Butte High School reunion G-S

    I married Gladys Jerke, class of 1958, graduated from High School and left for Bootcamp all in the same week!! In the Navy we had shore duty at Alameda Naval Air Station across the bay from San Francisco and led a wonderfully happy life until orders came to go aboard the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard. After 6 months as an electronic technician I got out of the Navy and went back to Butte and worked in the 3300 foot level of the Steward Mine! I was on shift in the back of an old drift when the Hebdon Dam earthquake struck. The "tunnel" seemed to spiral around and it was pretty spooky: we assumed the mine had caved in!! This was enough for me and ended my two month mining career!!

    We earned our way through Montana State in Bozeman then took a job as a Hughes Fellow in Los Angeles where I built travelling wave tubes that transmitted the signals back from the first moon shots and also attended graduate school at the University of Southern California. The Watts riots broke out just down the street from us and that convinced us to get out of Los Angeles and we went to Tucson for 5 great years in graduate school at the University of Arizona, earning a PhD in Atmospheric Science. In those years of school 5 kids came into our family: Susan, Joseph (who is now professor in EE at Bozeman), Raymond (who is professor of Physics at Michigan Tech), Glenny (who has just accepted a job at the School of Mines in the Bureau of Mines in Butte) and Sarah.

    We wound up moving to Alaska where Glenn became Professor of Physics affiliated with the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska. We've been here ever since, almost 38 years. We've gotten to travel a lot, in fact all too much it sometimes seems and spent high interesting sabbaticals in Switzerland and Vienna. Pretty much every year we go back to good old Butte where sometimes we get together with my old neighbor Ann Lynch and her brother Jonnie, known simply as JD in the political world. We get together sometimes, especially at the Tucson mineral show with Robin and Phil Callow and during trips to San Francisco sometimes to see Suzanne Dunlap. We've lost contact with our old friends Nic and Rusty Knievel ...anybody know about them? But I well remember being in delinquent run by Mr Harris and with Bobby Knievil who had a hubcap ring at the time. Nic was my best friend. His grandmother was a saint and his grandfather a super character who sold Volkswagens and once Nic picked me up in a Porche that they got in the dealership!! We tried our damndest to roll it over, going around curves too fast. Once me and Nic dressed up like girls and thumbed rides and talked in high pitched voices and got kicked out of the car real fast!! We did many other pranks, like putting poop in bags, setting them on fire in front of somebody's door, ringing the doorbell and watching as the owner came out and stomped all over the mess! Who would ever think that a guy like this would get all expenses paid trips to all seven continents? It was the crazy currents that ran all through the old Butte that we knew and loved.

Sincerely,

Glenn Shaw