I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and attended IU-Purdue after graduating from South Side High School. I majored in philosophy and French, although a large number of programs of study attracted me once I began college.
        Growing up, I played just about every team sport one possibly can in the USA. As a real Hoosier, my first love was basketball. I played chess with anyone who was willing, detested the rock and roll of the 50s, carried out just a few too many practical jokes in high school, and managed to exit said institution without becoming educated despite the best efforts of a number of devoted teachers.
        After a summer of 60-hour weeks laying high-speed rail and tending to my weekend window wash business, I crossed the Atlantic on an Italian battleship turned passenger boat to study my junior year in Strasbourg, France.
        Probably the year abroad tipped the scales in favor of French more than philosophy, even though I took a wonderful course on the pre-Socratics with an elderly professor who would quote Aristotle in Greek at least twice every lecture.
        Since, on the one hand, Indiana University accepted me for graduate study in French and since, on the other, Yale and Cornell turned me down in philosophy, I headed for Bloomington, Indiana in the summer of 1971. Besides, I abandoned neither discipline by reading quantities of Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and, of course, Descartes. 
        My trajectory through life included the following parentheses. The I.U. French & Italian Dept. sent me in 1973-74 as an assistant d'anglais in a high school/École normale in Cachan, a suburb of Paris, and the home turf of Georges Marchais, the leader at the time of the French Communist Party. This was an exchange arrangement. I learned only upon my return to I.U. that my French counterpart was a fellow named Bernard Lamour, an obvious witticism on the part of some French Ministry of Education bureaucrat. The École normale -- a sort of elite graduate school -- put me on the basketball team. On the team I learned French that wasn't in my dictionary, and traveled to London for the penultimate game of the season against a British school's team whose hospitality did not extend to losing the game to their guests.
        I tore myself away from Bloomington, that fair, if not ideal, university town when I.U. saw fit to grant me a Ph.D. in French. I first taught at I.U. Northwest, in Gary, Indiana. After my family choked on smog for three years, I applied for an opening at WKU in Bowling Green, Kentucky in the early summer of 1985. I had driven through on my way to Florida a year earlier and had made a mental note that Bowling Green might not be a bad place to watch the children grow up.
        I have been teaching French language and literature at WKU for thirty-two years. One of my supreme professional satisfactions to date has been to follow from afar several WKU French graduates who have done well themselves at I.U. or elsewhere.
        For recreation, I enjoy playing basketball and soccer, as well as refereeing soccer. I referee soccer in Bowling Green and have refereed as well in Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, South Dakota, and Florida. I cover all ages from U-10 through college and adult recreational soccer. It's a lot of fun -- most of the time!