Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

Health Spottr may not be "the" source of all wisdom on who the leading thinkers are in Health Care, but they aren't that bad either. What made me think about this is that of the 100 names on this "Future of Health 100" list, I had only ever heard of about six of them. I'm getting a little older and starting to become very sensitive to the health care subject, so I resolved today that I'm going to figure out who these people are and what they think about health care that might affect my life.

Yet another historic milestone in my life has passed. In late 1973, I was working in Los Angeles for Rockwell International. Being mid-westerners, we didn't take that well to the California lifestyle and I absolutely hated the LA comute (from the San Fernando Valley). About that time a headhunter in San Deigo called me and said they were looking for some kind of business development guy at a little company called WD-40 and was I interested? Even though I didn't know who WD-40 was or what they did, I decided to check it out. I went down for an interview and it turned out that that interview was with John Barry. I've never had a more interesting interview, he was a facinating guy. I'll never know whether or not I would have gotten the job at WD-40 (I think I might have), because before I had heard anything back from Barry I'd already gotten another offer from a friend back in Wisconsin, and we jumped at the chance to get back to the mid-west. One of those forks in the...

The date was July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon at 20:17:40 UTC according to NASA. (For those who like precision, Neil stepped onto the Sea of Tranquility 0°40′26.69″N 23°28′22.69″E / 0.6740806°N 23.4729694°E / 0.6740806; 23.4729694 based on the IAU Mean Earth Polar Axis coordinate system .) I will never forget that date and time because I witnessed this historic event at 3:17 pm in the induction center at Fort Leonard Wood Missouri. It was a very odd moment in my life. I had left my wife early that morning in a very frightened and emotional state by herself in Milwaukee; travelled all day by busses without airconditioning in 100+ degree heat; met up along the way in various little towns with what seemed to me at the time to be a very ragtag and slightly dangerous bunch of fellow draftees; and then arrived at Leonard Wood to the welcome of a bunch of screaming Drill Sargents just 30 minutes before Neil's famous landing. Mostly because the Drill Sargents want...

I think this January 3, 2003 entry was my first Blog post using Dave Winer's Radio UserLand software. I've long since moved on to Blogger, but it's still a little sad to see Radio UserLand go away. It seems like I'm having more and more of these senior moments lately when something memorable rides off into the sunset.

My son Jason and his wife Cristy couldn't make it to the traditional Ross family vacation in Florida this year. Cristy is expecting our fifth grandchild and the date was too near, so we included them in the family photo with a picture instead of the real thing, wishing they were with us. Vacation was great, too short.

The Bear brand, an iconic symbol of excellence in automotive service equipment, particularly wheel alignment equipment, passed into history recently when Cartek decided to retire the brand. It was a rather sad day for me because I once ran the group in Applied Power which had acquired this company from the decendents of the Damman brothers in the late 1960's. The Damman's had started the company in 1917 (an interesting history of the Bear business can be found here ) and at it's peak in the 1940's and 1950's the Bear logo displayed outside most good service stations was known nationwide as a smybol of a place where good automotive service could be found. It was a classic and I will miss it.

Wolfram Alpha is endlessly facinating. For example, I learned a little trivia factorid today that my wife and I were both born on a Thursday [by putting our birth dates into Wolfram Alpha and comparing them.] It also instantly computed that someone with the equivalent of my current salary would have been making about $23,000 / year in 1946 when I was born. There is a great list of examples here .