I was born in the small town of Franklin, Pennsylvania.  Franklin is a quaint town on the Allegheny River and is the seat of Venango County.  I can remember not truly understanding the expanse of the world when I entered kindergarden.  Until then nearly everyone I had met was a relative and I really don't think that I realized that other people existed-- everyone seemed to be an aunt or an uncle or at least a cousin.  Kindergarden turned out to be an extremely turbulent time for me.  My mother fell gravely ill in (I believe) November of 1965 and passed away early in 1966.  My father sought work in nearby Erie, Pennsylvania.  When he had secured a position he brought my brother Jim, my sister Mary Kay and me to Erie to live with him.  He remarried in 1968 and I gained a step-mother.  Another sibling (Richard) arrived on the scene about a year later.

I graduated from Strong Vincent High School.  That's a rather strange name for a high school unless you know a little about Pennsylvania history.  Colonel Strong Vincent, of Erie, was the regimental commander in the Battle of Gettysburg that positioned his troops on Little Round Top moments before the Confederate assault on the second day of the battle.  Vincent was fatally wounded early in the fight for Little Round Top.  Growing up in Erie and attending the high school named in his honor has fostered a strong interest in the Battle of Gettysburg and in military history in general.

When I graduated from high school in 1978, I really wanted to attend college, but found it economically impossible.  In the spring of my senior year, I was exposed to a twenty or so minute long sales pitch on the US Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program narrated by none other than William Shatner.  Woe is me ... I was hooked ... I was bound to be "underway on nuclear power."  I spent two years going through boot camp in Orlando, Florida, Basic Electricity and Electronics school in Orlando, Florida and San Diego, California, Interior Communications Electrician Class A School in San Diego, California, Nuclear Power School in Orlando, Florida and S3G (submarine propulsion plant, third design by General Electric) Prototype Training in Ballston Spa, New York.

After all that training, I was obligated to spend four years in the fleet.  Upon graduating from prototype school in June or July of 1980, I was asked to fill out my "dream sheet" (a Navy term for an assignment preference).  We were asked to give our top three preferences for duty.  I remember asking for duty on the USS Nimitz (the latest and greatest nuclear powered aircraft carrier) as my first choice and any fast attack submarine out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii as my second choice.  Although my assignment wound up being nothing close to either choice, I felt very fortunate to spend the next four years aboard the USS Mississippi (CGN-40).  The Mississippi was a nuclear powered guided missile cruiser out of Norfolk, Virginia.

My days aboard the Mississippi were filled with adventure.  I was aboard for a couple of cruises in the Carribean, two Mediteranean cruises, a sixth month period in drydock where we changed our ion exchanger resin, a GITMO (Guantanomo Bay, Cuba) cruise and a North Atlantic cruise.  Some of the highlights included an emergency end to rest and relaxation in Venice, Italy when Anwar Sadat was assassinated, rescuing the crew of a Greek merchant vessel when it sunk in the Mediteranean, obtaining my Associate degree in liberal studies from the Regents College of the State University of New York, and doing endless "bagles" off the coast of Lebanon (our ship's chaplain explained that donuts didn't quite fit when we were that close to Israel).  Our ship was relieved for some rest and relaxation just prior to that horrible attack on the barracks in Beirut.  I can remember making up some lyrics while standing feed control watch off the coast of Lebanon.  They can be sung to the tune of Alabama's "Paper Doll World" and they won't be appreciated by most mechanical engineers and machinist mates.
 

Please forgive me.  Standing feed control watch has got to be the most boring thing that I have ever done.  The Hagan system was a pneumatic control system for the main feed pumps and 'squiggle' was the steam generator (boiler for you non-nuclear types) water level control system or 'SGWLC'.  The watch consisted of taking readings on the inlet and outlet pressures and tank levels in the nuclear plant's main feed system and standing ready to take action during an emergency or routine shutdown of the plant.  Due to staffing shortages I often stood "port and starboard" duty (six hours on and six hours off) endlessly.  The key thing in the lyrics is that if moisture ever leaves the top of the steam generator(s) in a nuclear plant, it would rip the downstream turbine to shreds when the water droplets hit the turbine blades.  Honestly...it was only a bored sailor's way to come to grips with an awful situation ... and it was only meant in jest ...  Could the scenario actually take place -- well maybe it required that "temporary suspension of disbelief" that is needed when viewing a campy science fiction movie...

