Email: gsmith@plmconsulting.com

I began my life as a child. It all started when I was born in Long Beach, California, in 1949. My father had immigrated to the United States from Nova Scotia a number of years before that. Over the years, he had worked as a carpenter, painter, ship builder, etc. My mother had spent most of her life working in a paper mill in Portland, Maine.

My parents were married at a relatively late age, with my mother being 39 and my father 42. I was born the requisite 9 months later, and was their only child. They had moved to California from Maine because friends of my father had already moved there and found that jobs were much easier to get. Five years later, we moved into the "suburbs"; a town called Lakewood.

While I was a bright kid, I was somewhat less than enthusiastic about school work. Consequently, my grades were not what they could have been. Things took a real down-turn for my little family when my father died suddenly when I was 12 years old.

I made it through school with average grades in most subjects, but generally did well in the Sciences. The day after I graduated from Long Beach City College with a degree in Microbiology, I got a job at Long Beach Memorial Hospital working in the Lab. The day after that, I got my draft notice. Needless to say, I was not thrilled.

I entered into the Army on a three year enlistment rather than the shorter two year draft in exchange for a guarantee of Medical Lab schooling. My enlistment also gave me a three months delay before induction which I spent working in the lab at Long Beach Memorial Hospital. This three months came in very handy once I got to the Army Medical School in San Antonio, Texas. I managed to do well in class and was selected to remain in San Antonio to attend a one year long advanced training course. I also did well there and ended up spending another 18 months after that in San Antonio as an instructor. By that time, the Viet Nam war was almost at a close.

I was transferred to Germany in 1974, where after a short stint with a Combat Support Hospital, I ended up in Wiesbaden at the Armed Forces Drug Testing Lab. A few months later, Phil Winkler arrived at the same place and we became friends. That friendship has lasted until today and proved to be a turning point in my life.

After leaving Germany, I was stationed at the Army hospital in Columbia, South Carolina for five and a half years. I then returned to San Antonio for another tour as an instructor, then I was off again to Germany for my worst tour of duty ever - the Army Medical Center in Frankfurt. I won't go into details, but to say I was miserable here is the greatest understatement of all time. There were only two Hospitals in the Army that I didn't want to be stationed in, and this was one of them. I thought that my luck had run out on me for sure.

By that point in my career, I had been in the Army for about 15 years. The duration of my tour in Frankfurt was scheduled for 36 months, and I was looking forward to getting back to the States for a final tour before retirement. But after I had been there for about 24 of those months, I got a strange call at home one night from my old friend Phil.

Phil had entered the Army about two years before me and was getting ready to retire and was looking for a replacement. At that time, Phil was working at the Pentagon in the Armed Services Blood Program Office, which was charged with the responsibility of managing the World Wide Military Blood Program. A very big job for a very small office.

Well, the only other place in the Army I didn't really want to go was Washington DC in general and the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in specific. But I was willing to do most anything at that point to get out of Frankfurt, Germany.

For those of you who have never been in the Army, let me just fill you in on one thing, nothing happens quickly in the Army. It finally took the signature of a three star General (the Army Surgeon General) and 6 months of red tape, but I finally left Germany for the US.

One of the reasons I was chosen for the job was that Phil had begun a campaign of computer automation there, and he knew that I was very much into that sort of thing. My real involvement in computers had started in 1972 when I learned how to do some programming on a mainframe based Computer Aided Instruction system. The simple approach to programming logic it used came naturally to me. Later, in the early 80's, I had my own Apple and was writing programs for the lab school in San Antonio. Consequently, I had started to gain a reputation as a "programmer".

When I got to Washington, I had just enough time for Phil to give me a whirl wind briefing on his job and he was off on terminal leave. That's when I first got involved with DataEase (version 2.5). From then until my retirement, I became more and more of an expert in automation. I even became a kind of help desk for people from other offices in our building who needed computer problems solved.

By the time my retirement came, it seemed natural for me to move to Delaware to join Phil in his growing business. About four months later, Phil's sister Debe joined the team as a business manager and we incorporated. Since then, PLM Consulting, Inc. has continued to grow into one of the leading DataEase consulting firms in the world. The rest, as they say, is history.

So, here I sit, nearly 58 years after I first opened my eyes, wondering where all this is leading. I guess we'll all just have to wait and see, won't we. Check back with me in another 12 or so years when I'm getting ready to retire from my second career and I'll let you know how it turned out.

Photography © PLM Consulting, Inc., 1997