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Growing Up Geek: Thomas Ricker
Welcome to Growing Up Geek, a new feature where we take a look back at our youth, and tell stories of growing up to be the nerds that we are. This week, we have our very own Senior Editor, Thomas Ricker. I'm old. In fact, I'm so old that I predate geek chic. In my awkward years, a period that spanned into my early 20s, the term "geek" was a slander; a word reserved for boys with thick glasses, red hair, pale skin, freckles, and a talent for math and science. In other words, me. The kid whose mother made him wear a white t-shirt in the public swimming pool. The kid who wore a patch to help correct a lazy eye. Or, as my best friend described my condition at St. Peter's grade school, "you're everything that I hate." Fortunately (at least that's how I felt at the time) I was also athletic so I ran with the jocks -- the cool kids, the boys whose hair stayed feathered even after the helmet was removed -- both on the field and off, within the highly competitive social circles laced with adrenaline and cheerleaders on the cusp of becoming Cosmo girls. A John Hughes anomaly, to be sure. Desperate for acceptance, I all but abandoned intellectual discourse for the homoerotic embrace of my squat-thrust spotters in the weight room. This left little room for nerding out anywhere but home. I certainly wasn't going to build a variable voltage power supply with our fullback. That's where my father stepped in. Without a doubt, my secret nerdism was seeded by regular visits to Radio Shack with my pops, an engineer who actually built radios for a living. No, not the consumer variety, but top-secret stuff developed for the US military during the height of the Cold War. A man with intimate knowledge of Area 51 and so steeped in classified technology that he saw very early on how CDMA and GPS technologies, once commercialized, would revolutionize consumer electronics. It was during these visits to The Shack that I was first exposed to bins of colorfully-banded resistors and tightly-wound spools of solder. The foundation was set, the outcome was inevitable.
