Archie Julien's Page

Current Home {City, ST}

Mackay, Qld (Australia)

Attended HP {No, Attended, or Graduate}

Graduate

High School Graduation Year {yyyy}

1960

June, January, or August

June

Elementary Schools Attended

Parkside, Park Manor

Education after High School

University of Illinois at Chicago '79 MSME
Texas A&M University '91 PhDEE

Business

Retired

Spouse

Patricia

Biography

My last great achievements in Hyde Park were in the Chemistry Lab. So, after leaving Hyde Park in June 1960, I spent a year enjoying the campus at Ann Arbor pursuing Chemical Engineering. I left to spend a few years studying Music and Psychology at the Point and Jimmy's. I went to The Big Hyde Park Be-In in 1965.

Every once in a while, the engineering siren would again call to me, and I spent a couple of years in Civil Engineering supervising reconstruction of I-80 between Indiana and the East Dan Ryan, 1966-67.

I researched various campuses for facilities suitable for my interests, mostly Iowa City, Madison, and Minneapolis, but to no avail, so I returned to my music and psychology. Eventually, I turned to religion, and the Lord honored me with Patricia Ferguson, my Guardian Angel in the flesh, in August, 1974 when soon after in November we were married.

I immediately returned to formal education at the University of Illinois in Chicago, soon followed by Trish; I in Chemical Engineering (BS, 1977) and Mechanical Engineering (MS, 1979), and she in Geography (BA, 1979; MA, 1981).

Did I tell you Trish was from the Tropics, and the closest she had come to snow younger than 17 was when she opened the freezer door one day and observed that, "It must be like living in there." Well, she had a number of similar comments about Chicago's -25 degrees (-81 including wind chill) winters, so one fine day in 1983 she ups and applies to the Rangeland and Ecology Department at Texas A&M University at a time when my brother Guy was about one hundred miles from campus. Since Guy was close by it was hard to accuse her of exactly ripping up my roots, and I went along when she left.

Once again the lure of engineering sounded, and I entered the doctoral program in Electrical Engineering in 1986. I got my PhD in 1991, and Trish got her MS in Ecology, just in time for The Collapse of the cold war, and federal funding for defense research and development. However, an engineer can just about always survive by computer programming, so we kept the wolf at bay when I took a job in Houston in 1992. Since that time, things in the engineering employment community have improved to almost the point where they were prior to The Collapse.

We've had no children, but an extremely high-maintenance dog and cat for the past 15 years. I mean everybody is allergic to the cat, including the dog, and so the dog has to be bathed at least every other day, and rubbed down with cortisone. This cat is so finicky that "Morris" (the cat, remember?) has nothing on her. If her milk is more than 15 minutes old, it has to be dumped. Do you know cats have actually starved to death rather than eat what they don't like. Yeah, I know. I'm tempted. As costly as the two of them are, we could probably feed a third world country, but what can you do when it's family?

My love to you all. Archie