Account Executive,
GST WENet Sales Department
joan: Where
did you grow up?willard: Well that had to do with my father meeting my mother in Key West Florida. Dad was from Tannersville, NY, and my mother was from Lynn, Massachusetts. It was a yankee meeting a dutchman. They were married in the Dutch Reform Church in the Catskill Mountains, and I was born in one of the 5 boroughs of New York City; the Bronx. My early days were riding the Staten Island Ferry, the NY subways, and going up the Hudson River. As nature would have it the yankee energy got us into Massachusetts where I finally was brought up in a
small sea coast town North of Boston
called Nahant. It was an island like town, and I did not become really familiar with main
land Massachusetts until I entered high school. My childhood days were spent boating in
Boston Harbor. One of my childhood activities was riding the wakes of the waves from the
propeller blades on the large ships going in and out of Boston Harbor. I used a 14 foot
dory with an Evenrude outboard motor to go up and down in the troughs.j: What is your family like?
w: Unfortunately my father passed away in 1971, and my mother in 1992. My sister still lives in Lynn, Massachusetts. Funny thing, with both parents gone I seem to be the complete, or feel the completion, of what it would be like if you had to be both of your parents at the same time. I guess I think of them often.
j: I know how that is. What did you want to be when you were a kid?
w: I think I remember that very well. Many of my likes or wants, as I recall, were usually edited by both my parents. I was denied wanting to be a Navy Frogman, I was denied wanting to be a farmer, I was denied wanting to be an actor, but I was encouraged to go to school. Both my parents were very religious. My father was a Mason, a men's organization usually affiliated with being a protestant that honored the order of Free Masonry. My mother belonged to the order of the Eastern Star. Sunday school was mandatory, and I became a chaplain in the order of Demoly. I thought for certain I wanted to be a minister and do missionary work in South America.
j: What about your education?
w: As a kid my room was my school and I was pretty much a book-wormish kind of guy. Classmate pranksters would find a lot of delight in either hiding my books or throwing them away. I went to Harvard Headmasters Prep School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right next to Radcliff, and went to SE Ohio and attended Ohio University. I entered as an engineering student, mostly because my father said I should be one, switched to philosophy looking for God and answers and checked out and switched to Business Administration where I got my BBA. A few years later I got curious and got a scholar ship to the new Walt Disney Art School, the California Institute of the Arts, with a MFA in Design. That got me into doing media work at the University of Pittsburgh where I strarted my data base retrieval work at the Library and Information Science Department. From 1971 to today I have pretty much been in the data delivery and retrieval work place.
j:You had done a lot of things before coming to WENet. Tell us about some of them.
w: Memories are really what a lot of life is made of. I’ve climbed to the top of Mt Washington in NH. I’ve performed with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. I’ve slept in alley ways of Paris, and I’ve worked with the renown cyberneticist Nicholas Schoffer. I really think any given mood will give us the ability to recall a memory that is very similar to that mood. Almost like a self reinforcing mechanism to heighten reality.
j: I have gotten the impression you are well-travelled. Is that right?
w: I have not traveled all around the world. I have lived in Canada and France and passed through Ireland and England. Since my mother was French it seems my stay in Quebec and Paris fulfilled my French sensitivities. I have lived in Boston, New York City, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Athens, Ohio, Los Angeles, California, Middletown, California, and San Francisco, California.
j: What do you think is your most valuable asset?
w: I have to say my alien energy. Yep! I am a closet alien. I was visited by beings from outer space when I was a small child on the island of Nahant. I saw a space ship in 1972. And from 1972 to 1980 I performed nation wide with a synthesizer and organ and played alien music to crowds at Shea Stadium in New York, Grand Central Station, and many Universities. The name of the group was the Ether Ship. Located at http://www.earthportals.com/deck.html
j: What do you enjoy doing in your spare time? What are your hobbies?
w: I enjoy writing in my spare time. I am a horrible speller but I enjoy the ability to construct ideas with words. I think it comes from wanting to be a minister and a philosopher. I feel I have something to say and it just compels me to write. I love to take photographs and match them with words, and another past time is reading innovative cosmologies, especially those that indicate there really is another civilization beyond Earth….they just found water on Mars.
j: What are your plans for the future?
w: That is a great question. It seems the more I exercise my ideas as to what reality is all about, the future then seems to take on some kind of pre-reality or premonition. Somehow, WeNet came along to help me process those reality constructs using the enabling technology of highband width transmission for data, sound and images. This is right in line with my data retrieval background. All cyber-constructs have become electric reality extensions. It is from these electrical extensions that new models, or thought pathways, can be implemented. I am seeing e-commerce as a whole new future, and also seeing bizarre social behavior such as children shooting children. The future, I think, will be a by-product of our reality constructs which kind of makes this reality a product of our own reality constructs from the past. Don’t ask me how its done I just think we have to pre-language with ourselves if we are to create our own evolution.
j: Okay, Willard. Thanks for those thoughts.