I was born in New York City to Lorraine Marie Corrogano and Edwin Doyle Meisenheimer on January 19,
1950 in Booth Memorial Hospital, a charity hospital run by the Salvation Army. When I was two
Lorraine left to escape domestic violence. Eddie (as we always called him) took me and my brother
to Hutchinson, Kansas.
Things were rough in Kansas. Eddie had a violent temper and was extremely abusive. Sometimes he used a homemade whip that left nasty whelts. A couple of times he beat me until I was unconsious. I remember when I was in 5th grade he had me pinned down on my back in the bathroom. He was sitting on top of me pounding my head against the tile floor. After a while I couldn't feel anything any more and developed tunnel vision. The last thing I remember is his enraged face looming over me. I woke up fouled with my own vomit. Despite the pain and fear, I learned early on not to cry out when being beaten, it just seemed to pump him up even more.
Of course the authorities got involved. They took my brother away when I was 12, however I had to deal with the situation for several more years before they finally took me out of there.
Foster care wasn't much of an improvement. They placed me with a family that had 4 kids of their own already. They lived in a 1 bedroom apartment. The two youngest kids slept in the bed with the parents. The two girls shared a sofabed in the living room. The oldest boy and I took turns sleeping on the kitchen table or on a wooden bench in the kitchen. We couldn't sleep on the floor because of the rats. The kitchen sink didn't work, so the dirty dishes stacked up in the bathtub and frequently stayed there for days making it impossible to bathe.
On the morning of my 17th birthday I was sitting on the steps of the Army recruiter's office waiting for them to open. I signed up that day and a couple of weeks later was inducted into the US Army. Ultimately I was sent to Vietnam where I served on Military Advisory Command team 75 at My Tho down in the Mekong Delta. We were the US advisors they used to mention in the news all the time. We were attached to the 7th ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) Infantry Division.
I was at a bit of a disadvantage in life. I had to drop out of High School to join the Army, so I only had a 10th grade formal education. But I was fascinated with technology. I was particularly fascinated with nuclear physics. As a child my "safe spot" was the library. I used to go there all the time. My favorite magazine there was Scientific American in which I avidly followed all the amazing discoveries in particle physics that were being made in the 1960's. That was the field in which I wanted to work. But who would hire a high school dropout?
I compensated by putting myself on an ambitious reading program. When I came home from Vietnam I used to go to the used bookstores in Berkeley and buy the textbooks they were using at the Universtiy of California at Berkeley. After reading each paragraph I would ask myself to restate what I had just read. If I couldn't do that, I went back and read it again. I also did all the exercises at the end of each chapter. I studied Algebra, Trigonometry, and Calculus. I learned Electronics and passed the FCC's First Class Radio Telephone License exam which licensed me to repair and calibrate radio and television transmitters.
It also got me my first technology job, Senior Electronic Technician in the Engineering Laboratory at Systron Donner's Inertial Division. There we designed and built navagational accelerometers and gyros for missles and spacecraft.