Today's Featured Biography

 
Frank Wimberly

My father was from a prominent southern family in Georgia. They were planters, lawyers, clergymen and physicians mostly. His branch moved to New Orleans in the late 1800's. He attended Tulane University but in 1940, at age 21, he enlisted in a Naval Officer training program called V-7. When Pearl Harbor was attacked he was an Ensign in the engineering division of the battleship USS Tennessee. Lightly damaged, the Tennessee went to Bremerton for repairs. While he was there my father met my mother. She was a country girl from New Mexico who was visiting her sister who worked at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. They were married after a four week courtship. My father returned to the South Pacific but some months later he was assigned to a new heavy cruiser, the USS Baltimore http://www.flickr.com/photos/frank-deb-w/62486235/ , which was under construction in Quincy, Mass. I was actually born in Boston because of that. By the end of WWII my dad was LCDR and chief engineer of the Baltimore. He went to work for PG&E in the Bay Area but after a year or so got a job at Mare Island as a civilian engineer. We lived in Vallejo from about 1948 to 1951 and I attended Roosevelt School during that time. When the Korean War started my father went back on active duty as a CDR and was assigned to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. After he left active duty he went to work as a nuclear engineer at Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in Pittsburgh, PA. My mother, however, was western born and bred and she didn't like Pittsburgh much. My dad was transferred by Westinghouse to Mare Island where he worked in the Bettis Resident Engineer Office. When I was in high school he was the Bettis Resident Manager at MI. I attended VJHS before VHS.

I mention all the Naval stuff because it might be meaningful to people who worked at Mare Island.

After VHS I went to Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University). As a sophomore, I transferred to UC Berkeley and Married Joanna Binneweg in 7/1963. Daughter Diane was born in 6/1964. I graduated from Berkeley with a degree in math in 6/1965 and received an M.A. in math from UC Riverside in 1966. Joanna and I were divorced in 1968. I Received an M.S. in psychology from Carnegie Mellon in 1969 and a Ph.D. in math/computer science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1978. Deborah Ann Komaiko and I were married in 1977. I Worked at Bell Labs for a couple of years but for most of my career I worked at Carnegie Mellon in Robotics, Public Policy and, finally, Philosophy. We adopted 5 year old Flor Janeth in Mexico in 1997. We moved to New Mexico, the land of my maternal ancestors, in 1998, but I continued to work with CMU colleagues. Elder daughter Diane teaches AP Latin at the Emma Willard School in New York http://www.emmawillard.org/ . Flor married Derrick Sandoval in 2019. She and her husband had a baby named Eliana in November of 2020. They each have two children from previous relationships. Deborah and I are raising her son Matthew who was born in 2012. Because of that we get all the exercise we need but I play tennis several times a week anyway. Debby retired a couple of years ago from private practice as a therapist (LPCC). I translate old documents from Spanish to English for the New Mexico State Historian and a some friends and I are studying books on the mathematics of relativity, gravity and quantum field theory.

New Mexico is a great place to live. It's about like California was in, say, 1880. Seriously :-) There are only about as many people in the entire state as there are in Alameda County California and most of them live in Albuquerque. Many residential streets in Santa Fe are still unpaved and the oldest buildings downtown were built in the 1600's.

I must have really been out of it in high school. I didn't even know there *were* sororities. Or I don't remember knowing.

Diane and her husband Peter McCorkle have three handsome sons: Daniel, John and August(Gus). See http://www.flickr.com/photos/frank-deb-w/22011517/

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