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Jerry Brubaker

Jerry Brubaker

My previous lives (before GCC)

Personal

I was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Florida.  My parents were teachers, and I have 3 sisters.  My wife Cynthia was born in Hartford, but we met in Florida when I was 18 and she was 16.   We’ve known each other almost 50 years.

We have 2 grown children (a daughter in Amherst and a son in Florida), and they are each married and have two children.

I am a pretty serious tennis player (twice a week), a decent water skier, shoot some pool, and I like to play the ukulele.  I also like movies, music, TV (especially sports) and I love to eat. 

Jobs

  • Military:  Right after college (Florida State University) I was a Naval Officer stationed at the “super secret” National Security Agency, where I worked as a mathematician, helping to assess Soviet space capabilities. 
  • Patrick Air Force Base (East coast of Florida): After the Navy, I joined Civil Service as a mathematician and later as a computer scientist.  My organization developed laser and telescope satellite tracking systems for the Air Force and for U.S. intelligence agencies in what was known as SDI (space defense initiative).
  • Luxembourg:  Because I had a computer background and spoke some French, I was “loaned” from the Air Force to NATO for 5 years, where I worked in Europe as an analyst for logistics systems.  It was a dream job, because of my interesting European  co-workers and the travel opportunities.  From Luxembourg, you can have breakfast in Belgium, lunch in France, dinner in Germany, and spend the night in Holland. 
  • After Europe, I went back to Florida to work on safety issues for the Space Shuttle.  My organization determined conditions for terminating (blowing up) Shuttle launches, and I also served as a member of the Shuttle Launch Crew.  I took an early retirement in 1996 to become a college instructor.
  • Teaching: My first teaching position was at a State University in Savannah, Georgia (Armstrong Atlantic State University), where I taught computer literacy and computer programming.

Present

We came to Massachusetts in 1999 to be grandparents, when our daughter Cathy was in school at UMass and was due to have a baby.   Cynthia and I now share an office at GCC: she teaches Psychology and Sociology courses, and I teach Math and Computer Science courses.