Saturday, August 3, 2019

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- What Did You Do 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)  
Do you recall what you were doing in 1985?  Family, school, work, hobbies, technology, genealogy, vacations, etc?  If this doesn't work for you, what about your parents?

2)  Tell us in a blog post of your own, in a comment on this blog, or in a Facebook 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, with Linda as manager and me as coach.

*  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 contract 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, or we went exploring restaurants in the area.

*  I think that our 1985 summer vacation 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.  

*  1985 may have been one of the last years we went to Forest Home, a weeklong evangelical church camp in the San Bernardino mountains east of Redlands.  They had separate camps for families, high school camp, junior high camp, Indian camp for grades 4-6, classes for grades K-3 and pre-school, plus a nursery.  In 1985, Lori went to the Indian camp and we had a cabin with bunk beds in the main camp.  The family program was singing, inspiration and Bible study in the morning, and family fun time in the afternoon (lake, pool, mini-golf, hiking, etc.).  There was an evening singing and inspirational program in the evening.  The food was cafeteria style and pretty good.  In some years, a group of families from our church would attend at the same time.  The camp and teaching staff were excellent, and we had world-class speakers and teachers.  We all looked forward to this camp experience.  I really enjoyed the skies at night, since it was a mile high and the sky was usually clear on summer nights.

*  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 bought an IBM PC with two 64K floppy drives in early 1983, and 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 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 and signal strengths on the IBM computer at work.  

*  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.


What did you do in 1985?


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Copyright (c) 2019, Randall J. Seaver

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4 comments:

Diane Gould Hall said...

Great post Randy.

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

We did this theme in Oct 2015, so here is that post.

https://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2015/10/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what-were.html

Janice M. Sellers said...

As Lisa has noted, Randy asked about 1985 in 2015. Here's my post:

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

Linda Stufflebean said...

Here is my link: https://emptybranchesonthefamilytree.com/2019/08/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-49/