I was born and raised in southern Maryland, across the Potomac River ("Pot o' Muck River" we used to call it, though it's actually pretty clean these days) from Mount Vernon (where Geo. Washington occasionally lived, if you remember your Civics classes). Both my parents still live there. This is just south of Washington, DC; a couple of inches off the right edge of this picture.
I have a younger brother and sister (one each). Wayne lives in a suburb of Lansing, Michigan. He's into all sorts of folksy stuff, including handcrafting gorgeous mountain dulcimers (a 3- or 4-stringed musical instrument) when he can find workshop space. He's part of the volunteer staff at The Ten Pound Fiddle. What he actually does for paid employment has always been something of a mystery to me. Gail lives in Burtonsville, Maryland; near Silver Spring. She works for a NASA contractor at the Goddard Space Flight Center , managing software developers. Being six years younger than I, she's commented that by the time she became old enough to notice, I was out of our parent's house. E-mail has brought us closer together recently; it's an interesting (and welcome!) phenomenon to me.
The "R" in "Ralph R." stands for Robert. I like using the initial in my name. Actually, it's an affectation. (neat word, affectation). I had a favorite uncle who was in the Journalism field. Photo editor at the New York Times for a while, in fact. When he died (I was a teenager at the time) I adopted his signature ink color--green--and decided to use my middle initial all the time as he did. Chokes me up even now to write this. I seriously considered Photo Journalism as a career. Got a college scholarship, in fact. But decided instead to go to Carnegie Mellon University as a physics and math major because I was enthralled by their rooms full of timesharing computer terminals available to all students. (I had probably single-handedly spent the entire county's brand-new student computer timesharing budget in my high school fooling around.) Got distracted by computers and now look what trouble I'm in! <grin>
When I get a spare second or two I'll fill in some more stuff here.
I promise.
