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I’m an American by birth but I’d have to say that I primarily consider myself a citizen of the planet. I’m also a generalist and a futurist by inclination and I’m deeply grounded in systems thinking – having been a computer programmer and systems analyst for 25 years.

I’ve always been omnivorous in my reading and my interests. Indeed, in college it was hard for me to decide to quit sampling the classes and to settle down and take a major and graduate.

I took a BS with honors in Microbiology in 1976 from California State University at Long Beach.

But, I’m getting ahead of my story. Let’s go back and cover the basics and then come forward.

My name is Dennis and I was born in New York in 1947. I’m 75% Irish and 25% German by blood. My mother, Anna Gertrude McGee, was raised in a Catholic orphanage. My father, Joseph Francis Gallagher was 31 when he met and married my mother. He was a drill instructor in the US Marine Corp. My mother was 21, fresh from the orphanage and working as a department store clerk in New York City when they met.

It was a rocky marriage and it only lasted until I was about kindergarten age. My mother and father separated and then divorced and my mom and I moved to California; where I grew up from the age of 5 on.

I grew up as an only child and I’d say my childhood was difficult. But, unlike many, I came out of it without any irreparable scars. It seemed traumatic at the time, however.

I was a high school drop-out who went back later and finished. And lot of the problems in those years were because of my mother’s alcoholism. Indeed, my maternal grandfather, my mother and my father were all alcoholics. I count myself lucky that I’ve escaped this scourge.

After graduating High School, I worked building airplanes and shooting rivets in Long Beach for McDonnell-Douglas which, at that time, was making DC8’s. I tried junior college but I was too distracted by girls and partying and, since it was 1966 and the Vietnam war was raging, that put me on the short-list for being drafted into the military. Soon the US Army was on my trail and I joined the US Air Force to avoid being drafted into the Army.

When I joined, I was Pro Vietnam war. Like most young men, I was thoughtless and full of too much testosterone, I felt we should go over there and kick their ass. The USAF trained me to be an automatic tracking radar operator and repairman. These particular radar sets were the ones used throughout Vietnam to guide the many B52 strikes onto their targets under ground control.

I had signed up for four years but after the first two years, I developed serious doubts about my country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The anti-war movement was strong in the US and what they were saying resonated with me. When it came time for me to rotate to Vietnam to run the radars, I announced that I was going to refuse to go. This created quite a stir, as you can imagine. Apparently, I was the first in the US Strategic Air Command to do this and they determined, then and there, to make an example of me to cow any others who might be thinking the same thing.

But luck was with me. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I am, and have been, a very lucky person in this life.

They couldn’t court martial me unless I actually refused my orders and they couldn’t give me my orders to refuse until my group was ready to go. By luck (or perhaps because I was an excellent electronics repairman) they had assigned me to a new radar set – the first one of its kind to be deployed to Vietnam. Each time they thought it was ready to go, it would have another technical issue and they would delay shipping it again. This kept me on pins and needles for many months. But, in the end, the delay was so long that they had to take me off the assignment because I was about to get out of the service because my four years were up. So, in the end, I was discharged with an honorable discharge and I did not have to go to Vietnam or face prison. I am a lucky fellow.

About two years after I joined the Air Force I was married to Rosemarie Diane Foss and before I mustered out in October of 1970, we had a son, Daniel Martin Gallagher born September 19th, 1969.

We returned to Southern California (Long Beach) and I took a job again at McDonnell-Douglas. This time I was installing heating and cooling ducts in the wings of DC10’s. After doing this for about a year on night-shift, I realized that if I didn’t quit and go to college now– I probably never would – so I did.

Those were idyllic times – I loved college. I had been an indifferent student in high school but now I was on fire with excitement to learn everything. There were lots of new friends – some of whom became lifetime friends – lots of new ideas and books. I think I leaned as much from my own explorations as I did from what the university wanted me to absorb.

I graduated in 1976 and went to work for The Nichols Institute for Endocrinology. Working with radioactive antibody assays and doing research was interesting but, ultimately, it didn’t light my fire as I thought it was going to.

Towards the end of my time in college, I’d ‘discovered’ computers and I was never the same.

After a year and a half at the Institute, I talked my way into a lateral transfer and this put me in charge of the laboratory’s data reduction computer. I knew how to program it and how to do the data reduction curve fitting math but I was completely green about what an operating system was and how one took care of a physical computer. I don’t think the laboratory realized what thin ice we were all on during the month or two it took me to assimilate these things – but, luck was with me again.

