Today's Featured Biography

 
Daniel Falconer

This is long and boring. You've been warned.

Ok, so I dropped out of SRHS right after the National Merit Scholarship exams in 1967. Thanks to the principal whose name now escapes me for suggesting that if I didn't want to cut my hair for the class pictures perhaps I wasn't cut out to graduate; best thing that ever happened to me. Sold encyclopedias door to door in Houston, Austin, and New Orleans, then went back to school in 1968 but dropped out again (ref. Thomas Wolfe). Got a GED, went to San Jacinto JC and dropped out there, too; hmmm, I think I see a pattern...

Over the next several decades I was lucky enough to (not in exact order but close): play in some good outlaw-country-rock bands; marry a crazy woman who quickly left me to join a religious cult/commune; realize I didn't want to spend my life in bars and hotels; work as a surgical instrument set assembler at Seton Hospital Austin, where I believe I contracted Hepatitis C (not that I knew it at the time); marry a wonderful woman and gain an amazing stepdaughter; become the Floor Manager/Assistant Buyer for the largest vendor of fine wines in Texas; teach myself to type really fast with the aid of mind-altering substances; teach myself a couple of programming languages; talk my way into a job selling computers in the first Computerland in Austin, moving up to store manager; get a degree in Computer Science; divorce; move to Key West, Florida and become a pirate; sail around the Caribbean for a few years; work at MIT for a few years; marry another wonderful woman from Boston; move back to Key West and become IT Director for an independent oil company there; move to Fort Lauderdale and work for an internet start-up; divorce the second wonderful woman I married (by the way, and just to be clear, there was no animosity with either of my non-crazy wives, and in fact we are all great friends and I regularly babysit their dogs. We just grew in different directions); move back to Texas and take a flyer as Operations Manager for a primate sanctuary near Pearsall (turns out it's not that different from growing up on a farm near Pasadena raising cattle, except the monkeys are sneakier and there were a LOT more rattlesnakes and feral hogs); retire and take care of my invalid father until his passing a few years later; and then take a protocol of a new drug that cleared my Hep C. Phew. A Grateful Dead song comes to mind...

Now I divide my time between La Grange, Flatonia, Denver (where my stepdaughter lives) and Key West (where most of my friends live). As a Cuban girlfriend in Key West used to say quite often, "Life is grand - just ask Dan!" Ok, it sounds better in Spanish...

My favorite colors are seafoam and cobalt; my hobbies are collecting/watching movies, playing guitar and driving my Corvette Grand Sport on twisty roads. And world peace!

Feel free to get in touch, even if only to tell me what an @55 I was in HS :) or now, for that matter.

Respectfully, vaya con Dios, and a prayer for our fallen comrades,
Daniel

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