Creative Commons Chuck Kollars' Personal Home Page

Chuck

Youth

I was born in summer in the 1950s in Bremerton Washington, and grew up there. Bremerton is less than an hour's ferry ride from Seattle, more than an hour's drive. It's close enough for some culture to rub off yet far enough to not be just a suburb. Bremerton's population was about 35,000 then. Bremerton's major employer was the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, a government facility that made warships.

I moved only once. At that time the town had two high schools. I went to East Bremerton High School. In my family of origin I had two siblings: a sister close in age and a much younger brother.

College

I spent five years getting a four year BS degree in the mid '70s. The school was in the middle of Boston, and the new experiences of urban living kept crowding out serious studying. I eventually got a degree in General Studies, which meant I took nearly every 100 level course the college offered.

I only lived in a regular college dormitory for two years. I spent two years in a co-operative house and one year living completely off campus. These living arrangements provided lots of opportunities to learn how to cook, shop, and maintain a household.

Working

After graduating from college I moved to Northern California. After a couple months of fruitless job hunting in San Francisco I figured out that San Francisco and "silicon valley" aren't precisely the same place. Jobs were plentiful in the computer companies an hour to the south of the city.

I lived in that area for 12 years. I lived in Palo Alto (twice), Mountain View, Los Altos, Santa Clara, Los Gatos, San Jose, Cupertino, and East Palo Alto.

At first I was always the youngest person in the group. I had flashes of technical brilliance, and as some managers told me many years later also a reputation for being a bit difficult to control. As the years passed I outgrew the mantle of favored young person without ever completely growing into either marketing or management.

Family

In 1989 I moved to the Boston area of Massachusetts and married Kaye. Nobody could predict what would happen, other than that it would be an interesting adventure. Initially we lived in Beverly.

After Jennie was born and before Caleb was born we moved further north to Ipswich. Ipswich is a tiny town, around 6000 people decades ago and only a little over double that now, with a social milieu reminiscent of Mayberry RFD. It's about 35 miles from downtown Boston, about as far outside the 128 beltway as the beltway is outside of downtown Boston. Ipswich is a good compromise of cost, commute distance, and decent schools. The commuter rail line from Boston goes right through Ipswich on its way to Newburyport.

For most of a decade I saw myself as middle-aged (40-ish), with a family with a wife and two kids but only one cat and no dogs. Suddenly there were kids that wanted homelife to be organized and regular. All-nighters at the office were frowned on, as were horribly out of date clothes and sleeping in past noon on Saturday. It was time to act like a grownup.

Independent

The marriage didn't work out. I've been out of the house since summer 1998, and our divorce was final in early 1999. We communicate fairly amicably regarding the kids, mostly via email. We're certainly not friends though. Our interests and likes and values are so different that it's hard to explain how we ever got together in the first place. It seems sometimes people get married for reasons that have little to do with the other person.

I live in an apartment in downtown Ipswich. I don't have a TV, partly in an effort to simplify my life. The location is great. From my apartment I can walk to the car mechanic, the post office, the doctor, the bank, the pub, the toy store, and the shrink.

Previously I lived in an apartment in Peabody, but found it overly wearing to commute to see my kids and be involved in their schools. And I lived for a year and a half in a tiny studio apartment in the same building I live in now. I liked the low rent, and coped with the tininess at first, but eventually it got to me so much I moved when there was an opportunity. I couldn't even hide birthday presents very well because there was so little space. And when the kids stayed over night getting up to go to the bathroom at night entailed stepping around sleeping bodies.

I took the opportunity of living by myself to investigate a lot of possible personal interests. Many of these were re-visitations of interests from my college and young adult days, which of course mostly being rather inappropriate for my current age didn't stick.

I revived my interest in movies (especially foreign, uncommon, old, and arty ones). finding rather obscure art house and second run theaters that aren't consumed by the "blockbuster"; after all my interest is in movies not hype. Although around here the larger theaters are mostly to be avoided, several of the smaller theaters do offer some unusual movies. Some can't do anything else, as they're too small to get the studio's attention for the blockbusters. And some are programmed by an "old person" and combine less urgency about making money with much broader tastes. But I couldn't initially find a genuine "art house" movie theater on the North Shore.

I read even more widely, and attempt to use the local library consortium to reduce costs (although I've found my more unusual interests and the libraries' collections sometimes don't match up at that well).

