A Twelve Year Grand Tour

This book contains a series of light and mostly humorous vignettes that narrate incidents and activities in my life at Fordham College, in the U. S. Navy, and in between. Included are: how I explored Fordham, both above and below ground; my part in the New York City art scene circa 1950; my adventures on several hitch-hiking trips; my summer as a union pipe fitter; another summer spent climbing the fuel pipes at the Bethlehem Steel Company; how I may have had too many credits to graduate, but won the University Poetry Contest anyway; how I had to prove I'd been baptized in order to get married; how I learned engineering and helped invent a new missile at the Martin Aircraft Company; how I completed three Navy schools, became a father and an Airborne Combat Information Center Officer; how I became known as the king of cumshaw; how the inspection team found too many light bulbs and all the electronic spare parts on the east coast in my repair shops; how I won a sewing machine playing poker in Iceland; how I brought home furs from Athens for my mother, my wife, and a neighbor, as well as a gown from Paris for my baby daughter; how I took an art tour of Pisa, Florence, and Venice guided by one of my fellow officers; how we operated our detachment out of the Hotel Royale in Naples; how our plane was forced down in Algiers by the French; how we took a tour of the island of Gozo despite engine failures in two of our boats; how we partied at the taberna in the village called "Village" and hunted for the ruins of Atlantis in Souda Bay on Crete; how I helped invent Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School, getting a masters degree in the process; how I traveled across the US with Steve, age six, visiting caves of ice, staying in a cowboy bunkhouse, watching a shoot-out, and conversing with a talking bird.
About the Author: August Martin (Marty) Wildberger was born in Baltimore on November 1, 1930. After completing studies at Fordham University with a BS degree in mathematics, he worked briefly for the Martin Aircraft Company where he acquired his life-long interest in computers and electronics. He served for 23 years in the U.S. Navy, first as a Combat Information Center Officer in Airborne Early Warning Aircraft, and then, after earning an MS degree in Mathematics from the US Naval Postgraduate School, as a specialist in Aerospace Engineering. After retiring from the Navy in 1976 and after completing a Ph.D. degree from Catholic University in Washington, DC, he worked in academic positions and then in industry as Chief Computer Scientist for General Physics Corporation. He retired at 70 from the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA, and has since devoted himself to playing with grandchildren and great-grandchildren as well as writing memoirs and poems. Two of his recent books are: "Too Swift Becoming and Other Poems," 2014 "The Boy from 30th Street," 2014 Both are available from Amazon in paperback or e-book.