My father’s upbringing was far from normal. His father, Lyman Ross Orton and his mother Sidnia Butler Orton (Syd) met while he was in residency and she was a senior at the University of Maryland. Sidnia was in the first graduating class of women of the school in 1922. They were married in secret January 1st of that year because they were afraid they would be expelled if anyone found out. It made the Baltimore newspapers as a scandal when it was finally found out after Lyman and Sidnia both completed their studies. They lived in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Lyman became a surgeon who was also the MD in charge of the state’s public school heath program. From a personal standpoint, Lyman was great at making furniture and was quite a good musician, specializing in the violin. In 1927, Bob Orton was born. On January 13, 1933, when Bob was five, he discovered his father’s slumped body in his office. The official cause of death was heart attack, but many speculated he overdosed on morphine. Sidnia moved to Cambridge and worked as an art director for a major clothes retailer’s advertising department. My father attended The Nichols School, an exclusive private school located nearby on the Harvard University campus. Sidnia remarried a few years later to Leon Strauss, part owner of her company, while she continued to work in the advertising business in Boston. In 1942, when my father was only 14, Sidnia, who had recently retired and was only 44, died of pneumonia at a hospital in Salem, Mass. Because Leon vowed to take care of Bob’s education and watch over his inheritance until he was 21, he sent him to Cheshire Academy, a private boarding school in Connecticut where he was involved in football and baseball and was known to be a cheapskate on campus by his peers. After graduation, he attended Tufts University for a term. In late 1945 my father enlisted in the Marines and after boot camp at Paris Island, was stationed in Hawaii on the way to finish off Japan in 1946. Then Harry S Truman dropped the atomic bombs. Had it not been for that, I may not have been born. Returning from war Bob then finally graduated with a degree in business from the Babson Institute. While in college in Kansas, he met my mother. Interesting side note: Kansas? But Babson is in Boston right? Another interesting tale that involves atomic bombs. While my father was attending Babson, the Soviets has gotten ahold of the secrets and made their own H-Bomb. The founder and Dean of the Babson Institute, Roger Babson, decided it would be a good idea to have a second campus in an area not likely to be bombed by the Reds. As the story goes, he threw a dart at a map of the US and hit little Eureka, Kansas, where one young, popular, pretty, and fun-loving Joyce Darling lived.

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