I was born in the small Midwestern town of Nappanee, Indiana, in MCMXLI. My birth took place at home during a snow storm with the help of a retired African missionary. At four years old my father decided to move to Turlock, California ripping me away from my roots and my extended family. We looked like dust bowl refugees as my father headed our Lincoln Zephyr west out of Nappanee to Turlock. A baby crib tied to the roof of the car, a playpen to the side of the car and me with my cat in the back seat and the litter box on the floor and my mom's best Helen beside me. I refused to go without my cat! It was not snow storms nor dust storms that drove us from Indiana, but a stormy relationship between my dad and his father. We lived in Turlock for a while and my dad worked at the Modesto Bee and then he decided to work for the Fresno Bee. Oh yeah, the cat ran away in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

I had a typical 1950s upbringing but I was a non typical 50s kid. I am sure my dad was very disappointed that I was more interested in winning the science fair than a basketball championships. My father being ignorant of the workings of genetics just did not realize I didn't inherit any football or basketball genes. Lucky for me my brothers did so I was left alone to follow my interests.

One of the people that had a great influence on my life was my high school biology teacher, Dorothy Naman. At first SHE was a major disappointment. SHE was a woman! At 15, I wondered how a woman could know anything about biology. Within a very few days I wondered how that wonderful person knew so much about biology and could lecture for a full hour day after day and never rely on notes! Not only was she a genius but she liked this chubby little kid with glasses who would rather collect bird guts and cat skulls than throw a dumb ball through a metal ring! Admiration for this lady directed me to a biology major at Fresno State College and eventually a career teaching biology.

But I digress. School was not my whole life. In the summers there were mountains, lakes, girls and beer. I knew all the trite sayings... If your don't know where you are going you will get no where. Have a plan.. have a goal ... and all that. My life has been one serendipitous event after another. I never really had that plan or goal. I graduated from high school and of course had no summer job. The one promised to me evaporated. So good old dad had an idea. I could pick apricots. Well, that I did, for all of one day. I made $3.75 that day and it was the hardest $3.75 I ever made. That was the first time I really stood up to my dad. NO more apricots.

Then my mom got me a job selling fireworks at a stand near our house. That was ok but after the 4^th of July no one buys any more fireworks so again ... no job. Dad had another idea, his friend owned a Foster Freeze shop and agreed to hire me as a favor to my dad. It was great. I dropped whole ice cream cones in the tub of hot chocolate dipping stuff, burned my fingers on the grill, squirted water all over the storeroom, got covered with exploding chocolate milkshakes and felt like a glass of milk every day going to work in an all white uniform. Shocking to me was that one of the other guys there wanted me to "date" (a euphemism here) his wife so he could accuse her of being an unfit mother and he could get custody of their kids. I wanted no part in this drama.

Then the Job God smiled on me. Actually, it was another friend of my dad's. He got me a job in Yosemite, Tuolumne Meadows Lodge to be exact. That was heaven! For the next 9 summers I escaped the summer heat of Fresno, my mother's questions and my dad's constant unwanted advice and I lived in Heaven. I quickly progressed form pot washer to woodchopper to bell boy to desk clerk and finally Chief Clerk... and you guessed it, it was a WOMAN, Martha who promoted me. She was my boss and friend and gave me great jobs. I made real friends, developed real values and had a real life. I found a wife, yet another chapter in my life. I am still friends with many people I met during that great time in my life.

Back to college and my path to being a biology teacher. That course was not as direct as it may sound. There was a sort detour towards a desire to be a chicken farmer. Which was leading me to be an Ag major at first but again my failure as an athlete changed the direction of my life. Back in the day not only did you have to take a placement test in English and math but also in PE. On the day of the dreaded PE placement test I was at my athletic aphelion. Thus assigned to "bonehead" PE for the semester. Of course, that class was scheduled at the same time as beginning zoology, the prerequisite for all Ag class. The only other choice was beginning botany. Disappointment again. Plants? Plants are boring. They don't move, you can't pet them, they don't run with you on your paper route and they don't have fascinating guts you can put in bottles around your room and make your mom sick. But what to do?

So again I start the beginning botany class with a hellabad attitude. And again the sun rose... Dr. Quibell was old.. heckaold. Like 65 or some over the hill age. He wore the same brown wool shirt every single day of class. But he was up to date in his technology. He projected 4x4 black and white glass slides on the screen to illustrate what he was lecturing about. Again I was spellbound! He made plants come alive, like really alive. His lectures made me think of tons of questions and for some of the ones I wanted answered most he would say to me, "Ah, Mr. Field, we learn that in Plant Taxonomy. (what ever that was) I found out it was a graduate class in botany. Reserved for senior majors in botany and people getting a Masters degree in botany.

