25¢ Piano Lessons

Neither of my parents went to high school. They came from poor farm families in rural Missouri. At age 15, as the oldest male, my dad became the family breadwinner for his widowed mother with nine children; he moved to Kansas to work as a muleskinner, sending all earnings to his mom. My mom was a maid and cook in St. Louis. I was the middle of their three sons. After World War II, when I started elementary school, Dad was earning minimum wage and Mom was a housewife. But I managed to earn B.S., M.Sc. and PhD degrees and become a national technology leader in the mapping sciences, with two 30-year careers, all while raising two daughters and serving as caregiver for my schizophrenic wife for her last 46 years – then, at age 82, “finding my Jewel” and my new purpose for living.As an Army officer, I managed the covert mapping of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. I authored the geospatial-intelligence portion of new Army doctrine called Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB), widely used to this day. I developed the new military occupational specialties and equipment required to support IPB at Army corps, division and brigade levels; and I led the U.S. Army Engineer Topographic Laboratories (ETL) that won Army R&D Organization of the Year in 1991 for support of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq and Kuwait.As Associate Vice President for Dewberry, and Senior Program Manager for Geospatial and Technology Services, I championed a “3D Nation” with topographic and bathymetric lidar; managed the official surveys of Denali and the mapping of Alaska for the first time to national mapping standards; published three books on Digital Elevation Models (DEMs); won major awards for photogrammetry, radar and lidar achievements; and was honored to be named the “father of lidar.”I was able to go to college and achieve all these things only because my parents spent 25¢ per week for me to take piano lessons in elementary school when they really couldn’t afford to do so. Here is my true story! Read more