The long cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.

My brother Jim and I spent many wonderful summers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin owned by Mom’s cousins and as members of our local Boy Scout troop.

Following my junior year in high school I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber a young language teacher from Roosevelt.

Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota then Oxford College in Minnesota and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.

We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.