What to do now? So at registration, which was held in the college gym where you got IBM punch cards to register in a class I went to the botany table. Of course I had low registration priority and the class was full. I was neither a senior nor a graduate student. There was only one way to get in the class...get the professor's signature. So I ran through the rain to his office to ask his permission. (I won't mention dropping all my IBM cards in the mud and having to go back to all the tables in the gym and getting new ones) He must have had pity on me dripping wet and begging because he said, "yes!" For the next 4 months I got to spend every Wednesday afternoon going on field trips to the Fresno foothills collecting 465 plants and learning their species, genus and family names, their field characteristics and how to identify them. Leaves baseball for dead! The final was 100 herbarium sheets laid around the lab and we had to identify each one and tell everything about it. It was orgasmic!

That set me on the path to being a botany major. Which would lead to what? I had no idea. As graduation approached and my dad kept asking me what kind of job I was going to get, I not only did not want to tell him I did not want a job but with that major i probably could not get a job. One of my botany buddies, Bill, was a lab instructor. He told me one day he had been accepted to a Texas college and his job would be available. Did I want it? DID I WANT IT? IS THERE A COW IN TEXAS? So I applied for the job. The teacher I would be working for was 4 foot tall Dr. Arce....another woman! She did not like me. I had never taken any of her classes and besides that I was a man. She had a favorite student, Carolyn, and she wanted Carolyn to have the job. Carolyn was a woman and she was a "mature" - 34 - to me that was just old. Again the JOb God came to my rescue. Carolyn was not graduating yet and I was. So I got the job. Guess what, in a very sort time me and Dr. Arce were buds. She was great. A spitfire little Cuban lady that started college at 16. She knew everything about everything. Women are wonderful.

College years were fun. Study and parties in the winter and working in Yosemite in the summer. A time to learn, reflect, change and get ready for what people stupidly call the "real world." Dude! it's all the "real world" just different phases of that world. Just like mitosis: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, daughter cells -- kidophase, highschoolophase, collegeophase, jobophase, marriageophase, and sondaughterophase...it's all the "real world."

Another thing that contributed to shaping my life was the Viet Nam War. I wanted nothing to do with it. At that time Tricky Dick Nixon had resurrected the selective service draft system. But there was a loop hole. If you were in college and signed a deferment you got to finish college but you were eligible to be drafted until you were 32 years old. I managed to escape signing the deferment and my eligibility ended at 26. So just to make sure I made it past my 26^th birthday before I finished college I took just about every biology class Fresno State had to offer at that time plus I also got a masters degree and a teaching credential. I was 26 in January and got my degree in June. I was a free man!

I was part of a generation that had to make a huge decision. It was the '60s. The Viet Nam war was not popular. Nixon was not popular. For that matter the US was not popular either. I had a choice: war (too bloody), Canada (too bloody cold) study (lots of work)...I chose study.

So there I was, a BA, MA, credential to teach in a junior college and again my dad asked me what I was going to do. I still did not know. The last few years of college I had a group of friend that got together for beer and pizza every Monday night. It was late spring and we were all thinking about life after college. One night one of the girls was very excited over the fact that she had just signed a contract to teach high school biology in the Garden City of Madera, you know, "the real world." As she went off about this she asked me what I was going to do and as I had zero idea. So I looked her and in all seriousness said, "Oh, I am going to go teach in Australia." That was the farthest away country I could think of and it sounded pretty exotic. I went home that night and thought, "why not Australia?"

So the next day I went to a travel agent and asked about getting a boat ticket to Australia. I thought a boat would be more fun than a plane. The travel agent told me that there were very few ships going to Australia and if I wanted to go in the fall I needed to book right then. I wrote him a check for $100. Nobody could believe I did ithat...including me! But I did! Now I needed a job. So letter writing began. No email in that day.

For those of you that only know how to communicate using email, cell phones, twitter, texting of Facebook, here are photos of what we called letters, stamps and envelopes.

Well, as luck would have it Australia needed teachers. Many teachers. I was offered a job in every state of the country. I decided to go to the city of Adelaide. Why? Why not? It sounded good to me.

