My Journey Since St. John’s College

Careful readers will realize that I haven’t posted much recently. In fact it seems to have decreased to about once per year. Part of the reason is that I’ve been busy. But the real reason is that life has been too crazy starting with Trump 1, then COVID, short break from crazy, and not Trump 2. Posts about the joys of hand stitching are hard to write these days (but likely more important than ever…).

This will be the last post for a while, at least, on this blog. If I get motivated to make some fun new leather projects, I’ll add them. And one day I hope to return to this blog as I’m able to return more often to my leather shop.

I’ve started a new substack today that focuses on my career as a university professor who is navigating the Trump chaos. Feel free to stop into my substack and to subscribe if you are intersted.

As a parting post here, I’m using a short essay that I wrote in 2023 for a reunion piece for the 1983 class at St. John’s College. It gives a good overview of my start in academics, with several steps in between. Please find me on substack and maybe here again in a while.

My Journey Since St. John’s College

I matriculated with the St. John’s College (Santa Fe) class of 1983. After one year, I took a year off and then returned for another year, which would put me with the class of 1984. But after that second year, I left altogether, leaving me without a graduating class. I have often though that it would be fun to return after retirement to complete my final two years, perhaps putting me in the class of 2032, if that ever came to pass.

Despite my tumultuous tenure, St. John’s College has always remained my ideal for education and learning. It has formed the foundation upon which I approach most things in my job as a university professor. Below I summarize the path from walking with my fellow Johnies across the stage of the Great Hall in fall 1979 to my current life in Athens (fitting, I suppose), GA.

Perhaps I should start by saying that I took a year off after high school, because I didn’t want to go to college and did not have great grades. I was a decent ice hockey player, but that didn’t compensate for too many Cs and perhaps a D or two in high school, so I didn’t get accepted to any schools I would have considered attending. I rambled that first year off: worked as a river runner helper, hitch-hiked to visit friends (including Joe Rising at St. John’s College), and odd jobs. A memorable moment was selling plasma in Ft. Worth so that I could make it to my next destination. The culmination of an exciting year was riding my bicycle on the Lewis and Clark trail from Astoria, OR to St. Louis, MO with some dear friends. After visiting Joe, I realized that St. John’s might be a good place for me, so I applied and was surprised to be accepted! I got back home to SLC, Utah about a week before moving to Santa Fe for my first year of college.

I really enjoyed my first year at St. John’s. Euclid with Mr. Simpson was my favorite class, and to this day I love the Elements. I even referenced Euclid when I wrote a paper in grad school that used the Pythagorean theorem. Spike Venable was my Greek tutor, and I still tell the story to my students about this guy who would take a bite of chalk to calm his stomach when a student (sometimes me!) was being too stupid. It was this year that I also got to know Lynn Messinger, who became a life-long friend until his death in 2004. I’ve written a few blog posts (Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3) about Lynn and our time at SJC. Someday would like to write more.

Despite the fact that I really did enjoy my first year, I couldn’t figure out why I was there. Something was missing in my life. I took a year off and primarily worked as a shoe repairman in SLC, Utah and met Katherine, the love of my life. We celebrated our 40^th wedding anniversary last August with a trip in our electric vehicle from Athens GA to Santa Fe and Telluride, CO for a meeting. Shoe repair was great, but something inside me knew that it would not be enough. After dating Katherine for a few months, I convinced her to move with me to Santa Fe so that I could return to St. John’s. We rented a little apartment on a long dirt driveway off Guadalupe St and started living the Santa Fe life.

Year 2 was just as good as year 1, perhaps even better. I was starting to figure out how to learn and especially remember lots of time working on Greek declension on my small home chalkboard. I earned money that year working at Square Deal Boots with David Gallegos, who taught me to make cowboy boots. I made a pair for Katherine for our wedding that summer. Somehow, there was still something missing from my formal education, and the lure of boot making shifted to saddle making. I used most of the money my parents had set aside for college to study saddle making with Mr. Ginder in Cuyamungue. The rest of it was spent on an acre of land in the Santa Fe National Forest, where Katherine and I got married and built a house with no water or electricity or telephone.

We lived in our house for about 3 years, during which time I worked in Cerrillos Saddlery where I made saddles and horse gear, along with some leather items for several famous customers. Katherine got pregnant with our first daughter while we were living in our house in the woods. We weren’t particularly worried, but it did occur to us that it might be a bit challenging. Then, I got an offer to to work as a “ranch hand” in Apache Canyon, where we were provided with a nice house, electricity, running water, and flush toilets. What a great place to have our first daughter!

It was the birth of our daughter that prompted me to consider returning to school. My father was a physician, and during our time living in the Santa Fe boonies, I joined the Hondo Volunteer fire department and became an EMT. Therefore, it seemed natural to go to medical school, but I needed to finish college first. I seriously considered St. John’s, but I felt the need to save some money (which was now in saddlery tools and a house with no water or electricity) and we needed family support. So we moved to Salt Lake City, and because I thought I hated chemistry and could never imagine myself in science, I became an Art major at the University of Utah.

We had our second daughter in Utah. As a premed, I needed to take chemistry, but I while I was studying organic chemistry, I discovered that I loved it. Furthermore, none of my fellow premeds liked organic chemistry, so I took a hint. I switched majors and graduated with a B.S. in chemistry. I had gotten the science bug, and that summer my family and I moved to UW-Madison for graduate school in biophysics. Grad school was fabulous for me, and our two kids kept me very focused. I managed to get a PhD in 4 years and then got a postdoctoral fellowship in Zoology at UW-Madison while Katherine finished her degree.

We left Madison in 1996 and moved to Gainesville, FL for my first faculty job in the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology department at the UF College of Medicine. My lab used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to study biological molecules. We had many great years and made many friends in Gainesville. I received tenure and was promoted to full professor. Our kids grew up and went to college, and then a colleague of mine recruited me to the University of Georgia in Athens as a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

Katherine and I moved to Athens in 2015, and I am now a professor of Biochemistry and Bioinformatics and direct a big NMR facility in the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center. My lab uses NMR to measure metabolites, a technology called metabolomics. Our kids are both married, and both have their own daughters, our granddaughters. We love Athens and are happy to have moved north before Florida started going completely crazy politically. My job is very satisfying. I teach and do research and currently have 11 graduate students and several senior staff to help run the lab. I have a large undergraduate research team of 10-15 students, so we stay busy.

While I was a postdoc in Zoology at UW, I realized that I needed to learn biology. What better way than read the Origin of Species? I started the Evolution reading club, which had 10-20 faculty, grad students, and staff from several departments. We even had one of the most famous evolutionary geneticists at UW-Madison, Prof. Jim Crow, who was really in the lineage of great evolutionary thinkers, starting with Darwin. Stephan Jay Gould visited our reading group one time when he came to campus to give a lecture, and it was impressive how well he knew Darwin. We read many other books of historical evolution during the 3 years that I was there, and I was pleased to find out that the reading club continued at least as of a few years ago.

Just before COVID, I had started a history of metabolism journal club at UGA. I used the St. John’s seminar format and didn’t allow PowerPoint, lectures, or modern texts. We read many of the ground-breaking discoveries starting with Pasteur working out fermentation to the discovery of the citric acid cycle. We started each week with a question, and had a discussion, much like a St. John’s seminar. The students loved it, as did the faculty who participated. I realized that there is a real yearning for the sort of education that St. John’s provides, but most students that I teach don’t know what it is that they are missing. We needed to stop after half a semester due to COVID shutdown, but this spring I’ve restarted this seminar!

Thanks, St. John’s, for laying the foundation of my life, despite only completing the first two years!