There was a period of time from Thanksgiving to Christmas when I wasn’t contributing the same amount of literary/journalistic content that I usually do, and it wasn’t because of the holidays or anything. It was because my dad passed away.

My mom died when I was only seven, and my dad and I never had the best relationship, partially due to the fact that our communication skills are shit, partially due to the fact that he was doing clandestine government work throughout the cold war and was sort of limited in what he could even talk to me about.

I never knew much about my dad because he had top secret clearance and couldn’t tell us much about his day-to-day work in the bunkers of Aberdeen Proving Ground or his four-day stints at the Pentagon once a month. One time when I was a kid, I asked him what his job was like, and he said, “You know everything you read in science fiction stories? It’s all real, and that’s what I do.”

I believe my next question was something to the order of, “You work on jetpacks!?”

I had never even seen the above picture of him until yesterday, and it made me wish we could have made it to the level where we could speak to one another as gearheads, because this is goddamn cool. I’m dating the picture around ’76 by my dad’s appearance and by our family’s location at the time.

He was totally going for the “Meathead” look.

Rob Reiner...Not my father.

I believe machine in the picture above is a Commodore because I zoomed in on the placard on the left, and it looks like it says “CBM Termicare.” I’ll continue looking that one up.

But the real sci-fi shit my dad was working on was ARPANET. Long before the term “Internet” even existed, that was a major part of his job…check this out:

This article is from 1980…so this is in the period of time when it was still ARPANET, before it got turned into MILNET, when the packet-switched network was still a new concept, and there were only 100 something nodes in the entire Internet.

What he was researching is anybody’s guess, though. The only thing I know about this is that he once gave us a full-sized injection molded replica of an AK-47, and two smaller calibre replica handguns from his lab. Once he came back from one of his weekends at the Pentagon with a gasoline-soaked russian tank driver’s helmet. My stepmom says those monthly trips actually took him places like Cuba and Russia during the Cold War, and I know he went to Panama and Germany in the 80′s. I may never know exactly who he was watching.

He was a spy, after all…and an Internet espionage pioneer. Pretty cool. I just wish we could have talked more about his work when I had the chance.