I started in fall of 1974. Actually, September of 1974. My school, you know, I grew up in McCracken, Kansas, which is close to Hays, Kansas. Very much a farming community, a very small town. At the time I was growing up, it was probably a town of maybe I'm guessing but say 200-300 people. The high school and the middle school were in the city at that time. The high school probably had, depending on what year we're talking about in that time frame, probably 50 to 70 students. It was a small high school. Yeah, I was always good in mathematics at the middle school and elementary school stuff, so I was always encouraged to continue doing mathematics of course. When I got into high school, the principal of the high school was a physics and math teacher. And he had actually taught my father as well as myself. And so he encouraged me to stay in mathematics and to couple it with physics. And so he actually created a course, I think it's, in my junior year, where there's only being one other person in it that he taught us physics. [laughs] We were the only two in that course. Just as a sideline, it's always kind of interesting because he told me at the end of the year that my father had done better on the tests that he had given than I had [laughs] in physics, so that was kind of an interesting kind of thing. They encouraged me to go on to college. I was really actually the first person in my family to go to college. And so I went to Fort Hays State, which was just in Hays 30 miles away. Went there with the idea of getting a mathematics degree, but more for being, you know, a high school teacher, football coach, basketball coach kind of thing, which is kind of the normal thing that people there did [laughs] when they went to college. So to kind of speed it up a little bit, I did do a physics minor at the same time I got a math degree from Fort Hays State. Great physics teachers, there great math teachers. At the senior year, when I started interviewing the two or three of my teachers in mathematics, of course, my physics teacher did encourage me to go on to graduate school. During my time at Fort Hays, a person, Brixey, from Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma, gave a colloquium there and talked to us about, you know, mathematics, graduate school, and stuff like that. So in the end, I really wasn't real sure what I wanted do as a long term career life. And I did enjoy, you know, the university setting, and taking courses and all that kind of stuff. So in the end, we decided to do a, uh, a graduate assistantship at the University of Oklahoma in the mathematics department. Again, I did well actually the first year I didn't do well because the transition from the degree that I got at Hays, although the instructors were very, very good at stuff there, you know, I probably hadn't studied mathematics at the level of most people coming into a graduate program. A lot of the theoretical courses and analysis and algebra I didn't have at the level of the other students. So I kind of struggled the first summer I went there. I actually entered it in the summer, but just had fantastic teachers at Oklahoma that said you know got it [laughs] you just need more time to, you know, get the background and stuff like that. So I kind of backed up and started taking just a very introductory level, senior level mathematics courses at Oklahoma, which then that just went great.