Saturday, October 24, 2015

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- What Were You Doing in 1985?

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 
time for some more Genealogy Fun!!



Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1) Since this was Back to the Future week, I have a related challenge:  Do you recall what you were doing in 1985?  Family, school, work, hobbies, technology, genealogy, vacations, etc?


2)  Tell us in a blog post of your own, in a comment on this blog, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.

Here's mine:

I was age 42 in 1985, with a wife and two pre-teen girls, living in Chula Vista, and climbing the promotion ladder at work.  Life was busy, and I had no thoughts about genealogy and family history at the time.  I did have a hobby.  Here are more details:

*  I married schoolteacher Linda in 1970, and we had Lori in 1974 and Tami in 1976.  The girls were busy at their school in Chula Vista, both were in a GATE program and excelling.  Linda taught algebra and geometry at the school as a volunteer parent, and she was involved in PTA and Girl Scouts with the girls.  The girls played softball in the spring.

*  I was promoted to Chief of Aerodynamics at Rohr Industries in 1985, and had a staff of about eight engineers to work on all of the aircraft programs at Rohr.  I hired one or two graduates every year to support the growing business at Rohr.  In 1985, we had just won the V2500 nacelle contract with IAE and I made several trips to Derby in England.  We also had a contact with Airbus on the A320 aircraft, and I made several trips with others to Paris and Toulouse in France.  Each trip involved a series of engineering presentations to our customers on a range of issues, including aerodynamics.  The trips were exhilarating, fun and technically challenging.  We usually had a day or two of sightseeing on our own, and evening meals with the customers.

*  My hobby at this time was medium wave radio DXing and propagation.  I was somewhat of an expert in the radio clubs on propagation, and many DXers were expanding their knowledge in propagation and applying it to their listening.  I kept logs of signal strengths of distant stations (i.e., Japan, Australia, Tahiti, occasionally Senegal) heard on my HQ-180 receiver, and searched for more distant and rarer medium wave stations in the early morning (best from midnight to sunrise).  I ordered government reports, and created BASIC programs on my IBM PC to predict signal strengths from theory to compare with my measurements.  I also had a FORTRAN program to predict radio wave paths on the IBM computer at work.  

*  I bought an IBM PC with two 64K floppy drives in early 1983, and wrote small BASIC programs to help with the propagation analysis.  I wrote articles in Microsoft Works on propagation and my listening results, and submitted them to the bulletins produced by the two hobby clubs I was a member of.  

*  I had no thought of genealogy research yet, although we had visited my father's brother and three sisters and many cousins in 1982 in Massachusetts.  My father died in May 1983 and I realized that I really didn't know much about his life.

*  I think that our 1985 summer vacation (because the girls were in school) was to Hawaii.  We visited Oahu, Maui and Hawaii during the 1980s, and the girls loved the snorkeling, the beaches, the shopping, the sightseeing, etc.  On one of our trips when the girls were young, we were on Hawaii and went to a park near a surfing beach.  A Hawaiian lady was there making leis for her husband's political campaign, and she taught Lori and Tami how to make a lei and they had a great time.  

What did you do in 1985?

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/10/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what-were.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.




5 comments:

Dorene from Ohio said...

Randy - In 1985, my three children ranged in age from 2 to 6; I had just started working at the local public library. At that time I enjoyed hearing stories about my grandparents, but I had
barely even heard the word "Genealogy"!! How times have changed!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/8110786@N02/22259925350/in/datetaken/

Janice M. Sellers said...

In 1985 I was working, performing with the USC Trojan Marching Band, and playing D&D.

http://ancestraldiscoveries.blogspot.com/2015/10/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what-were.html

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

I was working at BART. http://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2015/10/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what-were.html

Anonymous said...

Here is my blog post! https://lifecitation.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/saturday-night-genealogy-funwhat-were-you-doing-in-1985/

I was a ninth grader with no internet. What did I do back then?!

Alex Daw said...

Thanks for the great meme Randy...I took a while but here's my contribution.http://familytreefrog.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what-were.html