What's your origin story? Parents, sibs, school years?
My father was one of ten siblings, my mother was the only child of a school teacher. She began school at 3 and graduated at 16. Dad was a theatre manager before and after WWII, Mom started out working for the Erie Railroad in Cleveland and later worked at Ingersoll-Rand. Both had been married to other people before they met and there are lots of siblings in our blended family.
David Baltzer
Theatres began to fail, and by 1953, theatres were already being replaced by parking lots. My parents met when he went to work at Ingersoll-Rand. They were married in Mexico in 1966 by Justice of the Peace Arturo Balthazar. (My surname, Baltzer, is an abbreviation). So the J.P.'s name was basically the same as my father's. The J.P. was also a bit elderly, a bit flustered, and almost ended up marrying himself to my mother!
Is there an early-years memory that has lasted? An event that made a difference in what you've become?
A very defining moment came for me on December 19, 1975, third grade. I fell on ice while at school. My feet went right out
from under me and the back of my head slammed onto ice-covered asphalt. When I managed to get back on my feet. I was dizzy, my vision was very blurred, my head hurt like hell, and I was highly nauseous. But, I felt I had to try to present myself as normal. The previous day, one of my half-brothers had been significantly injured in a car accident, and I was very determined not to have any attention shifted to me. I did not cry. There was a party, with cake and punch and so on. I threw up but passed it off as too much cranberry juice. I didn't tell anyone at home and, though my head was still sore, I seemed to be back to normal...physically.
Over the course of the next few months, it was obvious to everyone that something had changed in my personality. I was doing a lot of acting-out and misbehaving. Whenever confronted, I had no answers as to why. I did not know. Finally, right around the time of the Fourth of July, 1976, I was back to normal. I guess I had my own Independence Day. But there were also interesting improvements. Increased empathy. Increased cognition. The development of a complex, 3-D internal modeling system. A new, micro-awareness of things in the environment around me. A focus on minute details that others missed. Improved memory. I had healed into some kind of a higher state. But it was not a matter of manic activity. It expressed as increased capability for creative problem-solving, coming up with unique solutions, and up-cycling long before that practice became popularized.
Although most of us ended up in or near the arts, almost all of us did not have an arts-connected first career. Talk about your timeline?
After I graduated from college in 1989, I began taking care of my dad full-time. By then, he was legally blind from diabetes and had a lot of other health problems. With his personal needs,
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