On October 26, 1967, I boarded the P. & O. liner the H. M. S. Himalayan and pulled away from the docks at San Francisco and out under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was an old ship built in 1949 and a real step back into the past. What the heck was I doing? I had absolutely no idea what was ahead. But I was committed. Twenty eight days later I went under another bridge, the Sydney Harbour Bridge. San Francisco/Sydney... two famous harbors, two famous bridges, 9,000 miles across the Pacific. OMG!

Then a 2 hour flight to Adelaide.

OMG! Australia. It sure looked like places I had seen in the USA!

As it turned out I did have a friend in Adelaide. Edy. I had worked with her for a couple of summers in Yosemite. Edy and Leon met at the airport and took me off to their apartment. A new life had begun. Now for serious job hunting. Ok dad, you win but it is not apricots or milkshakes or fireworks stands. It's school teaching!

Edy and Leon gave me a list of 5 private schools in Adelaide and after a few calls telling headmasters that I was Gene Field an American with a teaching credential, I was granted interviews. It was the very end of a school year so I would not start teaching for 2 months. As I said earlier, Australia needed teachers and the first three headmasters offered me a job. I did not even bother to go to the other 2 school for interviews.

I took the offer at the newest and nicest of the schools and that was one of the best things I ever did in my life. It was a new school, all boys at the time but as it turned out it was fantastic. It was called Westminster School. The headmaster was Mr. Forder. He was a saint. The school secretary was Maggie Harris and she was like all school secretaries... she ran the school and was wonderful. Ahead of me lay 3 fantastic years of learning how to teach, learning how to get along with students, learning how to live in the "real world."

After a few months of just me, school boys and the gum trees, I got kinda lonely... so another life changing decision, I sent for a "mail order" bride...a Tuolumne Meadows friend, Anne, and we got married in Australia. (the rumor around school was that I was going to marry the Singer Sewing Machine demonstrator lady at the nearby shopping mall and all the boys would go see who she was and wonder why I would want to marry her!) One funny side story. There was nothing that Maggie, the secretary, did not know and know it first. Well, I wanted a weekend off to get married so I told the headmaster I was getting married and would like the time off. He was more than happy to give it to me. I heard later after I left his office he strolled into the secretaries office and announced, "Margaret Harris, for once I know some gossip before you do. Mr. Field is getting married!"

On our first anniversary Lucie came to live with us. We go her at the Queen Victoria Hospital, Rose Park, Adelaide, Australia. I am not allowed to say how we really got her because I don't have signed parent permission slips from everyone yet. After another 16 months went by we got another call form the Queen Vic and Victor was ready to bring home. From Lucie's initial reaction I think she wished we had just left him there. Life was good. A great job, lots of new friends, a new country to explore, new wife and new kids, no parents telling us what to do...what more could I want? Ah...Real Life!

As time went on I began to miss some things back home in California. I knew my parents wanted to be able to watch their grandchildren grow up. Funny how after a time parents become very important people on your life.

After 3 great years of trying to become Dinkum Aussies, we decided it was time to revert back to being Damn Yankees. We packed up everything except the couch and chairs which we gave away and got to meet the Postmaster of the local post office who thanked us for being the best customers he had ever had. The clerks however, hated us and would try to hide or find someone else to wait on us when be brought in our next 13 packages.

I have been back to Australia 4 times and traveled all over the place. In the summer of 2008, I returned with my daughter and she got to see where she was born, see some of the places that were important to me there and meet some of my former students. It is great to have a second home. It has added a whole new dimention to my life.

Arriving home in the '70s recession was not fun. After 6 months of looking for jobs I was ready to go back to Australia. The headmaster promised me a job and so I gave my mother the birthday present of telling her we were going back to Australia. She spent the rest of her birthday throwing up. That was worse for her than dead baby bird guts.

Then again the Job God smiled on me and sent me to Patterson. Need I say more. Forty years later you signed up for my class. You are approximately my 9271^st student. Hope you enjoy the class and learn some biology.

What am I today? A dad of two great kids. I travel a lot and try to keep busy. I am retired after 33 years teaching biology at Patterson High School. I am still teaching though. Besides the MJC Bio 111 class I teach for the Adult Education program of PHS. On www. ratemyprofssor.com I get a nice 3.8 rating (humm but only 5 entries. One thing I teach is that statistics are not too reliable with low numbers so...) At this point you can read my class information on line Mr. Field's Biology Page And if you really want to know more about me go to Lucie's Genealogy.