Linda and I were married on July 6, 1963 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. I’ll use that date to separate my previous ‘Life on the Farm’ and ‘College Life’ from my ‘Personal Life.’ The following picture should give a hint about why I thought that Linda was the best looking student at New Mexico State University.
I have always maintained two mental calendars: one for my professional life, and one for my personal life. These two calendars are only very loosely linked to each other in my mind, and if one were laid on top of the other, you would see numerous collisions. Thus a Tuesday evening examination on my professional calendar could easily conflict with a Tuesday evening poker game on my personal calendar, but in my mind I never saw the conflict until it was too late. That’s why `My Personal Life’ appears as a separate chapter, and not a part of `My Professional Life’ although the two chapters cover roughly the same period of my life.
Carol and Elbert had been married for six months and were away for the year at the Institute for Advanced Study, so we moved into their empty house on Hixon Drive in Las Cruces. To celebrate our new life in our temporary but comfortable home, we invited graduate students and faculty members to a big party. To prepare for the party, we drove west to Deming then south to Columbus where we crossed the border and bought a gallon of rum. We usually went to El Paso and Juarez, but Texas only allowed a quart at a time.
One of the faculty members at the party was Ed Thorpe, who had written the book Beat the Dealer. He introduced himself to Linda, who responded, “We have never met before, but you are my adviser.” I think that was also the last time that they talked to each other.
It was easy and safe to cross the Mexican border at that time. A US driver’s license was sufficient to get back across the border. We drove to Juarez several times, usually to eat at one of the popular restaurants, such as the Florida Club. We would park on the street and give a local policeman a quarter to watch our car.
Linda majored in mathematics and we took a number theory class together, taught by Robert J. Wisner, I still remember vividly one of his lectures and could almost repeat it word for word to this day. “There are a lot of primes…there aren’t very many primes…the primes are randomly distributed…the primes are very evenly distributed…” We learned the essential truth about mathematics. It isn’t all cut and dried, but is very interesting with all sorts of nuances.
By this time I had been in school more or less continuously since I had begun the first grade. Linda thought I had lots of money, but actually I had managed to buy her breakfast once in a while by loaning out my oil company credit card to my roommate in exchange for some quick cash. I wondered what it would be like to have a real job and real income.
Bob Wisner had gotten his PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle and had some contacts at Seattle University, who eventually offered me a temporary position.
In June of 1964 I got my MS and Linda her BS in Mathematics. We spent that summer in Montrose, living in a small quonset hut on the farm where I had grown up. It had probably been build during World War II and more recently had been used by my Uncle Wendell to house migrant workers who were hired to work in his apple orchards.
I took a summer job with the school district and worked for my former high school shop teacher Al Bonan. Our job was to remodel, paint, or dismantle rural schools and related buildings. He was an expert carpenter and I learned a lot from him. One of our projects, however, was to remodel a kitchen and do all the necessary plumbing. An expert plumber he was not. After soldering all the joints we turned on the water and all we had done was to create an indoor sprinkler system. He and I learned quickly, and after the second round of soldering there were no visible leaks.
We took advantage of the weekends by driving our VW Bug on jeep roads in the mountains south of Montrose. We met a lot of jeep tours that looked at us in disgust.
In September we drove to Seattle, where I had accepted a temporary teaching position at Seattle University. We moved everything we owned in our green VW. In Seattle we rented an apartment on Queen Anne Hill within easy walking distance of the Seattle Center, home of the 1962 World’s Fair. That year we attend several professional hockey games and Seattle University basketball games at the Seattle Center.
We knew that we be in Seattle for only a year, so we decided to take advantage of what the area had to offer. Every weekend we tried to discover something new. The Pudget Sound offered ferry boat rides to Bremerton and many other destinations. We dug clams, hiked in the rain forest, and visited the national park on the Olympic Pennisula. We drove north to Vancouver, Canada. We visited the ski areas to the west. We drove southeast for a closer view of Mount Rainier. We watched prototype Boeing 727s take off and land at Boeing Field. We visited Namu, the first Killer Whale in captivity. When Lynn and my parents visited us in the summer of 1965, we took a ferry through the San Juan Islands to Victoria, then another ferry to the Olympic Pennisula, where we visited the national park.