That began a computer career that lasted from 1978 until late 2001 when I was finally laid off at Motorola and I decided that our nursery business (which we bought in early 2000) was strong enough economically to support both of us.

But, let’s go backwards again. Rose and I were divorced in 1978. But, we weren’t really done with each other and on March 21, 1980, we had a second son; Christopher Brian Gallagher. We continued our relationship on and off until 1985 when we finally decide to let each other go and get on with our lives. I don’t think Rose and I were ever a good match. But, having said that, I still think she is, and was, an earth-mother and a wonderful and sincere person. And I am still very fond of her. We had our problems but we managed to remain friends and that’s more than many ex’s can say.

I changed jobs several times over the next few years. After I left the Institute in 1981, I went to work programming computers in a medical laboratory in Vancouver, British Colombia. The job had me flying back and forth between Vancouver and Southern California every few weeks. It was the first time I’d lived outside of the US and it was eye opening.

In 1983, I finished in Vancouver and took a job in Irvine, California, at Pick Systems. In my jobs at the Institute and in Vancouver, I’d been using Pick Systems based computers and now I was going to work for the very company that made the operating system software. My career was really moving up.

These were some intense and exciting years of learning and success. I don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply engaged in what I was working on before or since.

After Pick, some of the senior people split off and started up another company, Concurrent Operating Systems Technologies (COST), and I was invited to join them.

While at COST, in 1987, I took an unusual vacation with a group involved in Citizen Diplomacy between the US and the USSR. For three weeks we traveled in the USSR and visited Moscow, Leningrad and several places in Central Asia. The group stayed where the Russians stayed and we met with party functionaries, dissidents and ordinary people of all kinds. These were the years in the Soviet Union when Gorbachev was in power and the Soviet Union was just starting to open up.

When I came home from this trip, I began to give speeches and slide shows around Southern California about my experiences. I’d discovered a passion for activism.

This led to my being involved, not long afterwards, with another group, “Soviets Meet Middle America”. This group sponsored Soviet citizens to come to America and tour here; much as we’d done when we went there. I ended up coordinating and organizing a week-long visit of four Soviet citizens to Southern California. As part of this, we showed them around Irvine, Laguna Beach and Disneyland and had them meet our families and visit our homes.

My activism was making connections for me. In those years, Irvine, California had a progressive Democratic Mayor, Larry Agran, who was a bit of an anomaly in the area. Being “behind the orange curtain”; as we used to say.

As a result of these contacts, I was soon off on another trip in 1988. This time for two weeks with the “Witness For Peace” group to Nicaragua.

Our purpose was to see for ourselves first hand what the truth was in the struggle there between the Sandinistas and the US backed Contras. Again, we met with both sides and with a lot of the common people who were caught up in the middle of the war. It was two weeks riding around in the back of pickup trucks, sleeping on dirt floors, dodging summer rain showers, boiling our water, being careful with our food and hearing stories of killings and mutilations.

When I went, I was undecided about who was right. But, by the time I returned, I was firmly convinced that the US was using some very dirty tricks via the Contras to oppose what was then a popularly supported revolution.

Again, when I returned, there were more speeches and slide shows.

But, just about the time I returned from Nicaragua, I also became involved with Sharon Ann Ronsse who was to become my second wife.

She and I lived together in San Juan Capistrano for a year (1989) and then we decided that the relationship was working well and that we should get married. So we did on 31 December 1989.

We also decided to make a new start in honor of our marriage. We sold our properties and converted our corporate jobs into long distance consulting positions and we moved 1100 miles (1770 km) up to a rural area about 30 miles east of Seattle in Washington State.

We settled onto a 2.5 acres property we’d purchased in the woods in an area called Echo Lake which was about half way between the small towns of Woodinville and Monroe, Washington.

We lived there for ten years. And they were good years for us.

I did remote computer work for a few years in my former industry; which was centered on the Pick Operating System.

But in time, I could see that this small industry was starting to dry up. So, I went into self-teaching mode again (everything I know about computers has been self-taught) and taught myself Windows programming. And soon I’d talked my way into programming jobs at companies like Microsoft and Motorola. Most of my time in the 90’s were spent this way. We were doing so well that I’d work for a year and then idle for a year.

We travelled as well in the 90’s. In 1990, we went on a trip to Europe and Africa. The entire trip was memorable but I remember particularly when we crossed over into East Germany just days after the border to the west had been opened. That was history in the making.

At another point, we found ourselves on a safari in Kenya.

