My father, James Rich Huntington, was born in October
of 1930 in Eugene, Oregon. His father owned a shingle mill in the coastal
hills of that state, and at one point the family owned and operated a rustic
resort built around a natural hot spring. As a boy, my father was very
energetic and adventurous. He would amuse himself by trapping and igniting
swamp gas from the mill pond inside conical fire buckets, playing on the
mill's conveyor belts, and hiking around the countryside with no more than a
blanket and a little food. After graduating from high school, he worked for a
short time as a carpenter's assistant. The Korean War intervened. Sent
overseas as a marine radioman attached to a forward observing party for
artillery, he was serving on the line near the Chosin Reservoir when the
Chinese launched their counteroffensive across the Yalu. My father was
disabled by two grenades and spent the night crawling across frozen mud as he
made his way back to friendly lines. Outnumbered, his unit pulled back to the
airstrip at Hagaru, fighting through road blocks and ambushes. Although my
father was among the wounded who were evacuated before the loss of Hagaru, he
lost both legs below the knee to wounds and frostbite. In the years after the
war, my father worked variously as a radio repairman and as an engineer (and
occasionally the announcer) at a number of radio stations in Oregon and
Northern California. Finally, he settled down as an instructor at Lane
Community College, teaching electronics. Today he is happy to be retired, and
attends to gardening, computing (how many 73-year-olds do you know who use
LINUX?), and international travel.My mother was born in August of 1939 on the island of Honshu in Japan. Her father was a journalist who traveled extensively, and her mother ran the small farm they lived on. Although my mother may seem quite traditional to a westerner, in relative terms, she is the most unconventional member of my family. Consider that she grew up in a society that is overtly patriarchal even today. In the 1950's, Japan was a culture of arranged marriages and very few careers for women. Possessed of initiative and a strong will, my mother went to college and studied engineering - one of only two women in her class. After graduation, she left Japan to pursue graduate studies abroad at the University of British Columbia, and later at the University of Oregon, earning a doctorate in physical chemistry. Later, she did post-doc work at Berkeley, and then returned to the University of Oregon. However, my parents were wed in 1969, and soon the pressures of raising a family forced my mother from the lab. At home, she built a second career as a translator, teacher, and author/publisher. These days she devotes her time to folk dancing, bird-watching, and international travel.
My elder brother, Albert Masaki Huntington, was born in June of 1972. He spent much of his childhood playing imaginative make-believe games with me, building things, and learning electronics from our father. By the time he reached high school, he was a good musician and an accomplished student. His experience with digital electronics had progressed to the point where he was able to design and build rudimentary microcomputers. In 1990 he placed second in a national design contest sponsored by Duracell for designing and building a touch-sensitive keyboard instrument that could be rolled up and carried about like a scroll of paper. That fall he enrolled at Stanford as an electrical engineer, graduating in 1994, a term early. Today he works as an analog design engineer in San Jose, California. My brother was wed to my new sister Linda in 2003 (hence this picture); they live in Sunnyvale.