That GITMO cruise that I mentioned?  That was one of those things most sailors really don't want to go through.  GITMO cruises were meant to raise the readiness of a ship's response to things like casualties, first aid, battle scenarios, etc.  I experienced that GITMO cruise with just two or three months left to go in my enlistment.  My overt participation in all that training really wasn't going to help our nation's defense effort much.  At the time, my auxiliary duties were to man the Engineering Department's Technical Publications Library during battlestations.  Trained as an electrician, I had grown weary of emergency and routine electrical maintenance.  When an opportunity to manage the shipboard technical publications library cropped up, I jumped at thechance.  We had just left drydock and numerous "Red Badge Required" signs were still up all over the ship (instructing shipyard workers which areas of the ship that they were not cleared to enter).  During our GITMO drills, observers would roam the ship and evaluate our responses to their shenanigans.  I really wasn't in the mood for all that -- and besides our nation would be better off if the observer would be observing someone was going to around for a while longer.  During one endless drill session an observer knocked on the Technical Publications Library door and said he was there to observe.  Before I could stop myself, I barked out "Do you have a red badge"?  I outranked the poor fellow by a couple of grades, so when he nervously mumbled "Uh...no," I growled "Then I simply can't let you into this space!" and slammed the door in his face.  He never came back so I really got away with one -- imagine if he had told his chief petty officer what I'd said.  Oh Lordy...what comes over me every once in a while...!!!!

I wound up being fascinated by how that tiny shipboard library was organized and managed.  During those long GITMO days, I decided to seriously consider doing something like that out in the real world.  Maybe I'd figure out how to do similar work at a college or a university.  The demise of our civilian nuclear industry (since Three Mile Island) was also a driving force.  I've always had this dread of becoming unemployed.  I recalled the opening chapters of "In The Beginning" by Chaim Potok.  He had mentioned that during the great depression that his family was so fortunate.  His dad had never lacked for work because he was a librarian.  What more could a soon to be out of work nuclear power plant operator ask for?  Besides, I was finding that I had quite a knack for rifling through that Technical Publications Library and finding what people needed in a remarkably short period of time.  Imagine being intrigued by the human capacity for losing stuff!  It was natural for me to think of someone filing all of our technical manuals for the main feed pumps under PUMPS, MAIN FEED in our book catalog -- yes an honest to God book catalog -- yeah ... I guess it was some kind of a calling.

Right about that time, my future wife was busily handwriting letters to prospective library science students at Clarion University of Pennsylvania.  A month or two earlier I had contacted the dean of the College of Library Science at Clarion (I always was one for that direct approach) and asked her how one became a librarian in a college library.  She patiently asked me questions about my background and suggested that I get an undergraduate degree in the sciences to couple with the Master's degree in Library Science.  She thought it would give me a needed edge in a career as a librarian.  I am so glad that I listened to that kernel of wisdom!  It truly gave me that badly needed edge to compete.  Oh yes ... back to that letter that my future wife was writing.  She had wound up being the president of the library science student's organization (she claimed she was the only one absent at the election meeting and that was how she got stuck).  Personal computers hadn't really emerged as of yet, and she wanted to maintain some kind of a personal touch when she started the correspondence to the prospective students -- a task that the president of the student group was always asked to perform.  She copied the same letter at least a dozen times by hand and mailed them out.  Now consider my situation.  I was a typical homesick, lonely sailor that was desperate for any kind of mail!  The letter wound up chasing me all over the world.  I was able to determine that she mailed it when our ship was in the middle of the GITMO cruise.  It must have followed the ship, always just missing me, as it went from Guantanomo Bay, to the North Atlantic and back to our home port of Norfolk.  I was discharged from the navy upon our return to Norfolk so the letter missed me there as well.  It finally caught up with me at my parent's house in Erie after I returned from a trip to Ireland.  I was headed to visit my sister in Altoona, Pennsylvania and took the letter, unopened, with me.  When I opened the letter, I was just across town from where my future wife was staying with her parents for the summer.  Silly me ... I didn't know it was a form letter ... of course I had to answer it!  Jackie and I met that fall and wound up marrying seven years later (we were in a hurry).