Janet was born on March 27, 1965. On April 29, we all experienced a magnitude 6.5 earthquake. We took her on her first camping trip when she was about six weeks old. She helped Linda and I celebrate our second wedding anniversary on July 6 at the top of the Space Needle.
At the end of the summer we tucked Janet into a cardboard box in the back seat of our VW and returned to Las Cruces.
It took two more years to complete my PhD at NMSU. In the summer of 1966 we bought a brand new Chevrolet Chevelle with a two-speed automatic transmission and air conditioning. Our first roadtrip was to Brunswick, Maine, where I participated in a conference on algebraic number theory and class field theory at Bowden College. The first leg of our trip was across the widest part of Texas. About noon we saw a nice park in Dallas and decided to stop for a picnic lunch. When I got out of the car I nearly collapsed. Although it gets hot in Las Cruces, it is always very dry. I had never in my life felt so hot. We jumped back in the car and headed for Texarkana, where we planned to camp for the night. The heat and humidity were nearly as bad as Dallas, so we got back in the car and spent the night in a motel in Little Rock.
In Maine we lived in a cabin near Harpswell Center. We shared our cabin with Ray and Joan Mines. Ray was a faculty member at NMSU. Once each week Ray and I would pick up four live lobsters on our way home. Four lobsters, four pounds, four dollars.
In October of 1966, another life-changing event: Brian was born in Las Cruces on October 2. We were now living in a small cinder block house, which was a part of married student housing on campus.
I finished my Phd and accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Colorado State University in 1967. Before we left Las Cruces, we subscribed to the Coloradoan newspaper with pictures of students on campus with umbrellas to ward off the rain. It had been a dry and windy spring in Las Cruces and Fort Collins looked like a very attractive place to which to move.
We didn’t have enough for a downpayment on a house when we moved to Fort Collins in the fall of 1967, so we moved into a faculty apartment on the CSU campus. One of our first purchases was a pair of three-speed Schwinn bikes. By the next spring we were in our first real house on Constitution Avenue, just a half mile west of campus.
My cousin Douglas DeVinny was finishing a degree in art when we arrived on campus. Somehow we talked him out of his round Plymouth painting, and it has been hanging in our living room ever since.
The next year another cousin Mike Woods began his freshman year at CSU, majoring in engineering. His mother was hopeful that I could help Mike get through calculus, and hence the choice of CSU.
On our way to Montrose for Thanksgiving, we had a slow-speed headon collision on a snowpacked highway just west of Morrison. Our 1966 Chevrolet Chevelle was towed back to Morrison, where we bought a beatup used Mercury for our delayed trip to Montrose. We talked to my high school classmate Coky Hartman of Hartman Brothers Chrysler and traded for a VW Squareback, which we drove back to Fort Collins. After several weeks we got our repaired Chevelle back. We were now a two-car family.
In the summer of 1969 we drove again to the east coast, this time to a ring theory conferernce at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina where we lived in a dormatory. Elbert and Carol were also at the conference, and after the conference we all visited relatives in Wilmington, Delaware. My aunt and uncle had a large bell in their back yard, which they planned to ring if they ever got into trouble. Of course our kids rang the bell repeatedly and of course no neighbor bothered to show up.
The last year that Colorado State University was on the quarter system, the calendar was changed so that the fall quarter ended before Thanksgiving and the winter quarter started in January. We decided to take advantage of that long break by going to Mexico. We drove to El Paso and left our car with Mary Ann and Boone, who were living there at the time. We took a bus from Juarez to Chihuahua, then boarded a train through Copper Canyon on our way to Los Mochis. We spent most of our time in the club car, which was the very last car on the train. We were entertained by Mexican tourists who sang and played their guitars.
In Los Mochis we took another bus and made an overnight stop in Mazatlan then several nights in Puerto Vallarta. Janet’s blond hair was a real hit with some of the older women riding on the buses. We didn’t speak Spanish, and we nearly got left behind in the middle of the night when the bus made a stop and we tried to get a bite to eat. It was all an adventure rather than a vacation, but I think that Janet and Brian learned much more about the world than they would have staying in Fort Collins.
