Mel is just a plain old  farm boy from the dry land area of northeastern Colorado.  He spent his first seventeen years in that area before venturing off to the venues of higher education.  He received a BA degree from Colorado State College in Greeley, Colorado in 1961 and a MA degree from Oregon State University in 1967.

He spent twenty-five years in the education field as a teacher and coach, with all that time given to school systems in western Nebraska and the state of Wyoming.  Mel taught earth science, chemistry, and physics, and also did service as a basketball coach for a ten-year period of time.  For a fifteen-year period he served as a school administrator for a troubled youth facility in Wyoming.  During his tenure in education, Mel was professionally active in presiding over education association’s chapters, serving on negotiation teams, headed various curriculum departments, and lead a number of curriculum writing projects.  He was voted teacher of the year a number of times, in three school systems, by his peers.

Upon leaving the education field in 1986, Mel has spent time operating an insurance business, has given time to the management activities in the food industries, and has dabbled in the area of newspaper publishing activities.  Through his efforts in these areas, Mel has gained a greater appreciation for the business leadership skills needed in the workplace of today to insure business success.

Outside the work area, Mel has a wide degree of interests.  He is an avid gardener who takes pride in pushing the bubble with respect to growing plants in the harsh northern environment.  He still has some skill on the golf course and can yet scrape the ball from tee to green in a respectable fashion.  He handles a fly rod on a trout stream with a degree of efficiency that allows him to bring home the “bacon”.  He has a love affair with nature and takes comfort in watching the squirrels and birds feed from the various feeders in his back yard, or visiting the nearby mountain meadows to watch the feeding deer.  His life-long interest in the sports area has waned to some degree but he still likes to keep tabs on his favorite teams and view those major events of the various seasons. 

Mel is most comfortable with a pen in-hand or sitting at a keyboard doing various writing projects.  In the past few years he has written a rough draft of a gardening book for northern climates which he hopes to get into a final form during the forthcoming year.  He loves to write poetry which captures the feelings and emotions of the “human condition”, and he hopes to publish some of those writings done during the past twenty years.

Mel is the proud father of five adult children who continually bring him joy with their various accomplishments.  He has eight grandchildren and is looking forward to the day when he can graduate to the level beyond the title of “grandfather”.