Trevor Michael Bechtel

Trevor was born in Philadelphia, PA at [St. ???] hospital on September 3rd, 1968. His parents are David and Barbara Bechtel. He lived in Philadelphia for 2-4 years and then moved to Cortland, New York. Sometime in the mid-70's his mother joined the Navy and a few years later his parents were amiably divorced as they had grown apart. During this time, Trevor went to grade school at what was called the 'Campus school' at Cortland State (SUNY).

I have a vague recollection of one of my great grandfather's house. And what I remember is the pretty lights in the ceiling. There were different colored light bulbs in the fixture; red, green, and blue.

Many fond memories were to be had while at the campus school and Cortland during this time...

• Throwing Evil Kinevil (spelling?) dolls into the air and having them land on the air ducts 40 feet above us in the gym. (I believe that was Donald Stevens' doll...er, I mean action figure)
• Learning to play violin, having to play 'Twinkle Little Star' in the cafeteria, and then quitting shortly thereafter because it wasn't very manly. I really wish I hadn't quit.
• Playing ice hockey, which is still my favorite sport to this day.
• Going to the Phillies games every other weekend in the Summer. We had season tickets for as long as I could remember.
• Playing pinball in the arcade/pool hall with Christopher Mosbo in the University Union even though we weren't supposed to be there.
• Hiding under the turtle.
• Walking home school and making 'snow dams' to stop the runoff coming down the hilly street.
• My grandparents big house in Cortland (which is now the Chamber of Commerce).
  • Playing hide'n'seek
  • The little door under the stairway
  • The color striped kitchen
  • The huge attic with all kinds of neat stuff / like full-sized shuffle board
  • The basement with the gigantic water heater and 'back rooms'.
  • Playing ping-pong on the side-porch.
  • Playing whiffle ball in the back yard.
  • Playing 'drive the vehicles?' in the driveway with my cousins (Stephanie, Mark, & Julie). The pedal powered fire truck, tricycles, and other wheeled vehicles.
  • Performing plays with my cousins...I couldn't say what they were about anymore.
• Playing indoor hockey with my dad on Grotton(spelling?) Ave.
• Playing 'Spider-man', leaping over the trunk, and tripping over it.
• Ronnie; the small collie we had for a while.
• Minet, Sudsy, Maddie, Emmy, Blackie, Junior, Tiger, Alfie, Bow, Persian, Pumpkin, and many many other cats that we or my extended family owned.

In the summers after mom had joined the navy, I would often fly out to California to see with Mom or Margaret "Peggy" Ambler, my mother's sister, who lived in Daly City for a while and then moved to Pleasant Hill. Around 1979-80, my mother remarried with Jim Ryan, who she met in the Navy in Valejo, CA. They moved to Concord. Around 1980(?), Trevor moved to California to live with his mother and went to school (7th grade) in Concord for a year. This is when Trevor first discovered computers and his love thereof. Jim was an electronics engineer and he had built a Heathkit H8 computer. This computer had 4KB of memory, a BASIC interpreter, T19 terminal, a keypad on the H8 itself, and a standard music tape player for loading/storing software. Jim had subscriptions to Creative Computing and Byte, which, at the time, were oriented specifically for hobbyist programmers. I used to love typing in programs that I found in these magazines, most of them were games. This same year, I also took a BASIC programming class in junior high as well as at Diablo Valley Community College with my mother.

California is also where I learned about Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). When my mother and dad were still together, we went to the Prebysterian church. We had made friends with the Phillips' and sometime, I don't remember when, they had left for California. It turned out that they went to Stockton, which was not too far away from Concord and so we would visit them every so often. That's when John (and his brother David) taught me about D&D. This turned out to be the second love of my life (the first being computers). The only bummer part was that I didn't really have any friends while in Concord except my cousins (Keith & Mark). Since D&D usually requires about 4-5 people, I couldn't really play it (and mom wasn't that interested in it). However, I did read it a lot of the D&D books, modules, and other stuff, which kept me eager for the fantasy world.

My third love of life had to be Legos. Legos were great for a million reasons. You could build anything you could dream of and often I'd build things before realizing what it was I was building, just to see what I could come up with. I think the coolest aspect of legos is that if someone gives you legos for a gift, it doesn't matter if you already have the set or not. This is because you simply have more pieces to build your masterpieces with. My cousin Keith was really into Legos too and he was fortunate enough to get a large number of them donated to him by a friend. We'd spend whole summers creating all kinds of things. We were mostly intersted in making spaceships. From little fighters to very big carriers. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of what I consider to be the best ship I ever made. I believe I called it the Phantom Cruiser, but I'm not quite sure. When I built spaceships, there were certain rules of building that I had created for myself and followed rigorously. For example, one of the most important things about a spaceship was how it looked and it had to be color coordinated. One couldn't just use random colors in random places unless it looked good. Ships also generally had to be sleek, durable, and have a fully enclosed cabin. Also, certain kinds of lego pieces could only be used for certain kinds of ship parts, unless it was shown that the part fit properly in a context it hadn't been used in before. So, I guess I'm saying that there was a lot of structure to the way I approached legos. I believe this because of the same reason I have a strong affinity towards computers.