We flew from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara where we stayed in a classic old hotel out of the 1800s. We took another bus to Queretaro, where we visited with my cousin Michael Summers and his family. He was working there for the Carnation milk plant.
Our last stop was Mexico City. We had planned to take a train from there back to Juarez. At that time it was very difficult to make train reservations in Mexico from the Unites States, as we had discovered earlier in Chihuahua. But by now is was just before Christmas, and the first available train was not until January. We went back to the bus station, and learned that there were four seats available on a bus leaving sometime after midnight that night, with no other seats available for several days. We grabbed the seats and cut our visit to Mexico City a couple of days short. But first we took a quick tour of the Teotihuacan pyramids. It was two solid days by bus back to Juarez and El Paso, but at least we had seats.
Our other extended vacation was during one summer when I had no summer classes. We pulled a tent trailer and headed west through Nevada. Just before we got to Ely, we had a flat tire on our trailer. We had no spare, so we left the trailer beside the road and drove to Ely, where we bought a new tire and had it mounted on the old rim. When we got to Seattle, we decided that it would probably be a good idea to have a spare. We searched all over Seattle, and finally found one in a huge Wards store. Sometimes it is amazing what one can find in a small town like Ely, Nevada.
After seeing the beautiful city where Janet was born, we headed north to Vancouver, then east through the Canadian Rockies. It was a dry summer, and numerous forest fires were active in the mountains. As we were camped one night, we could hear bears as they ransacked coolers that had been left outside.
Our favorite place to back pack in Colorado has been the Mount Zirkel Wilderness Area west of Walden. Janet and Brian had the usual scout and sports activities, but we also managed to do lots family travel and back packing.
Some of their activities exhibited their superior talents. Each was at one time or another the Colorado State Hula Hoop Champion in their respective division. We took Janet to Dallas one summer to compete (unsuccessfully) at the next level. Janet’s fame extended all the way to Las Vegas, where she was introduced in one of the casinos as the Colorado State Hula Hoop Champion.
We formed a partnership with Frank and Annette DeMeyer to purchase some mountain property north of Fort Collins. We chose a partial that included a section of Mill Creek and had a damn built to form a pond, and we bought a used 18-foot trailer.
One trip that I made with Janet’s scout troop was especially memorable. We visited the family farm in Montrose, then spent the night camped just above Ouray. The next day we went on a trail ride that started near Ridgeway, went high above Ouray, then back to Ridgeway. Everyone had sore butts from 25 miles on horseback, but the final rule was that everyone had to be riding and not walking back into the stables.
And then there was the time when junior high defensive lineman Brian Hardy grabbed a loose ball and ran about 50 yards the other way for a touchdown. He played trombone and baritone in the band and sang in the elite choir at Rocky Mountain High.
While Brian was still in high school he went with Linda and I for a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. Our canoe was plenty big enough for three people with food and supplies for several days. After back packing in Colorado, this was luxury, with room for camp chairs. The big surprise was how warm is was at night. The lakes were warm enough for swimming.
Janet played clarinet in the band and became active in DECA at Rocky Mountain High and later attended Colorado State College, renamed the University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley and majored in business.
Just before Brian graduated from high school, we moved into our new home on Southridge Golf Course. It is a move that we should have made years earlier, when Janet and Brian were still living at home. At least once each summer before our move, Brian would talk me into playing golf. I would lose a half-dozen golf balls and swear never to play again. Now finding more golf balls that I can possibly use, golf is good.
Although living on a golf course is much like living in a resort, we did buy two weeks in a timeshare. That is probably the worst investment a person can make, but it did force us to actually do some planning and to decide where we wanted to go the next year. We own in New Orleans, but have traded for weeks in Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, Maui, British Columbia, and England as well as places in the United States such as Orlando, Tucson, Mesquite, and yes, a different time share in New Orleans. Bad investment, good decision.
Brian avoided mathematics, which he realized he needed later as a computer science major at Colorado State University. He played in the CSU marching band and sang in a small choir.
After Janet and Brian started college, Linda and I have gradually transitioned from back packing to traveling by car, airplane, and ship. We have traveled to Mexico nearly every year, using air and comfortable seaside resorts. Two outstanding vacations were to two Club Med resorts in Mexico.
