I met Jeff in 1974, in Iowa City, through some mutual friends. The first meeting was brief and it wasn’t until a year later that I saw him again, in the spring of ’75. He was working at an art supply store in IC and I was a disguntled graduate student in the Fine Arts department at U Iowa. During that chance meeting Jeff asked me out on a date.

Jeff and I fell in love and it wasn’t long before we were living together. He got a job doing carpentry work and I ended up doing the same. We were poor as church mice but we were so in love that money hardly mattered. Many people thought of us as the “perfect couple”, even to the point of looking alike. In fact, a photographer friend of ours photographed us for her “Look Alike Couple Series.”

In 1977, with a loan from my father, we were able to put money down on 10 acres of land in rural Iowa, near West Branch. This fulfilled some big dream we both had and in the spring we started building a house.

Jeff designed the house and, although he’d probably now think it was a piece junk, at the time it seemed like a palace. Much of it was built from recycled materials — we had torn down a barn and an oak-framed house. Plus, we bought styrofoam window cut-outs from the Winnebago Company in northern Iowa to use for insulating the floor, and hauled them home in an old, rattley pickup. By late summer we were ready to move in. It would have been a cold winter had Jeff’s parents not sprung for fiberglass insulation to fill the walls and ceiling.

We lived there for a year without running water and then my mother offered to pay to have a well drilled. That was momentous, to say the least, and once we had running water, the next obvious thing was to get married.

By 1980 our carpentry days were dwindling and Jeff was ready to move on to something more promising and less physically strenuous in the way of a career. So, I got a desk job in Iowa City and he went back to school. Thus began his life with computers.

I hope you don’t mind reading this little bit of ancient history. It’s not surprising, knowing Jeff for as long as I did, that he would make such a success of his life, and also that he is helping others along the way. Jeff always had big visions and his mind worked overtime on how to make those visions a reality.

If you decide not to post this comments I will, of course, understand. But I thought it might be interesting for some to read of Jeff’s earlier life, before Glenda and the kids and before he made it “big” in computers.