I have been living and teaching in Southern California since 1983, the year I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. I spent the first 33 years of my life living on Chicago’s northside and nearby Norridge, Des Plaines, and Evanston. I still miss Chicago, especially Evanston and Rogers Park where I lived while attending Northwestern. I went to public schools in Chicago and suburban Norridge.

I began college at Northwestern as a chemistry/pre-med major. At the end of my sophomore year, I changed my major to anthropology. It was the early ’70s: Woodstock was well on its way to becoming a legend; Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and James Morrison made their individual, tragic, way-too-sad, exits. In May 1970 the Kent State massacre sobered the nation. Just a day or two later I made my way to Washington D.C. to protest the war. But that’s another story.

I earned all my degrees at Northwestern: B.A. in Anthropology, M.A.T. in Education, M.A. in 18th and 20th Century Literature in English, and, finally, in 1989, a Ph.D. in English. I wrote my dissertation on a volume of combined verse and prose that Herman Melville was working on during the last 10 or so years of his life. While working with the manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library in the summer of 1981, I came across eight penciled manuscript pages of a preface Melville had written for the volume of combined poetry and prose that I was working on. This preface, “House of the Tragic Poet,” had never before been transcribed, let alone published. It was published for the first time as part of my dissertation.

Marcia and I met on New Year’s Eve, 1982. We got engaged and, in June 1983, having finished all course-work for my Ph.D., I moved from Chicago to Southern California. We married that December. Today she is cuter than ever, funny, smart, and my best friend. Tim was born in 1985 and Linny in 1988. Since 1984 I have been teaching English in Southern California high schools. In 1995, while continuing to teach literature and composition in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I became my school’s technology coordinator as well as educational technology consultant for several nearby schools. In 1998 I began teaching education technology courses part-time in the Charter College of Education at California State University, Los Angeles.

Besides life with Marcia and watching Tim and Lin move into young adulthood (the nest is almost empty), my life is filled with my students; teaching; making sure my iPod is loaded with podcasts for my commute; managing an online bookstore; working on the final volume of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville’s writings; learning enough PHP, CSS, and XHTML to keep this site going; getting to a gym or hiking trail several times a week; meditating; yoga; reading philosophy, science, and literature; and traveling to my desert home on weekends to enjoy the silence, wildlife, sunrises, sunsets, and dark skies in which you can actually see the Milky Way.

In the event that our digital paths never cross again, and, before you click away, let me wish you huge success and perfect health in your analog life already in progress.

Life is good.

Best Wishes,

Bob Sandberg
July 2009