I very much enjoy listening to choral music. So I located the various performing groups in my area. Chorus North Shore is a large general community chorus spearheaded by a dynamic -but aging- director. The Newburyport Choral Society is another large general community chorus also spearheaded by a dynamic -but no longer young- director. The Northshoremen Barbershop Chorus of Beverly performs their canonical repertoire irregularly for the local public, often as smaller subgroups. Cantemus is a small auditioned high quality "chamber chorus". Its programs are produced by its director who is currently an academic of very wide experience and erudition, so its programs are often learning experiences as well as musical experiences. Coro Stella Maris is an even smaller group that specializes in little-known but gorgeous early music.

And I revived my interest in walking and hiking, which since then my physical limitations have gradually reduced from my marathon 12 miler barefoot on the beach down to just a couple hours a week with other retired people organized by a local Bay Circuit Trail committee member, further down to just exploring nearby parks, and finally down to almost nothing.

I saw my kids about once a week while they were growing up. It seemed time passed all too quickly; I remembered vividly changing Jennie's diapers, and I remembered Caleb not being able to work a computer mouse very well because his coordination wasn't that good yet. Nowadays Caleb installs software and reconfigures computers -especially the five recycled ones in his house- regularly.

Semi-Retired

My body is falling apart (much much moreso than is typical for my age); I have trouble sitting and standing, trip and bump into things an awful lot, and can't run or ride a bike let alone ski. And my mind has slowed down significantly. So it's impossible for me to keep up with the "young hot dogs" and I know better than to even try. I've withdrawn from the labor force; by living carefully I can pay the bills, although I can't save anything during what I once expected to be my peak saving years. The model that fits best is to think of me as firmly "retired", ignoring the fact that my chronological age says that shouldn't happen for another decade.

My time is fully occupied. I drive senior citizens to their doctors appointments for the local Council on Aging, some weeks once or more and others none.

For several years I tried to help the local school computer technicians, even going into the school for a couple days each week during most of those years. The state's rule of thumb says they should have three people to support the computers in the middle and high schools, but they actually have only one full time equivalent, so there's plenty to do. They use a curious combination of technologies that are advanced for a high school with other technologies that are many years old. My previous work had been with the same technologies the school was using years later, so my experience was quite useful to them. Inevitably even the technologies used by the school moved on, but I didn't; as a result my previous experience became increasingly irrelevant.

I contributed my time and effort -particularly aiding their computer use- to some local non-profit organizations, particularly the Ipswich Historical Society (now Ipswich Museum) and the Ipswich River Watershed Association (IRWA). I found my relatively web-knowledgeable voice stood apart in the organization of mostly older people. But I wasn't good enough at making routine decisions, pinching pennies, or working with the wide diversity of both professional and volunteer people with different agendas, to be more helpful than not overall. And I found I wasn't emotionally suited to the rhythms of the ecological organization, which has to measure progress over decades rather than years. I was particularly frustrated by an effort to restore the annual river herring run after I realized that decisions made elsewhere (for example fishery rules) and a long long time ago (for example residential water supply systems) seemed to have dramatically larger effects than anything we tried.

I have become interested in producing good statistical charts directed to the general public, for example this display of the value of a dollar over time.

For a while several years ago I was moderately active in local politics, particularly those directly related to my children's schools. One can actually follow and occasionally particpate in local politics in a very small town like Ipswich. Local concerns of mine related to the funding of public education included our local property tax rate, the demographic characterization of the population of Ipswich, and the purpose and composition of the local Finance Committee. Other local concerns of mine related to the function and performance of our schools included funding of the Ipswich public schools, our state's requirement to pass the MCAS test to graduate from high school, the federal No Child Left Behind program inspired by Massachusetts, and education of gifted and talented students.

Also I've grown old enough that I feel justified in pontificating on some wider issues, with the theme that something about humankind living on this planet is going horribly wrong. I seriously wonder if our current population level could be sustained without "drawing down our capital" by extracting fossil fuels to turn into food. And shouldn't our goal be to enhance the quality of human life around the globe rather than growing our economy at all costs? Here are my thoughts on our foreign policy (fighting extremist violence in particular), our domestic policy, some what I consider common sense issues, and some things about our world that are still unsolved puzzles to me.