In many ways, I have always thought of Keith as my little brother rather than a cousin because he was a few years younger than I and we had very similar interests. We were often in sync with each other's thinking. I wonder if Keith knows that? If he ever reads this, then I'm sure he will :-).

Unfortunately, however, all was not well in California. I was a geek and geeks were picked on. It wasn't uncommon for the local bully, who I had to sit next to in computer class, to pick on me and hit me. I wasn't too happy about this, but then I was no snitch either. Stupid, eh? On top of that, I was fully programmed in Campus school to believe that drugs were evil and many of the kids in Concord were just getting into drugs at the time and personalities were changing. Some friends that I had had at the beginning of the year looked down upon me by the end of the year.

Incidently, I still don't care much for drugs and don't take them, but I'm not quite sure they're as bad as they're made out to be. But don't get me wrong, I fully believe that kids shouldn't be using drugs because they haven't matured enough to cope with them -- or perhaps they just mature too fast?

Since the time that mom and dad were divorced, dad had had a handful of girlfriends, all of them were really nice people. Since I was living in California, I took my yearly summer trip to Cortland instead of California. I came to find that dad was living with Patricia "Patty" Scherz in Homer (suburb of Cortland). Patty had two kids from a previous marriage, Erica and Werner. Erica was older and in high school at the time and Werner was a year or two younger than I was. We instantly hit it off, since we had similar interests (primarily Legos). In addition, my old friend from Campus school, Mike Neihus lived just a few houses down. I was also able to hit it off with the local kids on the block as well. Life was good and I decided that I wanted to stay in Homer.

I stayed with dad and Patty in Homer through high-school. This schools in Homer were a thousand times better than the one I went to in Concord. Largely because it was pretty easy to make friends there and the bully/drug culture I experienced just didn't exist or wasn't visible.

While in high school, I often played D&D with Chris Williams, Eric Kreh, Bill Fuller, and a handful of others. Chris' dad was the game master and he was fairly creative and spontaneous in the types of adventures he created. One of the things I loved the most was the lead minitures that Mr. Williams painted. He must have own thousands of lead figures and he had hundreds painted. We'd often play once or twice a weekend from 7pm-1am.

I still played with legos through high school, although the genre had moved a little from space legos towards a mixture of city and space themes. I believe the city legos were popular at the time because Mike Neihus and his brother were really into fire trucks and Werner was somewhat interested in the police sets. Since then, I've tended to shift back towards space legos, although, in general I have an appreciation for all legos. Incidently, Mike is now moving up the ranks of the Homer fire station.

For me, high school is a patchwork of memories. I remember faces, names, and various events, but I remember moreso running home to play with my computer. My dad had bought for me a Sinclair ZX81 with 1KB memory and a 16KB RAM pack. Later on, he had given me a Timex/Sinclair TS2048, which featured color, sound, and 24KB ROM and 48KB RAM. In addition, he bought a 'stringy floppy' device which was used streaming tape cartridges to store programs on. This was a *big* improvement over the old audio cassette recorders largely because it was reliable in addition to being faster.

I used to program all kinds of games. The more memorable ones were a monster maze, a text adventure game, and a stock market game. I learned about machine code and I learned about how to use the ROM with peek & poke instructions. I considered myself lucky, because my high school was able to acquire some 60 IBM PC's (8086), and a Prime minicomputer with 20 terminals. I had taken 2 semester of BASIC (which was probably unneccesary), a semester of pascal, and a semester of FORTRAN. By the time I graduated high school I was fluent in about 6 different flavors of BASIC (Apple, IBM, Sinclair, TRS-80, PET, Prime). This was important because many of the software magazines had code for everything except the Prime & Sinclair, which is what I had at home. I believe this was also important because the variety of languages that I had seen had strengthened my sense of what computer languages are and the reasons for the syntax differences between them, which was a useful skill in college.

While in high school, I wasn't really part of any one clique. While there certainly were various clicks (Jocks, Hoods, Nerds, and Independents), I was half way between the Nerd and Independent cliques, leaning towards Independent. What I called the Independent clique really wasn't a clique at all, but it comprised a bunch of people who were, to some extent, uninterested in cliques. Surprisingly enough, there was a large percentage of people in this group.

College

Marriage

Work