At Clarion, I obtained an undergraduate degree in Physics and my master's degree in Library Science.  It took some patience.  Before I could get any kind of student aid from the state or federal goverment (including the money that I'd saved in the Navy's "Post-Vietnam Era Veteran's Assistant Program") I had to register for the draft.  Can you imagine that?!!  Six years of active duty...

...oh well ... I can look back on it and laugh.

Somewhere in that fun blur of college -- during the graduate school part -- I acquired the third member of our tiny family (at Jackie's urging) -- Ivan.  Ivan is an eighteen pound domestic short hair cat (a kinder phrase for "mixed breed").  He's black and white with a tiny splotch of black on his white chin that kind of looks like a goatee that one would see on a Russian nobleman of yesteryear.  With that in mind, Ivan became the namesake of my beloved Electricity and Magnetism professor whose name was J. Ivan Rhode -- he's the current chair of Clarion's Physics Department.  Electricity and Magnetism is an incredibly difficult class for the undergraduate physics major (I don't think it's a terrible amount of fun for the Professor either).  About halfway into the course my classmates and I thought seriously (well okay, maybe not so seriously) about starting a write-in campaign for Dr. Rhode for President -- that was the ticket -- delay the whole class for four years!

Since those college days, I've been fortunate to hold three great jobs (see my resume).  Jackie and I married in 1991 and we've found it difficult to nurture two library careers in the same family.  At the present time, we both have professional positions in Pittsburgh and feel fortunate to have them.  Ivan has aged grumpily, still guards our home during the day, and demands his dinner for two hours straight every evening.  Our family is happily living in our first home in the outskirts of Pittsburgh.

I spend my spare time steeped in things like presidential trivia --I even have a goal to read biographies of all United States presidents(so far I've been through James Garfield and Chester Alan Arthur).  I've been diverted from my presidential biography reading by a particular Gettysburg figure -- General Winfield Scott Hancock.  Actually, Hancock lost the 1880 election to Garfield while enduring an absolutely horrible onslaught of Republican smear tactics during the campaign.

I also enjoy the fictional works of Tom Clancy, James Michener, and Robert Ludlum.  If you know of similar authors, let me know.  I'm running out of stuff to read.  Jackie and I enjoy spectator sports and follow the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the PittsburghSteelers (mostly Jackie) and the Green Bay Packers (Matt ... and it's along story).  We hope to someday enjoy a Steelers Packers Superbowl -- any volunteers to sit between us during the game?

Genealogy is another love of mine.  I've traced the Marsteller family back as far as our arrival to the new world in the mid-1700's.  I was helped tremendously by some very careful work done by my Great Uncle Rodney Marsteller.  I've been slowly gathering evidence of a personal friendship between George Washington and one of my ancestors -- his name was Phillip Marsteller.  He was supposedly the only non-Mason (honorary) pall bearer at Washington's funeral -- at the request of Martha Washington.  From everything that I can gather, my ancestor had absolutely no historical significance.  I think think he and George must have been drinking buddies or something like that.

So, that's my life.  Welcome to it!  I only meant it to be a biographical sketch, but I think I've created a new type of literature in the process.  I call it the autobiographette.  If you've endured the entire story, I commend you for your patience and intellectual fortitude!

Peace and prosperity ...

... Matt

July 12, 2000
 

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