My
grandparents on my mother’s side of the family are Gwen and John. My mother
Wendy was born and raised in Berkeley, California. She attended Berkeley High
School, and then went to the University of California at Berkeley where she
earned a degree in Psychology.
On my
father’s side of the family, my grandparents are Roger and Margaret. My father,
also named Roger, was born and raised in Berkeley, California. He attended
Berkeley High School and was in the same class as my mother; although they knew
each other, they did not run in the same social circles. My father went to
Cornell University as an undergraduate, where he earned a degree in History.
The summer
after my parents graduated from college, they were both living in Berkeley, and
after a brief courtship they got married. The next fall, my parents moved to
Palo Alto, California, where my father was starting his first year of graduate
school at Stanford University, where he studied History. In late 1966, my
brother Roger was born. My father finished his PhD the next year, and accepted a
faculty position at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
In 1969, I was born in Eugene, Oregon. My full name is David Maxwell Chickering, and I have always been called “Max”. With the exception of two years in Germany (1970-71 and 1975-76) during two of my father’s sabbaticals, I lived in Eugene throughout my entire childhood. I attended Meadowlark Elementary School from second grade through sixth grade.
My
memories from my childhood are, for the most part, very happy ones. My brother
Roger and I have always gotten along very well, and we had a lot of fun as kids.
We lived in a great neighborhood in Eugene, and we had some fantastic neighbors
with whom we played. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for the majority of my
childhood. When I was in 4th grade, she decided to go back to school, and she
entered the Master’s program in Computer Science at the University of Oregon.
In 1980, when I was in fifth
grade, my parents decided to get a divorce. My father moved into an apartment
nearby, and my brother, my mom and I stayed in our house. In 1982, I started
seventh grade at Monroe Middle School. In 1983, my mother completed her Master’s
degree.
Unfortunately, Eugene was
not a good place to get a job in computers at that time, so my mother, Roger and
I moved to the Portland area near where my mother found a job.
I entered Evergreen Junior
High School in Hillsboro, Oregon, as an eighth grader in the Fall of 1983; Roger
attended Glencoe High School in Hillsboro as a Junior. Although the move was
difficult at first, I made some good friends fairly quickly,
and I also made frequent trips
back to Eugene to hook up with friends and my dad.
Junior High School was a lot of fun, and it was at this point in time where I started getting particularly interested in math and science classes. In ninth grade I played for the Glencoe tennis team.
