My first writing attempt at about age 6 resulted in “The little squirrel went ha, ha, ha!” and I realize now was my desire to believe that all living creatures, especially of the animal world, were happy.  Human beings I think I left primarily to the care of God.  A gargantuan task and perhaps reason for failure.   My father was an architect and engineer despite little formal education and college was not a term I thought about for myself.  Started work directly upon graduating from high school announcing with my twin sister that “we specialized in shorthand and typing”.  In that era, that was about it for many a young female.  I did enroll in courses eventually at DeVry Tech and DePaul University in the area of mathematics and computer study.  I became a computer programmer, and eventually a systems analyst, designing contracts wherein I labored over the importance of outlining what type of reports we would furnish to clients, and what we demanded from them in the form of input data.  My first contract startled the “big boys”- they asked Who wrote this?  It was very detailed and attempted to cover legal aspects of which I had relatively scant knowledge.  The bottom line was it “scared off” the client . Later on, I returned strictly to computer programming, preferring to sit quietly at my desk drawing flow charts and writing code.  Because of this experience, I found the following incident extremely interesting.   One of my poems, entitled Author Unknown, contains the line “He hesitated not upon the order of his going”.  I often wondered the source of these words and I enlisted the support of Google to help me solve the mystery.  In seconds, this search engine came back with approximately 1,700,000 close matches TOGETHER with the source of each.  There was only 1 total match and I found the source to be a poem by Joyce D. Nitsche entitled Author Unknown!  As a former programmer, I marveled at the programming skills which produced these results.  As a programmer, I was once assigned to a project which demanded a print out of thousands of codes allowed by certain parameters. The program printed for a couple of hours and then fell victim to a programming “glitch”.   My later years of employment were with a financial investment advisor working in his home.  During the occasional absences of the owner from the office, and at additional times as the need demanded, I selected securities for purchase following established guide lines and reviewed existing holdings (convertible bonds, preferreds, Call and Put options) for possible sale.  I set up a transfer of all data from a manual system to a computerized system, designed a data base to accommodate all trading activity, control of current holdings and control of profit and loss data   New management of younger vintage came in to power and I realized it was time for me to move on. My poem entitled The Web describes my job searching experience.  I do not fault employers for discrimination at a certain age-  which I had certainly reached.   My Uncle Henry despite absence of “career success” , living in a small town in Arkansas, was a Chess Master, and perhaps inspired by him, my twin sister learned to play chess- eventually taught me the game which we enjoy nightly (more correctly,”mid- nightly”).   

Sheil School short story award
International Library of Poetry submissions, some accepted for publication in their anthology