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Michael was at ASIJ from
September 1937 until May 1941, when the school closed its doors owing
to mass hysteria and police paranoia that was going around. He spent
the war years in Tokyo, except for a brief three-month stint at the
war's end in Karuizawa, where all gaijin were sequestered by the Tokyo
and Military Police. Ironically, the Imperial family, including
the current Emperor, was also evacuated there. A year later he was
very fortunate to be re-admitted to the Occupation-administered Tokyo
American School in Meguro, where he was graduated in 1950--at least
two years later than his earlier classmates because of the wartime
hiatus. He immigrated that year to the United States, enrolled and
attended the University of Maine in Orono, Maine for two years.
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the US Air Force and after training as an aircraft engine mechanic
and electrical systems specialist schools at Sheppard AFB, Wichita
Falls, Texas, and Chanute AFB, Rantoul, Illinois, received orders
for Korea. Before shipping out, he married Joan Russell of Winslow,
Maine, whom he met at the University of Maine. After returning to
the US from Korea, he became an instructor at Chanute AFB, where he
taught aircraft electrical systems for a year before his final
assignment in 1955 with the Strategic Bomber Command base at
Fairchild AFB. He received his Bachelors degree at the University of
Washington in political science and Far Eastern and Russian Area
Studies while working part time at Seattle's Boeing plant in their
research and development instrumentation laboratories. After a year
serving as a nature language informant (Russian) at Cornell's Modern
Language Department and pursuing a graduate degree, he was forced to
stop and go to work. Because of his varied experiences from 1952 on
and through his work at Boeing, he was hired as a technical editor
by General Electric's Light Military Department in Ithaca. This was
his entry to further more challenging work at a technical publishing
company in Philadelphia and also a stint with IBM there until an
opening beckoned him to Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1963, where he
found himself until retirement from NASA as a Program Documentation
Management Specialist from the Apollo Program through the first
fifteen years of the Shuttle Program. His last assignment was in the
Shuttle Launch Processing Division.
After retiring, he acquired a small woodturning lathe and has not
quit yet!
Joan and Michael live in Titusville, Florida. Joan and Michael
are proud and happy parents of three grown children and four
grandchildren. Two children are teachers, and a third is an
aerospace engineer in Portland, Oregon with his wife.
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