It's hard to know what the truth is; these may be the facts.

I am my parents' third child, preceded by a brother and a sister and followed by a brother and a sister. I was born in Saginaw, Michigan and attended schools in Jackson, Oscoda, and Chesaning before the family moved to Tennessee. My first teacher in Tennessee thought I talked funny and tried to get me to adopt a Tennessee accent, but the home influence was strong enough that that didn't happen. One of the remarkable events in grammar school was the reaction of the teachers after my IQ was tested-- they wouldn't reveal the results but it was clear that I am unusual. I was much a loner through high school, although I was president of the science club and active in the theatrical group, as well as being a library assistant. I took four years of Latin but couldn't fit French in. And I continued the reading habit I inherited from my Mother, a habit which used to consume an inordinate amount of time (before I became active on the Internet).

When I graduated from high school the Second World War was raging. Circumstances dictated that I begin a scientific curiculum at the University of Tennessee, but the manpower situation was such that I was drafted anyway. I have often been fortunate, and one of the strokes of luck was catching pneumonia during basic training; I had to be held back to go through the training again because I hadn't completed it. After the war I learned that that first group I had been in was thrown into the Battle of the Bulge and suffered eighty percent casualties. I was finally shipped over to Germany in January of 1945. When we arrived at Le Havre we were put into French "forty men or eight horses" boxcars and shipped to the border of Germany. We were at the replacement depot only a few days; we could hear artillery explosions and see light flashes in the nighttime sky-- that is the closest I came to combat. I was assigned to a line infantry regiment which had just been pulled off the front lines for a rest period. My luck again perhaps.

At first most of my time was spent on guard duty, although there were a few idyllic weeks in Schlangenbad, until the regiment was dissolved and I was absorbed into a line company of the Third Division. I was in Hersfeld, pulling more guard duty for rather a while, where there are impressive ruins of a tenth or elventh century church, old city walls, friendly people. After I was transferred to division headquarters I was stationed in Bad Wildungen, where I was a librarian in the division library. It was there that when I asked our German secretary Rosemary how long two people had to know each other before they used the word "du" she answered, "Man muss erst ein Peck Salz essen!"

While I was in Germany I would have liked to visit the village from which a great-grandfather (a Prussian named Friedrich Block) emigrated to Canada, Ravenstein (twenty or thirty kilometers east of Stargard and now, I believe, in Poland). That was in the Russian zone of occupied Germany then, so I couldn't. I did have a vacation trip through Switzerland to Rome, with a side trip to Pompeii, which I had hoped one day to visit. At some point several of us were pulled into division headquarters to see whether the army couldn't make use of our potential; as the truck went through the town where the brass stayed I noticed a "Division Library" sign, so asked the interviewer whether they need a librarian. It turned out that one of the librarians was due to go home, so I had a nice job for the remainder of my stay in Germany.

I decided after my return to the United States and civilian life that, since the government was paying and since I now decided that archaeology was my field, I should go to Johns Hopkins, where David Moore Robinson was renowned. The class for that fall was already filled; a place was held for me the next year but when I arrived in Baltimore I found that Robinson had retired! Well, I thought I was committed, so I stayed there and received a bachelor's and master's in classical languages.

Then the money from the government ran out, and it turned out impossible to find a job related to my degrees. Eventually I gave up trying and fell back on my chemistry, taking a job in an industrial laboratory, first in East Chicago and then transfered to Toledo. I was saving money all the time, and eventually felt I had enough, so I applied to and was accepted at Columbia, where Professor Dinsmore was holding forth.

After my first year at Columbia, Dinsmore retired. I was left with the dismal prospect of getting a PhD under a man who shall remain nameless; the situation was imposible. I took what money I had left and spent a year in Italy, poking around the ruins in Pompeii, Herculanium, Ostia, photographing, reading in the libraries in Rome (mainly the American Academy and the Vatican), living in an almost exclusively Italian environment. That's one way to learn a language.

Click here for an excursus on my interest in Napoleonic medals.