Robert Mark Dickey's Page

After AHHS I went to Tarleton State College where I did some rodeo, some studying, some rodeo, some partying, some rodeo, broke two vertebra in my neck and met the mother of my children, Cathy, in Poultry Husbandry class...

After flunking out of Tarleton, I spent a semester at Hill Junior College in Hillsboro. I spent that semester studying, driving back to Stephenville to romance Cathy and partying. (are you beginning to notice a trend here?)

I joined the Air Force in July of `66, went to Fire Protection Specialist school in Champagne, IL after basic. Came home on leave to marry Cathy then was stationed at F. E. Warren AFB in Cheyenne, WY. Cathy stayed in Fort Worth until Rob was born then moved up to Cheyenne. Wendy was born a year later. In `69 I was cross trained into Weapons and Munitions Specialist and sent to Cam Rahn. I got out in `70 and Cathy divorced me. I was an OK father but a poor husband. Much more interested in myself than in us.

I fooled around working and going to school and traveling and roadracing motorcycles and writing, finally getting a degree in Journalism from good ol' Texas Cash University in `85.

During that best forgotten period of my life I met and married another young lady, Lovetta. She was a good woman who used to travel to races with me, keep lap charts and drive the van home on Sunday nights when I was too tired or too torn up to drive. We got married when I got a full-time job as a writer/photographer-production manager at Cycle News down in Austin. A few months after we were married she came out to the garage and found me working on one of the race bikes, getting ready for the new season. She informed me that those days were over now that we were married... I tried for the next two years, sold the bikes, took regular writing jobs, started my own company building fancy-schmancy residential greenhouses, bought a big ol' house in Arlington and such. I hated it. She hated it. We realized we'd both made a mistake. I regret to this day hurting her.

Knocked around for a few more years in th emagazine business as writer/production manager/editor then ended up as an advertising copywriter at Tandycrafts. Became the Copy Director then my career took a weird turn.

I'd bought a TI-994A from my neighbor for twenty-five bucks. Shortly thereafter TI got out of the PC biz and quit supporting the 99. I bought a book on TI-Basic and learned how to write my own apps. Wow! I built a database of all my albums so I could search by title, type or artist... Pretty cool, huh?

While I was writing copy on a Selectric I realized how much more efficient we could be, using PC's. I lobbied the VP of Advertising and got some Tandy SL1000's. They made it easy to keep all of the copy for each catalog and monthly flier then pick and choose what we wanted for the next issue rather than retyping everything. All we had to do was input information for new products.

Meanwhile I was writing Basic routines for the PC's in different offices at corporate. Up until then weekly sales reports would come off the Wang mini-mainframe to the line printer then be distributed to the various departments within each company. Secrataries would go through the reports and type up the information their boss wanted/needed. On a monthly basis, those reports would be summarized into another report. And on and on and on. I got with the head of Data Processing and asked him if he could stream the ASCI data onto floppies during the print run. He did and I wrote routines to summarize the information for each department's report(s) so the secretaries received a 5.25" floppy each week rather than a bound report.

And that's how I became Administrator of Management Technologies for Tandycrafts...

See, I knew you'd be impressed with my ability to stumble into a lucrative career based on native savvy, laziness and the ability to deal with numbers no larger than 1 and 0!

During those halcyon years I met, fell in love with and married the delightful Miz Anna. We celebrated our 20th anniversary in April. Of all of the many blessings God has given me, she is one of the greatest.

I continued roadracing motorcycles during all this. I'd promised Anna I would retire from active racing at 50. I miss racing to this day but I would miss her even more. Still keep my hand in a bit, tutoring young riders and doing some suspension setup. Nowadays my riding is limited to around town, touring and the occasional track day.

In `99 Tandcrafts went out of business (taking my 401K with it) and I went into business for myself writing database applications and interfaces. Anna started her own massage therapy salon a dozen years ago and we're both happily working for ourselves.

Fortunately that left time for me to become a volunteer firefighter in Willow Park. We built our home out here 16 years ago and I was fortunate to be able to use some of the training I got from Uncle Sam and give something back to my community. Besides, it's quite an adrenaline rush!

It also left time for me to enjoy the two grand daughters! You can read some fo the saga of my daugher Wendy going to China for her first one [URL="http://www.panthercity.net/kaylee/TOC-03.html"]here[/URL]

So, that's the capsule version. Sometime when you're really bored, or looking for inspiration, you can read about some of our [URL="http://www.panthercity.net/MCVac.html"]motorcycle trips.[/URL]