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Today's Featured Biography

Nancy Baum Delain

After graduating from BHBL, I went to Smith College for four years, graduating from there with a degree in biological sciences. Then, sick of school, I went to work at Rockefeller University for two years. I decided I really did not want to spend the rest of my life in a virology lab, so I returned to school (RPI) for a master's in technical writing. That did well for me; I spent over 20 years working, both as an employee and as a freelancer, as a tech writer and documentation manager.

As part of my tech writing career, I spent a couple of years in the publishing world. I was computer sciences acquisitions editor at Springer-Verlag New York, a German publisher of post-graduate-level scientific books, monographs and journals. As part of my job, I helped create Springer's first foray into the software publishing world. This was in the days when one could simply insert a full disk and an empty disk into the two disk drives associated with your computer (which had a max of 64K of RAM) and write "copy a: b:" We wanted that not to happen. So it was up to me, along with the copyright lawyer we hired, to come up with the killer copyright statement. I had FUN doing that ... and then I saw the check we wrote to the lawyer's firm, and decided that I wanted to become an intellectual property lawyer.

Many years intervened; I moved on to other jobs, I moved myself around the country and to Sweden and back, I got married, I had my daughter, I got divorced (he needed that...). When I started the divorce proceedings, I decided that it was time to make a life decision and either go to law school or not go to law school. So I went to law school.

I loved law school, and did well. But no one wanted to hire a 45+-year-old non-engineer as a patent lawyer. So I thumbed my nose at the legal system, passed the NY bar and the patent bar (both first time through, thank you very much), and hung out a shingle. In the intervening years (I graduated from law school in 2003), I've never looked back. It was great wisdom on the part of those hiring partners to not hire me. I've been happier as a solo than I would ever have been working for anyone else.

I live in Schenectady. I moved here after law school to be close to my aging and not-yet-ailing parents. I knew they'd need help eventually, and I did not want to have to interrupt my life to go back home to help them. So I simply made this area "home." They continued to live in their house with its five acres and 3500 square feet until Dad was 90 and Mom 89. At that point, Dad simply fell apart physically and had to be hospitalized. Mom had Alzheimer's and could not live alone. So they each went into separate nursing homes. The homes were not far from me and not far apart, so I took Mom to visit Dad (she was the easier to transport) about 3-4 times per week until he died about four months after going into the nursing home, in August 2014. Mom followed hard on his heels, dying five months later in January 2015.

In the meantime, I'd gotten married again (in 2011) to a delightful gentleman whom I met on an internet dating site. We had some wonderful times during our five years together, finding all the local hole-in-the-wall eateries and refurnishing the house. But he, too, was sick (type 2 diabetes) and didn't he turn up his toes and die right smack in between my parents' deaths, on Pearl Harbor Day, 2014.

My daughter has now flown the coop (as well she should, having been born in 1990) and lives in the Boston area. The rest of my family is flung to the four winds. I'm in touch with some of our classmates (old friends do indeed last forever in most cases). And I have become a crazy cat lady; I have eight kitties who share my home.

I spend my days practicing law, traveling, gardening, reading, enjoying my friends, and yes, watching far too much TV.

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