2022 - 50th - Update In the summer of 2021, I built a treehouse and run lodging/camping thruough Airbnb, hipcamp, Dyrt, and VSRO. It is 21' high and is anchored by eight poplars and black oaks. It's a lot of fun meeting campers who are generally pretty cool folks. 2022 - 50th A bike trip to the Garden State from Pittsburgh, with Todd Wright, prompted me to transfer to Rutgers so I could be close to the Big Apple and the Jersey Shore (plus, Bruce Springsteen went there but never graduated). An insightful advisor encouraged me to study abroad, and so I did. Guatemala taught me about subsistence agriculture, and it was just before a wave of violence would rock the country for decades. Today, I pay back Guatemalans who resettle in my town. I was lucky to get accepted at Penn State’s Geography program, which was/is arguably one the best programs in the nation. My thesis examined KAP (knowledge, attitudes & practices of birth control) in Costa Rica. Anxious to get out in the world, I took a teaching position (in Spanish) at the Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. I taught (in English) at Fr. Buchanan in San Juan. The University of Florida was home for the next five years, enriched by a Fulbright award to Chile. There, I studied the introduction of HMOs and health-care privatization. With sheepskin in hand in 1985, I entered a tight labor market. Rutgers hired me for year as a faculty member. It was fun being a colleague with previous mentors, who were gracious in accepting and guiding me. The Hawkeyes of Iowa called us out to Iowa City for the next three years, where our first child was born. I served as Director of the Latin American Studies Program and came to appreciate solid, mid-western values. Iowa students are hard-working and open-minded; it was a good three years (but chilly and with summers full of pig manure wafting through the air). Yearning to get the first grandchild closer to her paternal grandparents, we moved back east. For the past 32 years, my wife Gilda and I have called Blacksburg, VA home. Nestled between the Blue Ridge and Appalachian ranges, this has been a great place to raise a family. Virginia Tech has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it fell asleep during the more progressive 1970s (used to be an all-male military school) and had to play catch up. It was also the scene of the deadly April 17, 2007 attack the claimed the lives of 33 people: the university response disappointed. On the other hand, I climbed the tenure and promotion ladder quickly. Four Fulbright awards took me back to Latin America: Uruguay, Chile, and Colombia. I led more than two dozen study-abroad trips to Chile and Cuba (I’ve been to the latter 93 times). In 1998, our high-school alma mater awarded me its Distinguished Alumnus Award for my international work; I just managed to earn a C in both classes). I treasure a photograph of my mom receiving that award at the 1998 high-school graduation of 1998 (in my absence); she died from breast cancer a few days later. I’ve made four bicycle-fundraising trips from Blacksburg, VA to Magee Women’s Hospital in Oakland (375 miles) to support research on breast cancer. Magee set up a fund established in my mother’s name, the Josephine Cicero Scarpaci Breast Health Access fund. In a somewhat related matter, I’m trying to cobble together information about cancers of all sorts that might emanate from coal mines under how homes (near the Castle Shannon border, and along the Cedar Blvd.-Cedarhurst corridor; if you know of these malignancies, I’d like to hear from you). Earning Full Professor Emeritus status in 2009 --way too young to retire-- I got certified in marketing. Virginia Military Institute (where I was a full bird! (Colonel)) hired me to help them gain business-school accreditation. From there, I chaired a marketing and management program at West Liberty University in Wheeling. A European Union fellowship took me to Aarhus Denmark in 2014-15 which was fabulous. I studied social policy and consumer branding strategies in Nordic and Latin American welfare states. Since 2010, I’ve been running a small consulting company. We craft specialized cultural travel to Cuba. Teaching six yoga classes weekly, (with an emphasis on working with those recovering from trauma, cancer, and other special-needs groups, including we seniors) keeps me busy. My volunteer work includes teaching weekly ESL and Spanish conversation classes. Our two children live and work in D.C. We’ve seen them more often during the pandemic than in the previous ten years. And that’s been a silver lining amidst this malaise.