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Today's Featured Biography
Dale Darling
We moved from Stow to Wadsworth in 1966, so I missed high school in Stow, graduated from Wadsworth in 1970. Not sure I ever quite fitted there, but probably wouldn't have at Stow either, being on the odd side of things all in all. Went to Glen Oaks Community College for two years (AS 1972) then University of Akron for awhile, until finishing two bachelor and two masters degrees in piano performance and music composition. In August of 1978, Shan and I married in her hometown of Cambridge, OH and less than one year later moved to Boulder, CO where I entered CU and eventually finished a doctorate in music composition.
We stayed out here. I tied fishing flies commercially while working on the degree - along with a variety of other this's and that's - and then opened one fly shop, then another and then a third. They worked well enough and long enough to shod and feed our daughters, and we also hosted eight exchange students during those years, until the shops failed, we went broke and moved the small cabin we'd bought while things were going well.
Since departing the retail biz, two of our daughters have finished college and married, and our youngest is now a junior music major at a local college. I've composed and written a couple of operas, along with composing a variety of other music for orchestra, string quartet, this and that combination of instruments and a song cycle. Also wrote a novel which will remain as it is, along with a variety of things - thoughts about life, girls, fishing, dogs and how God is before all things. And so on. Presently, I'm shooting, editing and trying to figure out how to market fly tying instructional videos. Another curious challenge. Also tying full dress Atlantic Salmon flies, which are troublesome but beautiful.
Shan and I attend every performance that Jessica is in, knowing this time is drawing to an end, watch movies on DVD when we will and read quite often. I think that even though we've been married for nearly 32 years we still feel like newlyweds most of the time, but with more smells, aches and pains and opinions than we once had. Interesting how that goes. We enjoy the wildlife in our area, including deer, elk, bear, bighorn sheep, mountain lions and so on, and I like hooking the wild trout that will rise to one of my dry flies while fishing the stream that flows past our cabin.
It would be nice to hear from some of my old friends. Maybe a few remember calling me "Turtle", the reason of which still escapes me, yet I remain scarred from it. I'm a bit too tall for my own good, carry lots of pain from this and that injury and so on, but am always ready to encourage people to thrive in life, and to laugh at a good joke, and sometimes a bad one just for good manners, which often escape me as well.
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