The other day I got to thinking about family… as I suppose many people do when they get to my age. So far as I know, we don’t have any famous or greatly distinguished forebears. Slightly distinguished perhaps, by my paternal grandfather, a mining engineer who essentially founded the U.S. potash industry (twice) and sold it for a comparative pittance…and my uncle, a largely commercial artist who died young but whose work adorned such products as Coca Cola and Uncle Ben’s rice, or my father, an attorney, whose unseen legal efforts partly shaped U.S. antitrust law.

Needless to say, my father hoped I’d become an attorney, while my paternal grandfather, a doctor and noted surgeon, married to a nurse, urged me toward medicine.

After my tours as a Naval aviator, I got accepted to law school and then decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer – but after failing as an industrial economist and real estate agent, I ended up spending almost twenty years in politics – all of it in positions usually held by attorneys, writing on the side, at least partly to keep my sanity.

Among my immediate family, and aunts, uncles, and cousins, there are doctors, lawyers (of course), engineers, and business types, but the profession most represented is that of teachers, thirteen of them, ranging from primary school teachers through graduate school university professors. And, among them are two of my three wives, one a secondary school teacher/counselor, and one still a university professor. Also, in transitioning from politics to writing full-time, I spent three years as a college lecturer in English and writing, where the university actually let me teach a course in science fiction and fantasy.

And you wonder why I have to curb my desire to lecture?