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My parents sent me to private school in 1950 for one year because my birthday was too late to qualify for the public schools.
From 2nd thru 6th grade I attended Urban Park Elementary School five blocks from my home. From 7th thru 9th grade,
I attended John B. Hood Jr High School. From 10th thru 12th, I attended
W. W. Samuell High School. In high school, I
was a high honor graduate - one of 16 in a class of 540.
Photo page 272
of the Torch year book. My senior year I won the
High School Math Contest at Samuell and won the Slide Rule award presented by the Engineers Club of Dallas to the best student
in each high school in Math and Science. My fellow seniors selected me as the male "Most Likely to Succeed".
Photo page 123.
Graduation week many senior and some teachers signed a special shirt. I brought the
shirt to the 40th and 50th reunions. Notice my
Teachers and the Principal signed my Diploma.
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In the fall of 1962, I started my Freshman year at the University of Texas in Austin. At the end of the first semester, I was selected as
Class Champion in my fencing class by Ed Barlow, the head of required PE. He had the other 60 guys in class line up, and I defeated all of
them in a one touch contest. I majored in Math. In my senior year just back from Germany, I showed up at the organizing meeting of the German
Club and was elected President. On June 4, 1966, I received a Bachelor of Arts with Honors. President Johnson and Lady Bird were in
attendance because their elder daughter like me was among the 4,000 graduates in the plaza below
The Tower of the University of Texas.
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In the fall of 1966, I started my graduate work at the University of Chicago in Computer Science. This was
one of the early Masters programs in Computer Science anywhere. There were virtually no books except for
programming manuals. We studied academic papers on a variety of topics, e.g., proving program correctness
and artificial intelligence. We were solving various problems in a variety of programming languages.
My parents drove up from Dallas to attend my graduation on June 8, 1968.
The ceremony was full of medieval regalia and splendor in the atmospheric
Rockefeller Chapel.
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I started work at Bell Labs June 10, 1966 as a Member of Technical Staff (the highest technical level)
in Holmdel, New Jersey. In September 1966, Bell Labs relocated me to
the brand new Indian Hill Laboratory in Naperville, Illinois near Chicago which
focused on Electronic Switching Systems.
These Systems transformed the entire telephone network in the world.
Bell Labs paid me full salary while I worked part time and they paid for my Master's degree in Computer Science at
the University of Chicago. I also attended some in-house
training on telephone switching topics. This Graduate Study Program was a tremendous investment
in new employees. And it changed my entire life.
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In 1967 less than a year after graduation from the University of Texas, I became a Life Member of the
Texas Ex-Students Association. In 2000, I endowed
the Parrish Computer Science Scholarship.
It is managed by the Texas Ex-Students Association
and annual winners are selected by the Computer Science department. As part of endowing the scholarship,
I was asked to submit a photo for the Legends Room. I submitted a photo of myself and Margaret Thatcher.
Typicaly I visit Austin in September each year to meet the current Parrish CS scholarship winner at the
Scholarship banquet of the Ex-Students Association.
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The joined Circumnavigators Club, founded in 1902, in 1989. The requirement
for membership was a trip around the world. My first Circumnavigation in 1971 which took 6 weeks was packed with visits to
famous and historic places. In 1999, I became Treasurer of the Chicago Chapter serving for 5 years. I
created the Website for the chapter in 2001.
I am the longest serving Board Member and remain the Webmaster.
In 2011, to honor the achievement of Amundsen on its 100th anniversary I made 100 circumnavigations around the South Pole.
My article on the South Pole was published in the Circumnavigator's Log. It can be accessed from my
trip report.
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In the 1980s and early 1990s, I worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Case Western Reserve Library in Cleveland, the library of the New England
Historical and Genealogical Society in Boston, and at local libraries in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine
to trace the Parrish branch
of my family tree. This was slow, patient work, but yielded high quality, trustworthy results.
The discoveries included 5 ancestors on the Mayflower and 12 ancestors who fought in the American Revolution.
I became a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, and later served for 5 years as President of the
Fox Valley Chapter of the SAR. I remain on the Board serving as Webmaster.
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