And I've grown very frustrated with a foreign policy that's so wildly out of tune with my values. Even though I was kicking and screaming "no no no", our country went in the other direction. Now the "ugly American" tourist is back, and will be with us for another generation. So many of of our well-intentioned efforts to be the world's policeman backfire that I'm beginning to think it's folly to try.

...Semi-Retired II

I started out expecting the retired phase of my life to be a relatively short winding down, lasting only a few years. Surprisingly, it now feels to me like it's lasted longer than any of the other phases, and may continue for many more years.

Recently my interest in movies has expanded and deepened. This has happened partly as other of my interests have dried up so I have more time, but mostly because some new resources have recently arrived.

A lingering problem has been the lack of a real "art house" movie theater in the North Shore area. Although some theaters sometimes show what could be called "art movies" by accident, it's not been possible to get a steady diet of them. And the wide variety of movies available in downtown Boston is inaccessible to me because downtown Boston is too far and too difficult for me to travel to. But now we have something as good -or maybe better-, a new idea promulgated by a movie loving theater owner. The local movie theater in Salem has installed 20 cushy seats, a good screen about the height of a person and an overhead projector and sound system, and some high end DVD gear into a spare nook which they now call their Screening Room. They show really unusual movies there, sometimes a DVD that's publicly available but nobody's ever heard of, other times a one–off DVD they got from the filmmaker. Unfortunately few others find this as wonderful as I do —too often I'm the only person there— so it might not continue to be used primarily as an "art house".

Of course even though it's a considerable improvement, just one theater still can't show everything that interests me. And no theater can show the old movies that I missed last year or last decade. So I've set up my own DVD player too. While DVD rental services focus on those who want to see current movies without going to a theater, some of the rental service catalogs are very large and also include lots of the more unusual and older movies that interest me. When setting up my DVD player, I wanted the movies to show on my PC's existing flatscreen monitor, and I didn't have (and don't want) a TV. I had to make the DVD Player and the PC share a monitor, and setting up the DVD Player in this environment was trickier than usual.

Several local film festivals have sprung into existence fairly recently. The Northern-Lights/Newburyport-Documentary Film Festival has existed for several years now. I initially becamse aware of them because one of their venues is one of the small movie theaters I frequent. The Manhattan Short Film Festival has recently added a local venue. And the Salem Documentary Film Festival is already moderately large even though it's just getting off the ground.

I've also dived into breadmaking. Building on an old interest, I've been investigating both "modern" and "artisan" bread loaves, and have even revisited a reprint of the old The Tassajara Bread Book that I remember from my youth.

For many years I did all my bread mixing and kneading by hand. But my body can't handle that any more. So I've been experimenting with cheap, foolproof ways to make bread without hardly any physical effort. Every time I've found I needed a piece of rather specialized equipment, I've kludged or cadged or substituted it so as to meet the need as cheaply as possible.

My digestion's sensitivity to wheat (apparently specifically gluten) torpedoed my earlier plan of baking a different loaf of bread almost every day. After several sleepless nights, discussing "gastric reflux" with my physician, stocking lots of antacid liquid and tablets, and experimenting with substituting whole wheat flour, it became clear I couldn't bake bread that frequently and eat it all myself. Fortunately I've found that by baking only two or three loaves per week and skipping bread in other contexts (for example no toast with an omelette) my digestion doesn't get too upset.

For not quite a year I tried to provide useful volunteer services to Appleton Farms. The Appleton acreage began as a relatively large farm way back in the 1600's, and now supports a variety of local ecologically concious farming-related initiatives in pretty much the same location. It's one of the oldest continuously operating farms in this country. The group I was a part of focuses on one of the farm's current particular needs: maintenance projects that exceed the resources of the regular "handyman" yet aren't large enough to contract out. I eventually dropped out because my body currently is so decayed that much of the time I was more of a load than a help.

Although I no longer make any attempt to be active in person in local politics, I still make some of my ideas available semi-anonymously via the web. Of particular interest right now is the issue of preventing flooding in downtown Ipswich.


One of the constants from the early 1980's, through my family and independent phases, and continuing now in my semi-retired phase is my favorite rocking chair.

That describes my identity in a nutshell. You may be interested in other aspects such as my family of origin or Great-grandma Dover's Autobiography.

Location: N42 40.86' W070 50.35'
 (North America> USA> Massachusetts> Boston> North Shore> Ipswich)
Time: UTC-5 (USA Eastern Time Zone)
 (UTC-4 summertime --"daylight savings time")
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