I was born in Muncie, Indiana. Not long after I was born my family moved to Royal Oak, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit). We stayed there until I was in the middle of 1st grade and then we moved north again to Flushing, Michigan which is a suburb of Flint.
I graduated from Flushing High School and academically I was 7th out of a class of 494. Our high school was not large enough for the number of students at the time so they altered the school hours. Seniors and juniors went from 7 AM to 12 PM and sophomores and freshman went from 12:30 PM to 5:30 PM. It was a unique arrangement. I won our high school Bicentennial Spelling Bee, was captain once of our High School Quiz Bowl team (I was on TV!), was a vice president for two years of a Junior Achievement student run company, and was in the chorus and an extra in our high school musical Brigadoon.
I attended Michigan Technological University in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan after high school. The school is in Houghton which is up along Lake Superior. Snowfall each year was about 150 to 300 inches and winter lasted a long time. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. In-state schools accepted either the ACT or SAT test scores. I took the ACT and never took the SAT.
During my senior year of college I interviewed with a lot of companies on campus. I was invited to visit Sperry Univac in Minneapolis, Texas Instruments in Dallas, Chevron in San Francisco, Shell Oil in Houston and IBM in Kingston, NY. I received offers from all of them except Chevron and 3 offers from IBM. One of the IBM offers was for a job which would be in Raleigh, NC and that’s the one I chose.
I graduated on a weekend in May and the following weekend I packed up what little I owned into my father’s old car (which he was loaning to me) and drove non-stop from Flushing to Raleigh. I had no bank accounts, no credit cards, no insurance of my own – only enough cash from my father to last for a few weeks. Fortunately IBM paid employees weekly back then. I stayed in a motel for a couple of weeks until I had enough money for a security deposit on an apartment. Since I owned almost nothing I had no furniture and so I slept on the floor for a couple more weeks until I could rent furniture. I still had no TV – more time passed and I was able to rent one. I literally started off in life with next to nothing.
I worked for IBM for nine years in Raleigh and RTP until the product I was working on was transferred to Italy. I was given an international assignment for 2 years to help with the transition. It was an amazing experience which opened my eyes to the rest of world and I became a lifelong world traveler. I returned from Italy and resumed my career with IBM until 2012 when the part of IBM I worked for was sold to Toshiba and became Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions. I was “retired” by Toshiba when I was laid off in 2018.
Along the way I met my future wife on a scuba diving trip to Cozumel, Mexico which was organized by the local dive shop (in 2004). We became engaged in 2011 when I proposed to her on a trip to Belize. I popped the question on the top of the tallest Mayan pyramid at Xunantunich. We got married twice in 2012. Our family wedding was planned for October but the transition from IBM to Toshiba would be official in August. IBM “retired” me as part of the transition so I needed to get my marital status official before then so we were married at the courthouse in Raleigh at the end of May. We then had a beautiful wedding in the North Carolina mountains in October near Valle Crucis. We spent a couple of years joining our households together and in 2015 we purchased a townhouse in Brier Creek as “our” house.
Glen Klamer 