Let’s begin by Inquiring into your early years, your childhood, where you were born, where you grew up, what your family was like? Do you have siblings? What did your parents do, and how young were you when you developed an interest in what has become your career?
I was born in Boston. My mom lived in Vermont at the time, so it’s kind of a home state. We moved to the Washington DC area, to Alexandria, when I was about four. I have a brother whose name is Ian. He is not quite 2 years older than I am. He lives in Maine. Unfortunately, my mom, my father, and my stepfather, I’ll talk all about them, none of them are with us anymore. When my mom lived in Vermont, she was a postal carrier but was dissatisfied with that life. She had been an executive at the age of 22 In New York City, in the early 1960’s, which was very unusual at the time. She worked for the Wool Bureau.
For the what bureau? The Wool Bureau? I didn’t know there was one.
You’ve seen the wool label in wool clothes? The one that says “It’s Real Wool”? Well, that’s her. She actually made that happen. She’s the one who turned that into a nationwide thing. Anyway, she and my father parted ways when I was quite young, so she was a single mother and decided that she was going to take a one way trip to Virginia to throw herself into the mill there. She started a newsletter as a single parent with two little kids.
I was five years old when Star Wars came out. The movie had a pretty significant effect on my life, particularly given that the main character has the same name I do. But my first inkling that I wanted to do something associated with the stars and space exploration may have actually come a little bit before that, when I was four. One day we were at a laundromat, and I was left in the back of the station wagon. Let’s remember that this was the ‘70s. My mom had some library books in the car, and there was this book on astronomy. I was young enough at the time that reading for me was still very new, and I looked at big paragraphs as scary things. I remember just looking at the pictures of the stars and thinking how wonderful it all was. And by the time I was nine years old it was all over and I wanted to be – am I really going say this to the whole world? – I wanted to be a scientist, an engineer, and an astronaut. All those things.
What’s the matter with saying that to the whole world? Those are laudable goals.
What I wanted to do at such an early age seems embarrassing but the fun part is I’ve actually gotten two of the three.
Yes!
I suppose I’ve made my peace with it all. I had figured out very early that I wanted to be in science, but my stepfather didn’t think much of it. He used to tell me things like “a physicist is a boy with a toy” and other disparaging things about my chosen vocation. We moved from Alexandria to Calvert County, Maryland, and I lived there from the age of 9 to 14. So I spent those really formative years in what I felt as a kid to be a very boring part of the world with not a lot of friends, and I was an intense geek at the time. Being a geek is OK now, being a nerd is cool, right? We’re all nerds. That wasn’t true when I was ten, and so I didn’t have the best time growing up. I was so dissatisfied with life in Calvert County that I decided I was going to get the heck out of Dodge and go to college, and so I did that at the age of 14 by going to Simon’s Rock College in Western Massachusetts. I was there for two years and then I went to the University of Maryland. But there was a little problem for me, going to college at 14: I’d never done homework. Homework wasn’t a thing for me. I didn’t care. If you’re in college and you sit down at the physics class, I was the kid that you despised because I was the kid that would come in, take the test, and ace it, having never done anything.
