or on the Muskegon Surgical Associates link below. The picture of Dr. Demos was taken when he was much younger and is not a picture of one of his four sons.

I am extremely interested in my family genealogy and have traced several lines back to the 1600's. One day I will place some of this on another page in case there are other Duff genealogists out there who find this site. I'll give you a hint. My Duff lineage begins in Ireland and emigrates to Southwestern Virginia in about 1780. More to follow at a later date.

One of the things which I enjoy most is to go to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where I have a beautiful, two bedroom, oceanfront condominium, that I mentioned above. This is located about 20 miles south of the Myrtle Beach airport. It is in a large, (4500 acres) private, gated community called Litchfield By The Sea. The resort is known as Litchfield Beach and Golf Resort and it has it all.

When I was going to college my summer job was working as a telephone operator, for GTE, in Myrtle Beach. That was what I did for two summers and it was a great job. There were about 5 or 6 guys and about 250 females. I worked from 5:30pm until 2:00am. The hours were perfect for me as it allowed me all day on the beach. What a great tan I had. Every day all I did was walk on the beach and look for shark's teeth. After two summers I had collected about a quart jar full. My roommate one summer, Jim Lester, was a dental student friend from school and when we got back to WVU, West Virginia University, we tried to drill holes in the teeth in order to make necklaces. The problem was that they were 40,000,000 years old and were fossilized. In this condition when the heat, which resulted from the old fashioned dental drill, was applied to the tooth it shattered and became shark's tooth dust. We ruined most of the big ones that way. I still have a small jar full but most have been given away over the years. One of my favorite places to find shark's teeth was at Litchfield Beach. Back then there was very little there for miles. I remember thinking at the time how neat it would be to have a place on that very beach and now, all these years later, I do. For a cyber visit to Myrtle Beach just CLICK HERE or on the link below.