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BY: All right. So you graduated from Stanford in 1976 and then you said, you also said that you went to two other schools. So what happened after you graduated from Stanford?

SS: Well, okay. So when I graduated from Stanford, I got an internship that summer to work with the California Department of Health in the Vector Control Section. So that's the group that was looking at vectors of disease, mainly mosquitos and malaria in the Central Valley because the mosquitos are endemic that can carry malaria in the Central Valley and it had been a really big problem early in the 20th century. So then they established a mosquito control program and that basically eliminated malaria from the Central Valley. But that only works if you keep tamping down the mosquito population. They also looked at other vectors of disease like fleas and ticks and flies if there was a disease potential for actual risk. And the summer I got the job, initially I was just working with mosquitos, collecting mosquito larvae here and there around the Central, up and down the Central Valley, and doing tests on insecticides. So we'd go out with this fogging machine and blow insecticide across a field and then see what the population count was before and after. But then about the middle of the summer, after about a month or two of that, we got a plague outbreak, bubonic plague. This guy had died of bubonic plague in Fresno, I believe, or somewhere in that area. And so they started doing this campaign to look for and eradicate any fleas that might be carrying the bubonic plague bacteria. So then I got sent all over the state, largely in the Sierra Nevadas, so Lake Tahoe and north of there to track down squirrels and get their fleas and send them to see if there was any plague. So anyway, that got me interested in public health and vector control. But that job ended, so in November or late October, it ended once the cold weather came in and all the fleas got killed, and there wasn't any danger of plague anymore.

So I decided I wanted to see the world, well, every city in the United States. I moved to Boston and drove across, took two weeks to drive across. Side note, so I'm driving across late October, early November, and I hit Atlanta. I decided to go walking around downtown, so I'm there and then there's this big commotion or a lot of traffic and lights and stuff around this one hotel, so I go walk over. And this young woman, so probably about my age which would be, like, early twenties, said, "Hey, want to go into the party?" So I said sure. So she said, "Well, just wait 'til the door opens, and then we're going to slip in." So it turns out it was the victory party for Jimmy Carter. Because I didn't realize it, but that was election day and I had stopped in Atlanta. So we snuck into the party, and then close to midnight, Jimmy and Rosalynn came walking through on their way to the car, so I got to see Jimmy and Rosalynn on election night of '76.

So anyway, I moved to Boston, though I would get a job as a research lab tech because I had a biology degree from Stanford. But couldn't get a job. For six months, I worked as a waiter on the night shift at Howard Johnson's restaurant, which actually was very interesting because of all the characters that came in, there was the late night crew that came in after the bars closed. Some of them we thought were probably enforcers for the mob. And then one guy actually pulled a gun inside the restaurant one time. And then we were, like, literally next door to WGBH public television station in Boston, one of the premier PBS stations. And so their tech crew would come in before they started their shift at seven, so like at five or six a.m., these guys would come in. And then there was the Armenian dance troupe, there were like thirty Armenian dancers, and they would come in around eleven after their practice. That was really interesting. But anyway, I was about to give up when I did get a job as a research tech in this pharmacology lab for a guy who was on Harvard med school faculty in pharmacy, pharmacology, and I worked there for about a year and a half.

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