We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.

Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.

The long, cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.

My brother Jim and I spent many wonderful summers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin owned by Mom's cousins, and as members of our local Boy Scout troop.

Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.

We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.