I was starting my junior year at OU, 20 years old, married about one month. My mother worked for John A. Brown’s department store in Oklahoma City, and one of her co-workers ran a personnel agency. She helped me get a part-time accounting job at OMRF. I’d come in nights and weekends and post checks to our grants accounts. It’s all computerized now, but back then I did it with a ledger, a pen and a 10-key adding machine. Since then, I’ve done just about everything imaginable at OMRF. Accounting. HR. Facilities. Safety. Purchasing. Technology transfer. Everything except research. I leave that to our scientists, who still amaze me. How did I end up spending my life around all these brilliant people? Forty-nine years here, and I’ve never worked anywhere else. I’m the luckiest son of a gun in the world.
