Warren Hilliard

Applied to Northeastern U. Waited too long for the inevitable rejection notice, given my academic record at Ken. It seems the College Entrance Exam Board sent my results to the wrong school; when Northeastern got my scores I was told I may have been accepted despite my record, but would now have to wait and try again next year. I joined the Air Force, planned to do 4 years, get some training, and maybe be more ready for some serious college work at a later date.
About the time the 4 years was coming to an end I drew an assignment to Japan. If I wanted to go there I'd have to reenlist. I did.
I wound up spending something over 23 years in various states and countries and in various jobs, all of them involving electronics and communications. During that time I had been in Airborne Radar maintenace, Encrypted Teletype, Data, and Voice systems, and finally Satellite Communication earth terminal maintenance.
While stationed in Thailand for the third time, I succombed to the charms of my children's mother.
It didn't last, but we still see each other.
I retired from the USAF at Onizuka AFB, CA, near San Francisco in 1983

Needing some sort of civilian job, I sent out about a dozen resumes to Silicon Valley companies. I was hired as a Senior Electronic Tech at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which is run by Stanford U. for the U.S., originally for the AEC, and now the DOE.
The SLAC was originally funded by President Eisenhower as a scientific facility which could provide about ten years research into sub-atomic particle physics.
Every few years, they'd come up with a new program 'which could provide about. . . '
When I retired from Stanford in 2003, it was as an Associate Engineer.
When I started there, they had just begun work on constructing the SLAC Collider, which ran for several years. Then they built the Assymetric B-Particle 'factory' (we were worried for a while that that might get built at Cornell instead of SLAC). Now that I've left the new thing is the Linac Coherent Light Source, 'which could provide. . ."
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/