Later, in 1994, we went to India and Nepal for five weeks. One part of that trip that I especially enjoyed was our time in Ladakh; in India’s northwest. Most of the countryside was over 10,000 feet high and we visited a number of Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries.

Still later, in 1999, I went (without Sharon) on an adventure cruise to the remote islands of the South Pacific. That was an intense adventure. We departed from Valparaiso, Chile and sailed for a month and visited many remote (and sometimes uninhabited) islands. Everywhere we went ashore was by zodiacs and sometimes that was through the surf. The trip took us to Pitcairn Island; among other notable places. And we ended in Tahiti; from where we flew home.

If you are curious about this trip, you can find my logbook by following this link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1eg9rcm41vttp0l/AACsTkakA0gDZCMjcinm1ILxa?dl=0

During the initial ten years of our marriage in Washington State, Sharon’s involvement with the corporate world and her interest in being an international sales and marketing guru had diminished. Her interests had shifted to plants, trees and landscaping. I think she was returning to her roots; since she had been raised in a small family farm in rural Kansas.

In any case, by 2000 she had taken a job at a wholesale nursery located just outside Monroe, Washington. After a few months, she came to me one day and proposed that we buy this business.

It was a wild idea to me and an extreme jump away from what I’d been doing before. But, after some discussion, we decided to go for it.

And within six months or so, the place was ours. 19 acres of it. With 52 greenhouses and quite a lot of infrastructure that had been years in the making.

We also bought a house on an acre of land that was just beside the nursery. This was extremely convenient as we only had to walk 100 feet to the nursery office. And this purchase brought us up to 20 acres.

Later, we acquired yet another 5 acre adjacent piece on the southern side of the nursery and that took us to 25 acres.

Our business was a success. Not a roaring runaway success but one that grew steadily year by year. I stepped away from the hi-tech world by the end of 2000 and learned all about tractors, irrigation, trees and plants, business accounting, sales and a million other things that were new to me. But that was good. I really like challenges and learning new things.

I didn’t give up hi-tech entirely. During the nursery years, I developed a Windows Application that ran on little Windows-based handheld computers. We used this app daily at the nursery to keep track of what we had and where it was.

We had 25 acres, with 52 greenhouses and over 600 kinds of plants and trees. it was a big operation. And we specialized in Japanese Maples.

It was during these years at the nursery, just outside of Monroe, that I also got involved with the Monroe City government by becoming a member of their Planning Commission. This, again, was a new adventure for me. And one I enjoyed immensely.

In 2003, I set off one winter (the nursery business is very slow in the dead of winter) on another solo adventure. this time I bought passage on a working freighter to sail from San Francisco to New Zealand and Australia and back again. It was a two month journey.

My time in the South Pacific in 1999 had whetted my appetite for ocean adventures.

Three weeks of sailing (without seeing another ship, a plane or anything) brought us to Tauranga on New Zealand’s North Island’s northern coast.

When we arrived, I arranged with the ship’s captain that I should get off, spend two weeks in New Zealand while the ship went to Australia and back and then I’d come aboard again for the return trip. He was fine with that idea.

I took a bus from Tauranga to Auckland and I rented a camper van and took off to see New Zealand’s North Island.

I circumnavigated the North Island going counter-clockwise and I stayed in beach camps most of the way. Christmas Day saw me in Wellington; the country’s capitol. And New Years Day saw me in Gisborne; on the North Island’s northeast coast.

A diary of my trip can be found here:

Voyage to New Zealand

This trip absolutely knocked me out. I just loved New Zealand. I did not expect to have such a strong reaction – but I did.

When I returned to the US, I began to talk with my wife, Sharon, about immigrating there.

This was in early 2004. She was resistant at first. But finally she agreed that she would give it a try.

But when I did some research, I began to think that it wasn’t possible. And for well over a year, I didn’t really push it. But then I got some more information that convinced me that perhaps it could be done and then I began to push it.

We hired a New Zealand based immigration consultant and, for a fee, he guided our application process.

Finally, in the winter of 2006, we got word that we’d been accepted and granted two-year resident visas to NZ.

New Zealand gives out two-year resident visas initially, rather than permanent resident visas, to new applicants because it wants the new immigrants to ‘prove’ that they are really serious about NZ. There are several ways to ‘prove’ your seriousness and, if you do, then after the two years elapses, you can get permanent visas and you are good for life.

For us, we still had an active business in the US and we were loath to sell it until we were absolutely certain that the NZ visas were permanent. So, in order to ‘prove’ our seriousness, we had to buy a residence in NZ and each spend a specified amount of time in NZ over the two year period.

