Jo was of Italian-American descent, and she cooked fine Italian-American meals. We also ate out often, frequently Mexican, with taco salads, had parties at the house with her many friends in the Tampa Bay area, and for 3 years everything was very warm and peachy. At first we lived in a magnificent 2-story house flanked by large palm trees that Jo found in Palm Harbor, which even had an extra room that could serve as my home office. It was equipped with a 2-story ceiling in the living room, which gave it an atmosphere of space and luxury. I remember one time we had a splendidly sociable Palm Harbor party in an attractive neighborhood not far from the Gulf Coast beaches we loved, like something Grandad Green would have thrown for key stockholders.

Before I moved to ABA Electromechanical Systems, which became General Defense and later Radiation Systems, we moved farther North from Tampa, towards Dunedin, which was still close to the beaches, and every day I drove South to Largo through Clearwater and Pinnellas Park, near Treasure Island. Symbols from Grandad Green's favorite novel by Robert Louis Stevenson were in evidence in the Tampa Bay area, which has The Buccaneers as a football team.

The Clearwater scene above, showing some of the beaches and islands on the Gulf Coast near Tampa Bay, was one of our favorite hangouts and picnic spots. One time I saw the space shuttle take off (videos, Atlantis launch) from Tampa Bay, emitting a contrail of orange vapors seeming to be as thick as my finger at arms length, although I was located on the other side of the Florida peninsula from Kennedy Space Center. There was no sound at that distance, but it was an astonishing early morning sight on the way to work that day, when I caught it quite by accident.
Jo seemed to figure in signs I saw after she divorced me: in Big Jo on Mars, in Atimiske Island in St. James Bay, in Betty Boop posters, and in sidewalk slabs prepared by CorneJo & Sons Paving Contractors on Tulsa Street. See Satellite Visions 34. I might add that there is an enormous 2001-style Black Monolith emblazoned with CorneJo in a cemetery near Hillside visible from Kellogg Street (Highway 54) in Wichita that I drive past quite frequently. It reminds me of the day when everything suddenly seemed to be painted on black velvet, as in pictures from the Old South of houses painted in pastels on black backgrounds, or Elvis portraits on black velvet. It slowed us down for a week.

Also, there is an amusing free-association resonance with the first lights of the written word, the first marks of men. Pharaoh Hor-A-Ha, or Menes, who founded Memphis (mem-physics) about the time the first heiroglypics were invented 5000 years ago, was pursued and attacked by a Hippopotamus resembling my first wife Susan. But his third-dynasty descendant Dzoser, pronounced "Jos-your" [1], built a "Big Jo" in the form of the first step pyramid that resembled a stairway to heaven. It was designed by master builder Imhotep (visionary). (See Timelines.) The first walled city was Jericho, near the river Jordan behind the tooth of Israel, on the "eating side" of the barricades, built nearly 11,000 years ago, 4,000 years before the invention of the wheel in 5000 BC, about the time the horse was first domesticated (4500 BC - 2000 BC). Perhaps it has some claim to being the real Garden of Eden, from which the life-extending properies of apples were first determined. History was at first written in Egyptian hieroglypics, which we can find in the foundation of Memphis, but the voice of God did not play well from the page until phonetic scriptures were available from the Phoenicians about the time Moses and the Isrealites fled from Ramses II in the 13th century BC, although phonetic writing seems to have originated about 2000 BC, the Canaanite-Phoenician alphabet having come into being in the 14 century BC. (See the history of the alphabet.) By the time of the Kingdom of David in 1000 B.C., Psalms could be written out and performed by players. Approximately 1000 years later, Hadrian drove the Jews from the region in 70 AD, about the time animals were first functioning as engines in mills, before the scarecrow and eyesore of crucifixion was finally eliminated when Christianity became the state religion in 313 AD, after a haunting reign of terror lasting approximately a millenium.

Where are the Engineers Now?

My father James A. Green Jr. died about the time I married Jo Nucifora in 1983. Jo and I were divorced in 1986 after she sued for divorce, suspicious that I was getting interested in other women. It was the End of the World, like the Last Days of the Planet Krypton. In fact, the Space Shuttle exploded that same year. I was an MSEE and a Rocket Man from General Defense (formerly ABA and later Radiation Systems) who had been involved in missle tracking work before applying my servo wisdom to phototypesetters at AlphaType/Berthold, a respected applied scientist in Tampa Bay. I saw to it that Jo and the Kids Christina and Joseph got all the property in Florida, packaging them carefully into little rockets like Superman's father Jorell making the children safe before the final explosion. That is where I really showed some "largess". After launching them on their getaway from the End of the World, I myself landed back in Kansas at 36 years of age like a "meaty-or-write" with my resume Profile to rejoin my old company at Mycro-Tek, working on the AIM interactive graphics workstation, reborn as a Kansan in 1986, but no longer a married man living in a household in tropical paradise with a family of my own.
Thirty-six is the atomic number of Krypton, and from 1960 to 1983 the meter was defined in terms of one orange-red spectral line of krypton-86. My father Jorell had sent me to another world, once again as a manchild in a promised land without a wife or a home of my own, like an "I am sent me" from Moses, an emissary from "I and my Father are One". Hal Jordan became Green Lantern, a jock in good condition with an MSEE degree, some experience, and powers and abilities beyond those of mortal man, a child of the advanced lights of a future gone far past Faraday and Maxwell. Note that Krypton's multiple emission lines make ionized krypton gas discharges whitish, making krypton-based bulbs useful in film work as a brilliant white light source. This reminds me of Timothy Leary's eerie White Light, which was combined with virtual apparatus associated with an etherial projector or a movie camera, a light of "script-on" associated with a film "project" that I saw in 1969 under the influence of a stiff dose of LSD, when psychedelics were more popular.