People are always asking me where I'm from. And I always tell them that it's a long story. I'll try to keep this version brief.
I was born in Denton, Texas, and when I was only six months old we all packed up to move to Japan. Dad was a fresh Air Force officer, which made me an Air Force brat. I was just old enough to figure out a little about where I was when we moved back to the States. I was three and a half, it was 1967, and we were at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. A year later my dad got out of the Air Force and we moved to Monticello, Arkansas, a small town in the southeast part of the state. Even though Monticello hosted a small university, it was not the most open-minded town I've ever lived in. My dad worked as advertising manager for the local paper, my mom taught school, and my brother and I did our best to fit in while growing up.
When I was almost 13, we started a series of moves that eventually led to my dad's managing a newspaper in Yazoo City, Mississippi. I lived a year each in Baton Rouge and Jennings, Louisiana, and Dunedin, Florida. I spent my junior and senior years of high school in Yazoo City, which turned out to be a great little town. I really liked the folks I went to school with, and I got enough honors and awards that by the time I graduated, I was, well, just a teeny bit overconfident.
I went to college at Northwestern (near Chicago), where they quickly taught me some humility. I got my degree in 1985 and moved to the University of Wyoming in Laramie for my graduate work.
I earned my Ph.D. in 1992, and began the life of a science mercenary, with stops at what was once the Air Force Geophysics Lab. (AFGL) in Boston, where I worked for Steve Price (twice), NASA Ames Research Center in the San Francisco Bay Area, Australia, where I worked as an NSF International Research Fellow, Virginia Tech, where my wife finished her Ph.D. We settled down in Ithaca, New York and raised a family, and then we moved to North Carolina. So, where am I from? I'm a Southerner, more or less, even if I've lived in Upstate New York longer than any other single place in my life.
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Last modified 4 November, 2019. © Gregory C. Sloan.