Deane W. Merrill - personal autobiography

My adult life centered around Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California. While a graduate student in the research group of Nobel Prize winner Luis Alvarez, I experienced the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and I played opposite Stacy Keach in a campus production of Sean O'Casey's <em>Purple Dust</em>. A review saying that I was "almost as good as Stacy Keach" was the pinnacle of my short-lived dramatic career.


Next, three years at the Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires de Saclay, near Paris, where my daughter Eleanore was born. With scientists from ten countries, I enjoyed two-hour lunches which were dominated by discussions of Vietnam - "Can't the stupid Americans learn from the French?" I agreed. My French improved quickly. The French had their own Free Speech Movement in May 1968. I would have stayed in France except that DeGaulle had a tantrum and cut off financial aid to visiting American scientists.


Next, three years at the Enrico Fermi Institute in Chicago. My wife preferred Paris. With my daughter, she returned to Europe, eventually remarried and settled in Utrecht, Netherlands. In Chicago, I met some singers and for a while followed in their footsteps, singing professionally in the Chicago Symphony Chorus. My friends went on to sing at the Met. (I did not.)


I returned to Califonia and got paid (not much) to sing in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. I was rehired at "the Rad Lab", where I stayed for another 25 years. For 20 years I sang in a San Francisco men's Russian chorus "Slavyanka." We traveled three times to the Soviet Union and were treated as celebrities. I was interviewed on Russian television.


At the Rad Lab I was no longer in physics, now working instead with Census data and other government data. Before PC's became affordable, we used the Lab's supercomputers to create the world's largest online public information system. The data tapes filled a 40 foot room. The data base was 10 gigabytes, smaller than a PC today. The Rad Lab (not Al Gore) helped invent the Internet, and by 1974 there was long distance email for the privileged few. Obsessive Compulsives (like me) could take home a "dumb terminal" and a 10 character-per-second modem in order to work at home.


On the early Internet, advertising was prohibited. "Spam? What's spam?" Privately, I cobbled together viruslike software which invisibly connected to other computers for the benign purpose of sharing public data. I could have become rich except that my virus was inept, my motives were pure, and I was happy working at the Rad Lab.


To study geographic trends in health data, I used population data from old atlases. All my interests - Russia, maps, health data, mathematics and computers - converged when I converted a Russian geography paper into a computer program to automatically create Density Equalizing Map Projections (cartograms). My "DEMP" program fueled ten years of research and s dozen Ph.D. theses, including a second one for myself just before my retirement.


While searching for old atlases, I became infected with the eBay disease and accumulated almost 1000 atlases, including a complete collection (possibly unique) of the World Almanac. I learned that my great-great-grandfather's ancestral home, a 15-room Victorian in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, had been foreclosed and condemned. Sight unseen, my wife Chris and I bought the home for a pittance and performed a complete renovation (NOT for a pittance). For ten years, with Chris' mom Laura, we owned and operated Bear Haven Bed and Breakfast. Not to be outdone by my 1000 atlases, Chris accumulated 1000 (tax deductible) Teddy Bears, and Laura gathered 1000 cookbooks. We met amazing people, including movie star Elizabeth Perkins and astronaut Mike Fossum. Being in my ancestral home town, I became a local history guru. I taught in the local high school.

 

High school layoffs, fuel bills, slow winters and Laura's death (at 97) got the best of us. With Herculean effort we wrenched free of our too-many belongings and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where I had met Chris 20 years earlier. Today, teaching in two community colleges, still addicted to genealogy and the Internet, I am in good health and happily surrounded by loving family and an excessive number of beloved pets.

 

Deane, 2003
 

 

granddaughter Chilen, granddaughter Noa and daughter Eleanore, 2007

 

daughter Jeannie, 1999

 

Chris and son David, 2001

 

The Merrill Homestead, Shelburne Falls MA, 1893

 

Bear Haven Bed and Breakfast, 2000

 

Koshka, 1999


go to short biographical sketch
go to biography and selected publications

back to Deane Merrill's Web page

This biography was submitted on 5/17/08 to the Williams College Class of 1960 50th Reunion Web site, http://www.williams60.com/.

biog5.htm 5/18/08 in:
dennie2::\c:\dwmerrill\public_html\biog5.htm
http://merrill.olm.net/biog5.htm