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Wanted to go into astronomy, but left my physics major halfway thru senior year. Schrodinger Equations. Sigh. Took an extra year and graduated in Art History, mostly ancient. First took my dream job - Adler Planetarium. Even checked out on the Zeiss for the main auditorium, but they wouldn’t let a woman speak then because her voice wouldn’t be authoratative in the dark. Besides, they caught me the day after the election. I’d been a Chicago Republican election judge holding down a Democratic patronage job. Amazing how fast they figured it out.

Ended up in the U of Chicago comp center - operating systems. The head left and our group left as a whole. Ended up at National Cash Register for a year in LA, still OS. Then married one of the group and followed him to NY where he worked for IBM Research. He really needed his PhD, so we went to Boston so he could go to MIT. Actually, by that time, he had a competing data flow language to his advisor.

He had to go back to NY, but I couldn’t bear to leave the Boston area so I ended up working for a small company in Fresh Pond that did language design (basically Harvard school of language design). Poor husband commuted to NY. My group ended up in the DoD-I contest and came in 2nd. Better language. My books were getting good reactions. Made govt standard for excellence and so on. Exciting times. I was a consultant to Time/Life on their Programming Languages book. Went to another company for a while after we lost. Not as exciting.

Eventually husband couldn’t handle the stress of commuting, so I hired into IBM Research, too, so that we could commute together. Had to get a NY apt but went back every week. By then, I headed our professional society in programming language and was running conferences and had started 1 magazine.

I joined the Lisp group and started another magazine, as the IBM arrangement gave 1/4 of my time to professional activities. A few years in I was getting bored and stopped the head of Research telling him I gave my video hobbies everything and him what I had to. Could he change that. He did and gave me an international multimedia magazine. Had NO idea what that was, but what the heck. Husband came over at night and dragged 1” broadcast machines into a closet for my first videos. I had to have great posture working off the consoles - no edit controller - or the camera would get me in my back.

Eventually they let him come over from the other building and he built a half million dollar studio around my project. I did the NY, CA and Switzerland videos. Tokyo sent me theirs. It was absolutely wild. I could do basically anything I wanted and learn anything I wanted. So I hired a steadicam op for the John Cocke shoot, went to a digital studio in CA for one of the videos. Wrote a white paper at the NAB and SMPTE conventions on non-linear editors and got an invite to various places in Hollywood. It was all learning and high and fun.

Then my project was over and I consulted to all the research projects on how to be sexy by adding video to your project. That wasn’t as much fun. Took early retirement and started making computer videos for BBN and MIT using the edit controller my husband finally wrote. And used some of the early retirement money to learn how to write movie scripts and had a couple repped by John Grisham’s NYC book agent, who subbed them out to Writers & Artists in Hollywood for 2 years. They didn’t sell, but it was such a wild time.

Now I spend my research efforts working with academics to prove 5th great grandfather wrote Night Before Christmas. Still wild and still high, and still having fun.