Richard Nygren
.   Phone: 505-344-3332

Spouse: Marian
Children: 1 (Garrett)
Home: 918 Salamanca NW, Albuquerque NM 87107
Occupation: Scientist

"In the first part of my post-college years, I roamed. After a brief stint in areospace in Culver City, CA, I returned to Washington State, joined Westinghouse Hanford and, in a few years, began working in fusion energy. I spent the latter half of the 1970's there and enjoyed hiking, skiing and visits over the mountains to the Seattle area to see my mom, Virginia, who was living then, my brother, Robert, and various relatives. Next I spent a couple of years in Knoxville at Oak Ridge National Lab and then moved to Chicago and continued working in fusion at Argonne National Lab. I began a planned year-long vacation but interrupted this to work in Washington, D.C. for a year. (There is no mention here yet of wife or kids because I remained a bachelor well into my forties.)

After the year in Washington, D.C. I resumed my interrupted year off and spent a month on a solo journey in the Arctic Circle going down the Noatak River and hiking in the Brooks Range. During the first part of my year off, while driving around the US and living in my old Chevy van, I met Marian. We dated long distance while I was in Washington D.C., and I moved to Santa Monica where I could be with Marian and bike to work at UCLA. I tried to like LA but just could not handle the population density and we began to consider other possibilities. In 1988 we had a wedding in California and another in a small church in Preston (east of Issaquah) that my grandfather had helped to build. Then a somewhat fearful Marian, a big city girl, avid gardner and lover of the green canopies of California, accompanied me to the arid and brown-looking desert in New Mexico. We love the southwest and have lived in Albuquerque for about 13 years. I work at Sandia National Labs, still in fusion, and am involved in science education and (mostly) parenting. Marian and I are typically a generation past the "peers" we encounter at our 11-year-old son Garrett's activities (soccer, piano, skiing and academic pursuits such as Knowledge Masters). As I have roamed, I have tried to keep in touch with Jon Eddy, Larry vandenBerg and Jennifer (Solomon) Malakov. I look forward to seeing classmates at the reunion."