Something in the water...

It makes sense that your home town is the town where your home is, and in my case that is currently a place the Spaniards who discovered it called "Tall tree," which in Spanish is Palo Alto. I say currently not because I'm about to move, but because I have been at home in several different towns over the course of my life.

But your home town is also the town where your are from, where you lived when you were young and growing up, and that for me is a place called Carmi, Illinois. It seems a tiny bit pretentious to me for Carmi to call itself a city, having a population that is south of 6,000 and a land area that can easily be traveled by foot in a day, but it is the county seat and the biggest town for at least 30 miles, and it does have a Wal-mart Supercenter.

Pretentious or not, Carmi (pronounced like "my car" only backwards, and with the emphasis on the first syllable) has touched the lives of a lot of people, possibly including yours. Most people don't know that, of course, including people who live and work in Carmi today, but that's why I'm here.

I first started thinking about this several years ago and the thought came up again last week when I was having lunch with a friend from church who is a Vice President at HP. Somehow the conversation turned to a mutual friend of ours named Wayne Lichtenberger. You may have never heard of Wayne, and for many years of my life didn't know where he was or what he had done, but I began to find out after I moved to California.

I had been recruited by Western Athletic Clubs to come to the Bay Area and help turn around one of their clubs that wasn't doing well, and I had accepted. My wife was still back in the Chicago area trying to sell our townhouse, but I was getting into California life. I was living in San Francisco with relatives (wonderful and amazing folks, about whom I must write soon) for the first several weeks, then in a corporate apartment, then in a hotel room. About the only two solid things I had going for me were the work (intense but fun) and church.

One Sunday the preacher was going to be gone, and he asked me to fill in for him. Someday I'll tell you why that was OK, but my point is that in my sermon I mentioned something about growing up in Carmi, Illinois. From the back of the congregation -- and this was not a congregation that normally responded to the preacher with Amen! or Preach on! or much of anything except polite laughter if a line was really funny -- came a loud "No way!" It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that someone in the crowd had a connection with Carmi.

That person was the son of Wayne Lichtenberger. Wayne had grown up in Carmi, and in fact he and I had gone to the same church there. He's older than me by more than high school, which means we probably wouldn't have known each other at all except for church, and he didn't really "know" me or I him but our families certainly knew each other.

Turns out that Wayne had gone to school, at least graduate school, in a place called Berkeley, and that he had been one of the primary students involved in something called Project Genie, a computer research project started in 1964. Now I can't tell you all the stuff that happened with this little school project, but I can tell you that in the annals of computing history it was significant and that it turned into Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC), a commercial business venture that failed and the employees of which then became the core of Xerox PARC.

Just a few cool things eventually came out of Xerox PARC, including ethernet, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, and the mouse. PARC, by the way, stands for Palo Alto Research Center. When my wife finally arrived in California I took her to see the building. Just to be near a place like that was cool, it seemed to me. Not to her, but at the time she wasn't using a mouse, ethernet, or a GUI.

Anyway, Wayne was there for a while and had an influence on a few of those things, as well as creating some very cool stuff of his own. If I have my history right he went from there to teach in the grad school at the University of Hawaii where he worked on Aloha-net, which was really the precursor to ethernet, and a few folks from UH were involved in something called ARPANET, which of course became what we know today as the Internet.

One of Wayne's students was a fellow named John Davidson, who later became my boss (and my good friend) at a little company he started called Network TeleSystems. John was the guy (at least as I understand it) who really thought up the ideas which caused the founding of Ungermann-Bass, the first large networking company which was independent of any computer manufacturer. John was also one of the authors of NCP, the protocol which was the precursor to TCP/IP. And he was influenced in many ways by a guy from Carmi.

There is much more about Wayne, but there are also many others from Carmi who have done amazing things. Just in "modern day" history we have John Edwardson, a friend of mine when we were kids who later became President and COO of United Airlines and whose many business accomplishments are well documented. If you buy anything from CDW or MacWarehouse, John is your boy. He is also on the board of FedEx. What the general public doesn't often hear about John is that he is a man of faith who has volunteered in a prison visitation ministry with his church and has had a positive influence for good in many companies and for many people.

Back in the day I was (I've heard it from her own lips) the first boyfriend of a girl named Sandy. We were in grade school at the time and the romance didn't last but the friendship did. Sandy was an excellent singer, and one of the cool memories of my high school career was singing backup (with Rick Mitchell and Lloyd Winter) for Sandy as she performed "Boy From New York City" at the Carmi High School "One Niter" variety show.

Sandy went on to sign a record deal with Word Records and do a lot of other very interesting stuff, including hosting a talk show on a big time Chicago based Christian radio station. Today Sandy Rios is the President of the conservative Christian group Concerned Women for America. Whether you agree with her political perspectives or not, she has done much with her life and gifts, and she is from Carmi.

So is Brett Kirkpatrick, a biggie not only at the University of Texas Medical Branch but in the whole Medical Library Association, and my brother Bill, whose former company may have helped you get a hotel room for the night if you had a flight stranded in Chicago any time in the last ten years. David Muse's hometown was Carmi and it is again. He sailed to Hawaii shortly after college then built a boat and sailed it single handedly to Australia. He is back in Carmi these days and working at a high level for an international company involved in helping abate the damage from oil spills. The company itself is based in Carmi, although I don't think there has been an oil spill in the Little Wabash river since Les Owen accidentally overturned a drain pan when he was changing the oil and filter on his car in the bowling alley parking lot. Les, by the way, became a fairly well known manager for BP in Alaska but before that introduced me to the delicacy called alligator tail when I visited him and his family in New Orleans.

Another one of my former girlfriends never left town, marrying a local farmer (there were lots of those) and outstanding athlete (there were a few of those), settling down and raising a family. Along the way she also started a very cool business called Pat's Porch, and in addition to all that she became my step sister when her widowed mother married my widowed father many years ago. Drue Pearce is also from Carmi. After school she moved to Alaska where she eventually became a state senator, and today she is the Senior Advisor for Alaska Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, a role that is certainly not without the possibility of controversy.

There are lots of other stories that come out of Carmi, many of them much older than I. Fred Karch was a Brigadier General in the USMC who led troops in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Colonel Conger moved to Carmi, but that was after he led the soldiers who captured John Wilkes Booth. James Robinson was a U.S. Senator from Carmi, and Orlando Burrell and Roy Clippinger were U.S. Congressman. I knew Roy Clippinger when I was a kid, but I didn't know he'd been a congressman until many years later.

And then of course there is me. Although I'm not famous and doubt that I will be, I have had the opportunity to impact a lot of lives over the years. That is still happening today in amazing ways -- or at least they are amazing to me. And I believe some of that is because I was raised in Carmi, Illinois, a town that may be shrinking in size but is still growing in influence.

So what is it about Carmi? Back in the '50s and '60s were there just some excellent teachers there who challenged us all to excel at what we did? Was there some kind of civic pride that beat deep within us? Maybe the answer is, as the Carmi web site says, just a belief "in hard work, family, religion and community."

Personally, I think there was something in the water.