From: "JD Eveland" To: bond AT stsci.edu Subject: B-CC 60 retro update Hi Howard! I hope that you have at least some vague recall of who I might be...I got a call from Steve Johnson recently regarding assorted high school classmates, and I believe that he mentioned your name as one of some folk who had regathered the tribe on some recent occasion...His call led to googling the school, and thence to the Class of 1960 website, and further thence to your name and address appended to the tag end of the list as a contact...and thus all around the circle back to who I might be and why I might be composing a more or less unending run-on sentence that would have appalled Miss Casey no end. Anyway, I thought that this might be a reasonable vehicle for electronic reconnection. To aid the process, I'm attaching a couple of recent pictures, one my sort of formalish office pic and the other a rather more informal shot taken during a recent power outage. Like all of us, I may have aged a bit, although most parts still function with reasonable quality most of the time. I suppose that a brief 50-year recap might be in order. Let's see: Reed BA history 1964, UPitts MPA 1967, USDHEW in DC 1968-72, UMichigan PhD organizational behavior 1976, EasternMichiganU AsstProf business 1975-79, USNSF in DC 1979-85 program manager innovation studies, California relocation research consultancy1985-89, Los Angeles 1989-95 Claremont Graduate University AssocProf psychology, CalSchoolProfPsych 1995-2000 Prof OrgPsych, 2001-date TUI University Prof business/info systems Which, as you may have noted, is (with only a small degree of fudging) exactly 50 words, one per year. Of course, it does omit a few small personal details, such as marriage, divorce, and an incredibly wonderful daughter now 29 and an MD. Oh, and it turned out along the way that I actually happened to be gay, which may or may not turn out to be any great surprise to anyone (though, oddly, it was to me). I'm healthy, reasonably content with life, strictly non-monagamous as a matter of principle, possess a quaintly comforting theology that I made up myself in a drug-induced hallucination (relax, I don't proselytize), seldom drool at the dinner table, some years ago won $5000 on Win Ben Stein's Money (if that means anything to anyone back on the Right Coast), can't imagine living anywhere but here up in the Los Angeles hills (by now you have undoubtedly concluded that I am more than a few marbles short of a tournament win, but it's true) even if I do have to commute to my school down in Orange County (behind the orange curtain, as we Angelinos say), drive a red Toyota pickup truck (you are what you drive, as we also say), continue the ongoing remodel of my house along with a couple of resident friends (it's the seventh house I've redone over the years, going back to Michigan days), and spend my copious free time communing with the eight computers on my home network (about right for three people, wouldn't you say?), contemplating my retirement fund (the tin cup with the pencils is rather fetching, but the shopping cart probably will need a new set of wheels before I move all my gear into it full-time), and composing run-on sentences that by now you have undoubtedly concluded will never end. OK, all right to relax and breathe again now. My current (and hopefully final) university is a rather interesting all-online institution, TUI University ("Touro University International", until we were recently sold off to a venture capital partnership for a cool $200 million dollars, none of which happened to trickle down to the faculty). Though we're not bricks-and-mortar, we are actually a fully WASC-accredited institution (the only all-online school to be so accredited) with among other things a high-quality PhD program in business and organizational behavior. It's been a fascinating way to wind down my extremely oddly assorted career and set of interests -- everything I ever did between 1960 and 2000 has turned out to be relevant and necessary to the part I've played in its evolution over its seven years. I was the third faculty member hired there, soon after being rather unceremoniously fired from the California School of Professional Psychology Los Angeles (I was Program Director for Organizational Psychology, and made the bad mistake of telling the students the truth about a series of ludicrously horrible reorganizational manipulations being carried out by the school's president and dean). There's no question that they have been seven dog years, with an entire career packed into them alone. I have survived, as I have always done in any professional position (and most personal situations), by being generally entertaining, able to write competent and often engaging (if run-on) prose, if not omnicompetent at least a reasonable utility infielder able to take on just about any strange organizational task that presents itself and pull the occasionally impressive rabbit out of the hat, and managing to be the absolutely only person around able to do certain things just often enough for them to (mostly) tolerate my total lack of respect for the rules and wanton pushing of the organizational envelope. As I say, it's been fun. I gave up travel some time back, so the chances of my emerging from a plane in the DC area are more or less equivalent to those of my being elected to Congress as a Libertarian (of which party I happen to be a registered member). However, if any of you fine folk ever happen to be in the Greater Los Angeles area (a rather more probable if not inevitable situation) please drop me an digital or analog jingle and we'll see what can be done to renew acquaintances. All things recur, as Marx said, one as tragedy, then as farce -- although there were few great tragedies in our high school years (though it of course seemed so at the time), I think that we're still entitled to at least a few recurrent jollies before trotting off to the Ethical Suicide Parlor. Well, in any event thanks for the chance (or at least license) to put together this mini-memoir in all its run-on and strained-metaphorish and bizarrely associational glory. I would be happy to hear from anyone from the crew, and please feel free to share any or all (or none) of this with anyone who might be interested or mildly amused and post whatever portion you wish to the online archives. My life (at least the part reviewed here) is an open book (or at least a PG-13 rated website), and for what it's worth, I deliver it over to all of my friends from lo those many aeons ago! My very warmest wishes and best regards to you all, and keep your stories going! (A point related to the theology I mentioned earlier, but I have to leave something mysteriously open-ended. don't I...?) Thanks! JD Eveland -- "I sent my soul into the invisible, Some letter of that after life to spell. And by and by my soul returned to me And answered, I myself am heaven and hell." Omar Khayyam 323.224.0473 cell 323.868.3148