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After graduating from Sunset, my first two years in college were at Oregon State University where I focused on mathematics, following the crowd of people interested in a scientific direction. However, it soon became evident to me that my interest and abilities did not lie in the science/math direction at all, so I began to continue my high school passion, German, originally sparked by Mrs. Eleanor Duncan. I also began to study Russian at OSU following John Ferguson’s interest in that language as well. I remember that I was so interested that I took first and second quarter together. Then with a recommendation by German professor Dr. Walter Kraft of OSU, I transferred my junior year to Stanford and entered a program with nine other students of German focused on receiving a MA in German and teaching German as a profession. After receiving my BA and MA from Stanford, I transferred to the University of California in Berkeley where I was a teaching assistant in the German department while continuing my studies in German.
I took a one-year leave of absence from UC Berkeley in 1968-69 during which time I studied German at the University of Hamburg in former West Germany. It was there that I met my future wife Helena who was a student there from Czechoslovakia in economics and statistics. Within 1 ½ years we were married first in Prague in June 1970 and later that year in Beaverton for my family and friends. After teaching German and Russian at California State College in San Bernardino for three years, we both moved to Portland where I decided to begin a new career working with the Federal Government. I first worked for the IRS and after three years transferred to the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), an independent government agency of the Department of Energy. Helena was already working at BPA as a mathematician, and I began a career with the Department of Information Services (computers). I was one of ten trainees beginning in 1983. Later Helena and I both took early retirement from BPA, I in 1999 and Helena in 2001.
Since Helena and I both had extensive musical backgrounds (each of us started at age five in our respective countries), we then began our musical career as a duo, I with the accordion, and Helena with singing and dancing. Starting around 2003 shortly after Helena retired, we launched our next career calling ourselves “Greathouse of Music”. Around that time, I was continuing to take piano lessons and within a few years began to compose music on the piano. We performed all around the Portland area in independent living facilities and later mostly in libraries. We then created our own show which we called “You Do Speak English, Don’t You?”, which was launched during Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival of New Works in 2014. We grew in our new career and took this show to many places on three musical tours to Texas during the years 2017, 2018 and 2019 and then to the Chicago area in 2021 and 2022. We will again go to the Chicago area on a musical tour in September 2023 with both our previous show as well as our new show, “Life Is a Cabaret”. We always drive on these long trips, which presents a real challenge for packing our Honda Civic with accordion, sound system, props, costumes, etc. As you see, neither of us ever really retired. Our website is: www.greathouseofmusic.com. I even decided to add a page of travel blogs reaching back many years to adventures that happened to us in several countries.