The first Club Med was in Huatulco, Mexico on the Pacific coast south of Acapulco. Every Mexican resort offers water exercise and a beginning Spanish class. Club Med has organized activities nearly 24 hours per day. We found wind surfing to be about all the challenge we could manage. We were asleep long before the night activities got swinging around one in the morning.
Club Med always seems to have prime property. In Cancun we had sandy beach to the east, choral reefs to the south, and water skiing in the lagoon to the northwest.
For our 25th wedding anniversary in 1988, we bought a rail pass and traveled around Europe. We flew to Madrid, toured Toledo, then took trains to Barcelona, Nice, Milan, Zurich, Salzburg, and Vienna. I gave a talk at a semigroup conference in Vienna, then the day of our anniversary we attended a conference reception at the Rathouse. We went to a fancy restuarant with Bob and Laura Wisner, and learned that in Vienna you pay for every single piece of bread that you eat from the tray. On our way to Frankfort for our flight home, we stopped in Munich to test the Beer Gardens.
We have crossed the Atlantic another couple of times. The first was with Mary Ann and Boone, when we visited October Fest in Munich in 2000.
Shortly after we moved to Fort Collins, I joined the Fort Collins Investment Club. We continue to meet each month. In the beginning we played poker from 7:00 in the evening and ended at midnight. As we got older, we moved everything up an hour so that we started at 6:00 and played the last hand for odd change at 11:00. Recently we have been thinking that 5:00 to 10:00 might be a better schedule.
When we first moved to Fort Collins, we sang in the choir at the First Presbyterian Church. The next summer I was a member of the quartet in The Music Man and also sang in the barbershop chorus in Fort Collins. After that I sang in a small show choir called The Nightengale Singers which morphed into Euphany when we changed directors. I also sang for a number of years in the Fort Collins Chamber Chorale, let by Ed Anderson. We gave two concerts each year, with five rehearsals before each concert. The proceeds from the concerts went to a different charity each time. After one of the concerts, Brian gave his ultimate compliment, “That is the best choir that I have ever heard that I was not a member of.”
Since then I have sung a couple of times with other former members of the Choral-Aires at the 50-year homecoming reunions in 2011 and 2012 at the University of Northern Colorado.
More big events. Janet was married in Fort Collins to Scott Garlock in 1989. They have three children; Sarah, Kyle, and Sean. Brian was married to Cheryl Dyer in Fort Collins in 1992. They also have three children; Brendon, Preston, and Grayson.
We have taken two vacations with Janet and her family in Mexico. The first was a week in Manzanillo, near the resort where 10 was filmed. Because of a delay in the return flight, we rented a car for the day and drove up the coast to Isla Navidad, location of an exclusive golf course. When we finally arrived in Denver, armed officers impounded the plane because the carrier had gone bankrupt. In 2001 we spent the week before Christmas without incident at an all inclusive resort on the Mexican Riviera.
In the fall of 2002 we bought a quarter share in a two-bedroom townhouse at the Greens at Copper Mountain from Rex Richards. Each year we had possession for 12 or 13 weeks, enough to justify season ski passes. During the summer, our balcony looked out over the golf course.
In December of 2003, the start of my second childhood began with a complete surprise. On my last day of teaching, I thought that Nick Krier and I were on our way to the University Club for a quiet beer. Instead, we found ourselves surrounded by my relatives, friends, and colleagues who had been secretly invited to my retirement party.
During the last four years of my career at Colorado State University, I had been on transitional retirement, which meant that I taught one semester and took the other semester off. The off semesters seemed to feel more and more like the right place to be, and indeed I have yet to find the downside to retirement. Retirement started with more golf, more travel, and finding the time to read a few books.
By far the biggest project after retirement was the planning and building of our cabin in Mill Creek, just three miles south of the Wyoming Border. This cabin would never have been built without the push from Linda’s sister Mary Ann, who insisted, “When are you going to build? You have been talking about it for years!” We were painted into a corner. Our only option was to build.
One of my poker buddies, Bill Spencer, had built a real log cabin near Red Feather and suggested that we do the same, using Pacific Log Homes. We were surprised at the relative low cost of a log package, which included the cost of transporting the logs from British Columbia and assembling the skeleton log cabin. The cabin was actually put together three different times: in Canada, at the log show in Denver, and finally on our Mill Creek property. What a simple way to have a second home!