We did this and bought a nice apartment in central Christchurch; just next to the city’s central 800 acre park.

I should mention that Sharon was nine years younger than I was and she had a Master’s Degree in International Business. So, when we applied for NZ residency, she was the primary applicant and I tagged along as her husband because we felt sure that her resume would be more attractive than mine.

In spite of all the stuff we were doing with NZ, we still had our nursery business and it occupied our lives and time fully for nine of the 12 months of the year.

2008 rolled around and we’d been two years now ‘proving’ to NZ that we were serious. We’d each been down several times living in our apartment. In the second half of the year, we were granted permanent residency in New Zealand. Yahoo!

But fate wasn’t kind.

Just as we began to think about how to approach selling up to shift to NZ, the 2008 global market crash occurred. Nearly overnight, we went from having a business that we thought we could sell for two million, to having a business that was struggling to survive. It was a big shock.

And Sharon and I could not agree on what to do in the face of these new realities. It had been a good and cooperative marriage for the most part before this. But now we came to a serious difference of opinion.

She wanted to stay and wait for the US economy to recover; so we could sell for big money. And I wanted to go; even if we had to sell for pennies on the dollar.

We argued for a year. And I finally packed my stuff up, shipped it too NZ and got on a plane and went in November of 2009. I told her I very much wanted her to change her mind and come join me.

But she never did. And a year and a half later, we divorced. She got 75% or more of our net worth. That was the nursery business, the land the two houses, the stock, and the tractors, trucks and etc. I got about $10,000 in cash and ownership of our apartment in Christchurch.

I turned 62 in August of 2010 so I was going to have some income and the apartment in Christchurch was paid off (with my own US IRA money) so I was going to be able to survive OK.

But it was a big move, moving to NZ like that. I knew some American Expats there so I was not totally alone. But even so, it was a big jump.

But the biggest adventures were not over. In February of 2011, a massive earthquake hit just under the city of Christchurch. And the city was badly damaged.

My apartment, six floors up in a high-rise, was rendered unlivable. I’ve never lived through anything like that earthquake. I wasn’t hurt but the level of chaos in the city was astounding.

By this point time, I already knew my marriage wasn’t going to recover; though it was still going to be awhile before we divorced. And I’d been dating a Kiwi lady named Colette.

Colette’s house was OK in the quake and she told me that I could bring my essential stuff (passports, computers, family heirlooms, clothes and whatever) over and put them in her garage and that I could stay for a week or two until I knew what I was going to do next.

The long and the short of that story is that I never left. And we’ve been living together now for 10 years and we are getting along great.

Here’s a magazine article I wrote about those harrowing times:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yc3vouewfh4c1th/AADDCd_Rx8VZH1eItfNoCJ84a?dl=0

It took two and a half years for my insurance settlement to come through on my apartment. It was well insured and I ended up getting fully paid out for it. So that was nice for my finances.

In 2012, my younger son, Chris, came down to NZ for a six week visit and he never left. He loved the place just as I did. He met a lady working here from the UK, Laura, and they hit it off and began living together and then they had a son, Sammy, who is now just six years old. So, that was another beautiful thing. Part of my family had come along to my new home.

Back in the US, my older son, Dan, still lives in California and has a beautiful wife, Ann, and two kids; Cody and Eden. I try to get back and see them every year or two but in these times of the virus, that’s gotten to be nearly impossible.

As I write the end of this story out, I am 73 years old and have been living here in NZ with Colette for 10 years.

I spend my retired time now in a variety of ways.

When the world is normal (no virus), Colette and I try to travel someplace nearly every year. We’ve been to the US several times. We’ve been to Montreal and Vancouver in Canada. We’ve been to Paris in France. We’ve been to Rome in Italy. And we’ve been to Spain, Denmark, Norway, Singapore and Hong Kong as well.

Here at home, we stay absorbed with our grandkids (Colette has four in addition to my one with Sammy).

We exercise together with walks and bike rides. I do two workouts a week at a local gym. I lead a Meetup group on philosophical subjects.

I’m still playing at being a programmer. And I’ve been writing an App that runs on Apple iPhones and iPads for six years now. I keep telling folks it is almost ready to be released; but no one believes me anymore.

I play at stock trading in the US markets. I spend a lot of time on Facebook chatting with friends and sparing with folks on philosophical issues.

Both of us are healthy and are aging well. And with every year that passes, that is a greater and greater blessing.