About Us

Steve:  I was born in Chicago and moved at 6 months (with my mother’s help) to Three Rivers Michigan where I graduated from Three Rivers High School in 1961.  The family spent summers on Corey Lake near Three Rivers where I learned to love the water and nature.  I started sailing when I was 12, buying a Snipe for $50 and then sewing together pieces of scrap sail cloth for the sails.  Sailing remains an active part of our lives today.

I attended Alma College where I majored in Chemistry.  In 1965 I attended graduate School at U.C. Irvine the year it was founded.  I received my Ph.D. in Chemistry from U.C. Irvine with an emphasis on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR).  After U.C. Irvine, I spent 5 years at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), first as a Post Doc, and then as a Senior Research Fellow on the Research Faculty, again specializing in NMR.

In 1973 I was offered a job at Varian Associates, a major manufacturer of NMR equipment in Palo Alto California.  The next year was spent commuting up and down the California coast in the transition from Cal Tech to Varian.  I worked for Varian for 33 years before retiring at the end of 2006.  At Varian I worked in many positions from NMR research, collaborating with Caltech and Stanford, software and digital hardware development, to marketing and applications development.

Rosemarie:  I was born in Kremmling in the Colorado Rockies to a ranching and farming family.  My parents, aunts and uncles taught me to respect and work with the land, to respect other people and to give back to the community.  My mother died when I was eight years old and we moved first to Las Vegas, Nevada and then to Redwood City, California.  I graduated from Sequoia High School.  During the summers I worked at various jobs to earn money for college and volunteered in a local Head Start program.

I graduated from UC Riverside with a BA in psychology.  While there, I took advantage of UC’s Education Abroad Program and spent a year at the American University of Beirut.  I had intended to pursue a career in clinical psychology, but instead decided to attend San Francisco State University where I obtained a Masters in Research and Development in the Social Sciences through the Education Department.  While pursuing that degree, I began working as a research assistant in the Education Group at Stanford Research Institute (later called SRI International). 

When the OPEC oil embargo occurred, I was offered a position in SRI’s Long Range Planning Service where I could utilize what I had learned in Beirut to assist the Institute’s business clients.  I stayed in the Planning Service (later renamed the Business Intelligence Program) at SRI for 9 years, working my way up to Associate Program Manager and began work on my MBA at Golden Gate University.

While completing my MBA, Varian Associates offered me a position in their International business operations where I managed a department responsible for Varian’s regulatory compliance program for about 16 years.  I then worked for another 9 years at Space Systems/Loral as Licensing Manager.

Steve and Rosemarie were married in Menlo Park, California in 1985. After we married we bought a 40 foot sailboat which we lived on it for 7 years, actively, and successfully, racing the boat in the San Francisco Bay.  

Now in retirement, we have built a “green” home in Mariposa, California, near Yosemite National Park, and we are very active in local environmental and Democratic organizations.  We also hope to find the time to occasionally sail either in a dingy on the pond behind our house or on the boat that was once our home, now berthed in Monterey Bay.   Steve has 4 adult children from a prior marriage that enjoy visiting us in Mariposa.