Then the true cost of finishing a cabin finally started to strike home. First there were all the fees associated with engineering, soil testing, and building permits. Then we found out that for only “a few thousand more dollars” we could have a full walk-out basement, rather that just a foundation. Of course we would need a well and a solar system, since we were off the grid. And we needed a road and a level place to actually build.
The walk-out basement had to be in place before the logs arrived. Styrofoam forms were used for the concrete walls. The styrofoam would later be covered up with fake stone on the outside and drywall on the inside.
One thing I’ve learned about building a cabin—nothing is ever simple. The logs were to be in place in a single day. After the truck lost an engine, the replacement driver drove off the road, and the load of logs had to be put back on the road using the crane. It took an extra day, but finally the logs were finally in place.
We had been trying for a couple of years to sell our quarter share at Copper Mountain. Linda had messed up her knee in a ski accident, and was not eager to push her luck any farther, and we hardly needed two mountain retreats. We talked with our realtor, who decided that we weren’t asking enough so we raised the asking price and sold it within a couple of months.
In December of 2008 we took our first trip to Asia. The excuse was an Asian Technology Conference in Mathematics, where I was scheduled to give a talk. We visited Hanalulu for a couple of days then a week in Lahaina, Maui. We rented a car and left it beside the road while we hiked to a waterfall. We returned to find a broken window and a missing purse. The purse was essentially empty, but it took the rest of the day to do a police report and exchange the car.
We were told not to drive on dirt roads and probably not to drive to Haleakala National Park at the top of the volcano, but we couldn’t resist and we drove on almost every road that appeared on the map.
Air back to Hanalulu, then through Tokyo to Bangkok. This was when the yellow shirts were fighting with the red shirts about who should lead Thailand. The protests seemed to be peaceful as far as we could tell, and the protestors spent a day scrubbing the airport before they gave up their occupation.
Elbert and Carol were also in Bangkok for the conference and we toured the sights together.
Yupaporn, one of my former PhD students, was teaching at Chulalongkorn University and the took us to dinner one evening.
The flight back to Colorado seemed to take much longer than the trip over, mostly because we didn’t spend an extra week in Hawaii.
We took our first cruise in March of 2011 with Brian and his family. They wanted to take a Disney cruise from Los Angeles to Mexico and Brian decided that it would be cheaper to pay for two cabins with one Hardy boy in our cabin, than to pay for a single suite large enough for a family of five. What really made it cheaper was that he didn’t have to pay for our room. We ate together at lunch and dinner, but the rest of the time the boys were busy with all sorts of organized activities. Although the food was wonderful, Linda and I managed to control our weight by refusing to use elevators on board ship. Each night the boy with the short straw stayed in the grandparent cabin, and everything worked out great.
We enjoyed the Disney cruise so much that the next year we took a cruise on the Island Princess from Vancouver north through Ketchikan, Juneau, Skagway, and Glacier Bay. We had already done the inside cabin thing, so this time we upgraded to a cabin with a balcony. We flew to Anchorage a day early and did a lot of walking, ending the day with a fish dinner in Stanley Park.
In Ketchikan we walked to a salmon fish hatchery and the Totem Heritage Center. This was September and the Salmon were spawning. What an amazing sight! The Totem Heritage Center has a collection of historic totem poles that they are trying to preserve.
We took a city bus in Juneau towards the Mendenhall Glacier, then walked the last mile to the visitor center.
We took our only real excursion in Skagway; the must see Skagway railroad.
The weather was beautiful the day we cruised Glacier Bay.
The schedule the next day was to cruise College Fiord, then end our cruise in Whittier. An oncoming storm forced the Island Princess to head straight for Whittier and leave College Fiord for another day. The next day on our bus transfer to the Anchorage airport, we watched gale-force winds whip up the bay along the highway.
We picked up a rental car at the airport and headed north to Fairbanks. Heavy rains washed out one lane of traffic on the highway and completely washed out the railroad. Hotels and stores were closing for the season and Denali was no longer charging admission. We enjoyed the trip, but next time we will go a bit earlier in the season.