I worked with Bland Ewing at UC-Berkeley in the summers that bracketed my Caltech undergraduate years in the early 1970s. Bland’s perspective and insights profoundly shaped my career, introducing me to novel ways to weave math, computers and biology at a time when few considered such a blend. He suggested I pursue a PhD in biostatistics at UC-Berkeley, which I did after taking a gap year as a Watson Fellow. We drifted apart during my graduate years as he moved from academia to the emerging tech sector. When my faculty trajectory at UW-Madison reached full professor in the mid 1990s, my personal life fell apart and I reached out to people from my earlier life. Nancy Sullivan told me that Bland was very sick and I should seek him out. I found him in Paradise, CA, in advanced stages of Huntington’s Disease. I started visiting him regularly and, after encouragement from my sister Lynn, began recording his life story and returning to the science questions that had inspired him and me so long ago. Bland died about ten years later, and I have been returning to those ideas and the tape recordings since I retired. This is about Bland, but it also about me and my journey.

In the summer of 1969, I was first exposed to a Varian computer at a company, where I learned to toggle the boot block to initiate a program load. The next summer, after graduating from high school, I interned at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) where I was exposed to early computers and programming languages. I was promised a job for the following summer, after my first year at Caltech. However, that fell through and I had no options. My Dad happened to talk to David L Wood, UC-Berkeley professor of forest entomology, who said he might have a summer job for me. That opened the door.

David Wood hooked me up with Bland Ewing who kindly took me under his wing during three summers, 1971-73. He taught me about computers at a time when there were only two on the Berkeley campus and just a few at LBL. Bland was building models based on David Wood’s research into the ecology of the western pine beetle and Ponderosa pine trees. Bland introduced me to a way of modeling organismal behavior, which he called then quantitative population ethology, or population ethology, although I now think of it as systems ethology, that still seems innovative and important today. The ideas Bland led then never got properly published and were largely forgotten.

But let’s step back. I was exposed Bland’s ideas while at Caltech, but could not see how to act on them at that time. When I began graduate school at UC-Berkeley in biostatistics, I thought I might explore Bland’s ideas, but they seemed too ambitious and I needed more training. Further, while I had some contact with Bland around that time, we drifted apart as the forest entomology modeling group lost funding. Bland gravitated toward the emerging field of microcomputers.

Later, as a faculty member at UW-Madison, I was distracted by the need to “publish or perish”, and Bland’s work seemed too broad to tackle. In 1996, as my personal life was falling apart, with a divorce as I completed a book and got full professor, I learned that Bland was really sick, suffering from Huntington’s Disease. I began seeing him regularly, and we started working together again on his modeling ideas as I learned his life story. My sister Lynn said, you have to record his life story, which I did over the next ten years until his death.

Much of that dialog Bland and I had, with occasional other friends, can be found in the draft book, Bland Ewing Story that I have been writing since the mid 1990s. Still, I was distracted by my career, and left the transcript of his life, as well as the modeling ideas, to gather dust. I did have a burst of activity around 2000, leading to a software package, ewing, and the beginnings of a book on Systems Ethology.

Now, in the mid-2020s, I am returning once again to this project. I have begun working with a person in UW-Madison Communication Sciences and Disorders to digitize the tapes from the 1990s and improve the transcriptions originally done by Pat Klitzke. [My CSD colleague is interested in how chronic disease such as HD alters speech.] I also have ambitions to expand the software package to model predator-prey populations at scale. This work has reconnected me with Jim Barbieri, now in his 80s who was part of that initial work in the 1970s and who visited Bland with me in the 1990s both in person and by phone.

It is nice to continue imagining my collaboration with Bland Ewing, and to notice how it continues to evolve over the past 50 years.