Robert Thornton

b. 1949 in Denver Colorado to a father who had returned wounded from
the War and so had begun to study psychology to figure out Why, and a
mother who was more certain about Things and who studied biochemistry.
My birth caused my mother to drop her studies and my father to redouble
his, thus I grew up with lab rats (live) as they spilled over from my
father's psychology Ph.D.  and lab rats (dead and pickled) as they
spilled over from my mother's teaching bio-labs in after-school
afternoons waiting to go home.  Home was Denver til I was 5, then Iowa
til i was 12, then Delhi, India til 14, back to Iowa, then to
California in the late sixties to People's Park demos and draft
resistance while studying at Stanford U. and hanging out in Berkeley,
and SF.  Fled to Uganda in 1970 to visit my parents who were Peace
Corps administrators there, taught science to Ugandan High School Girls
for two years, then back to Stanford to finish degree, and on to
Chicago to study for the Ph.d.  Field work in Tanzania, mid-seventies,
and first job in Cape Town SA in 1979.  STill here, dangerously
hypereducated with broad interests including staying alive, computers
and programming, south AFrican politics, landscape and langauges, most
aspects of anthro., gardening, keeping my old car running since I can't
afford a new one, food and cooking, an d other things that I have
forgotten at this moment.   I dislike cats, find dogs mildly amusing
but don't have one, and, surprisingly, am neither for nor against
laboratory rats.

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