* I lived in Vero Beach, Florida until the age of 10, when we moved to Pennsylvania. But living in Vero Beach – Dodgertown, spring training home of the Los Angeles Dodgers – instill a lifelong love of the Dodgers. Though not LA.
In the early 1970s, Vero Beach had a number of retired former Brooklyn Dodgers and fans and they never quite got over the trauma of the team moving to California in the last 1950s. Even today, though I own a lot of Dodgers gear, I don’t own any Los Angeles Dodgers gear.
I have Brooklyn Dodgers gear, and things that say just Dodgers, and things that say Vero Beach Dodgers, but no LA Dodgers.
* I was thrown out of chorus and off the high school tennis team my senior year in high school for mooning an opposing girl’s volleyball team. In a small town of 200 people, with 5 churches and no bars, that was a pretty big deal. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan would not write his book discussing ‘defining deviancy down’ until a decade later, but I knew what he was talking about.
* I had three letters in high school sports (soccer, wrestling, track) and one in college. The one in college was for Division 1 shooting – when the final listings came out my coach didn’t understand my lack of enthusiasm. He told me what a great thing it was to do so well as a freshman. I asked, “Who can I brag to? I’m not even the fifth best shot in my family’.
* I learned martial arts on my own, reading magazines. As a freshman at Duquesne, I was working out in the dark area of a lot behind a building (it is a lovely sports complex now) and a fellow student named John Kacvinsky somehow saw me and came over and talked to me. He asked what style that was and I said I didn’t know, streetfighter style. He said, ‘You don’t kick like a streetfighter’ and he got the owner of the martial arts school he attended to let me train there for free.
*In 1987, the movie “Wall Street” had come out, and it gave stockbrokers a bad name. Which made them cool. After college graduation, and before I went to Ft. Gordon Georgia for Signal Officer OBC, I got a Series 7 license a few days after the market crashed. By the time I returned in 1988, I had a job waiting for me but the business was much different. A lot of small firms had collapsed because of margin calls and I wouldn’t find out until later that the one that employed me was engaged in some unethical behavior brought on by that financial duress.
*In 1994, I had to be the first person in Pittsburgh selling data services to high-tech companies. The long-distance market was still a big thing then and LCI was growing rapidly. My idea to give away the long-distance in return for a T-1 to do data was not well-received by the company but everyone basically gives away phone calls now.
* When I joined Ansoft, the company had been losing money. I sold a copy of our electrical engineering software my first month, to Coors. The CEO, Nick Cendes, came over to me and asked how I had done it, because salespeople were always telling him it was a six month sales cycle. I told him no one had told me it was a six month sales cycle so I just went ahead and did it. Then we talked about how I had sold electrical engineering software to a beer company…
* I was the only person at Ansoft to be a top salesperson in both low-frequency and high-frequency software. To people outside physics, inductance makes sense and s-parameters in antennae make sense. But no one outside physics thinks working in the frequency domain rather than the time domain makes any sense.
* Before my senior year at Duquesne, I ran for Student Government president. My opponent had gotten the rules changed so law school students could run, rather than just undergraduates. He defeated me, after getting a turnout in the law school voting of over 95%, all for him, which is the kind of popular favor even Saddam Hussein had trouble pulling off. For my entire senior year, everyone assumed I had won.
* When Senior Awards were being determined, there was apparently debate about me because I was not very well liked, due to calls for more accountability and less waste in student government spending. I had one defender, who, I was later told, said, if he does not get this award because of personality, the whole award is meaningless. I did get it. College students can be reasonable in a way that we all seem to lose as we age.
* I was a DJ and later Program Manager and Vice-President of Communications for the Residence Council. The station was a booth and the only audience was students in the cafeteria. I tried to create a low-power station to have real college radio – not the corporate-ish classical/jazz of WDUQ, the official college station of Duquesne, but I graduated before I could see it through.
* As an Army officer, you pick which field you want to go into and then a committee decides. My first choice was aviation and my second was the signal corps. For the physical, I had to go to the U.S. Army War College. No one said anything at the time, but they had screwed up my EKG. So when the accession panel met, I couldn’t go into combat arms because of an incomplete physical, so I got my second choice, which was Signal Corps, and they told me to just go to Ft. Rucker for flight school after that and it wouldn’t matter. But by the time I was done with OBC, I couldn’t fathom why I was being paid the same as everyone else and figured the private sector was the better way to go.
* Since I was the only one of the children to be born in Pennsylvania, as a young lad in Florida I declared that I was the only who should be allowed to celebrate Fourth of July.
* In 1983 the local Science Olympiad – which was basically like College Bowl, except for 15 local high schools or so – was held at Mansfield State. I came in second in the physics challenge.
Your first question is obviously ‘How did the smartest guy named Hank Campbell that I know on the Internet only come in second in a physics challenge?’
That’s a complex story. The year before, our class had put our little school on the map. Standardized testswere in 8th and 11th grade and this little town of 200 somehow had a school that placed near the top in Pennsylvania. And at the previous year’s Science Olympiad, no one really wanted to go, so it was just a few of us, and we cleaned up. I came in third overall.
So tin my senior year it was serious stuff. There was a trophy in our school display case now and so the school decided to put together a big team, and develop young science students and all that jazz. As a result, I was going to be in one or two events so that everyone had a chance to do stuff. Well, I wanted to win this thing and the two friends of mine who were instrumental in that previous showing did also, so we quit in order to form a SuperTeam. That is why our team name is so long and has Renegades in it. For this certificate, they couldn’t actually fit my name and the team name on it so they left out part.
You needed a minimum team of 5 so we got two willing participants to be in one part each and the three of us did the rest.
But the scheduling was tough. I had three events in the same time period – so for physics, I walked in and listened to the setup and patiently waited for the signal to start. All the other teams, including the other team from my tiny school, had a specialist for each event and they were all calculating and measuring and looking very earnest.
I didn’t have time to do all of that so I summoned the awesome power of physics, did some back-of-the-envelope stuff – and basically guessed. Then I ran to the next event. I knew my friends were doing the same thing.
How did we do? We came in third place, which is not too bad for 3 guys and two people kind enough to go along for the ride, against well-stocked teams from a dozen much larger schools.
But I personally did not win. My physics teacher, Mr. Watkins, had been a good sport about us seceding to form our own team and when he learned I did not win and had sacrificed my scores to make enough events so we could get points overall, he asked what had gone wrong in my plan.
“It degenerated into a team effort,” I said, and he laughed. In 1983,