I grew up in Queens, New York and got interested in radio astronomy when I was about 10 years old and this subject was starting to become a major news item. I had a paper route and would often get stopped by some of the little old ladies I would deliver papers to. They would ask me 'What would you like to be when you grow up?' and I told them I would like to be a radio astronomer. Actually, I don't really know what really got me fired-up about being an astronomer, only that this particular specialty was something that I gravitated to right from the start. My father didn't know much about science or such a 'high- tech' profession, and wanted me to get into something more practical that paid better. I do recall reading a lot of books while young. I wasn't interested in science fiction at all, or in traveling to the stars. Instead, I was more interested in what you could learn about space by studying it from the ground. I also remember going into a pawn shop to buy my first telescope which I used to look at the planets and stars, or whatever else I could see against the bright sky of New York city.
Graduate school at < a href="http://www.georgetown.edu/guhome.html"> Georgetown University was quite a different experience than than the one I had had as an undergraduate. I found that you had to teach yourself most of what you wanted to know rather than have the Professors do all the work for you. I also worked as a summer student at the Naval Research Laboratory doing radio astronomy at their Maryland Point Facility. This was a great time to be entering this specialty because in the late '60s, radio astronomy was just getting into mapping HII regions at high resolution, and various theoretical investigations were also helping us understand in detail, how these star-forming regions worked. The radio telescope at Maryland Point was rather badly underutilized so for my postdoctoral appointment I mapped HII regions and did recombination line work too.