Bio, 2014: Carolyn Abbott
I went straight from graduation in Stillwater to Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, which had a 5-year work-study program, so I lived and worked in Washington, D.C. and Boston for 3 months each in 1965 before deciding to return to more familiar territory. While in Boston, I got to spend some time with Larry Flesner and Ken Bailey, both attending MIT. At OSU,I roomed off campus with my friend Wendy Winsted before she moved to the Village and the folk music scene in NYC. (Wendy became pretty successful as a musician in NYC and subsequently went through medical school and an internship without having a bachelor’s degree, but sadly, she contracted first breast cancer, which was how she’d lost her mother as a teenager, and then, after surviving a double mastectomy, she lost a battle with ovarian cancer in ‘93). At OSU I met my first husband, Edward Gonsalves from Guyana (formerly British Guyana, having recently having achieved its independence from Britain). We married in August ’67 in the Catholic Church in Garden City Long Island, where his mother lived (the wedding ceremony did not include anything I’d requested and that really started things off badly). He was 7 years my senior, British-educated and from a wealthy Portuguese-Catholic family, part of the ruling class there, which I learned when we had to leave school in Jan. 68 after his father died, so Edward could help keep the family sawmill business going in Georgetown. As a result, I spent 9 months in a tropical country with a multicultural, English-speaking (and cricket-mad) population, a socialist government, and fresh produce so delicious that I couldn’t eat American produce for several years after returning to the US. We traveled into the bush (jungle) on his 125cc Yamaha (me on the back) for a brief vacation, which was a wild and memorable experience (and unique, no other woman had done that before, to anyone’s knowledge). But mainly it was a miserable time for me; I’d married him for the wrong reasons and given my Unitarian upbringing, I didn’t relate well to his family’s old world Catholicism and overall value system, nor, quite honestly, did I ever relate to being Carolyn Gonsalves. We returned to OSU in the summer of ’68, learning about the Chicago riots and other significant events after the fact. Edward graduated with a civil engineering degree in ’69 and we prepared to emigrate back to Guyana (my bachelor’s degree incomplete), shipping all of our possessions there while we drove to his mother’s house in Garden City, Long Island. Once there, I couldn’t bring myself to make the move; the hardest part of that decision was knowing that all of my treasured books were on their way to Guyana, would probably stay boxed and be eaten by tropical bugs, and I’d never see them again. I returned to OSU and graduated with a BA in English in ’70, got divorced, assumed my maiden name, and moved back to Boston where I was hired by Houghton-Mifflin Publishing Company as an editorial assistant – that English degree was working! Worked for the senior editor in the Psychology Test Dept (they published the Stanford-Binet and other commonly used psychological tests), so my English degree turned out to be completely irrelevant--it was really just a glorified secretarial job. I was commuting by train from Sudbury MA (west of and adjacent to Concord), and when I asked my boss for a raise after 9 months, he declined. I said I could earn more as a secretary at another company and he called my bluff. Shortly thereafter, in April 1971, based on a tip from a former colleague at Houghton-Mifflin, I rode my Yamaha 175cc dirt bike (my boyfriend then was involved in motocross and road racing) to Maynard MA (west of and adjacent to Sudbury) and was hired as a secretary in the Sales Training Department of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), inventor of the minicomputer (precursor of the PC). Twenty-two years later, I took a severance package from Digital and became an independent contractor as a training professional (instructional design and course development). I grew up professionally at Digital, going from secretary to training unit manager during that time and was fortunate to work where technology was king; Digital pioneered or was an early adopter of word processing, email and networking applications, and I was involved in developing the sales training programs for major new products. As a result, I was able to travel widely to Europe, South American and around North America (even getting a chance to visit Beverly Voss in Austin a few times). But my success was due in large part to being a good writer in a company of engineers (that English degree again). Strunk & White’s “Elements of Style” was my Bible and people thought I was odd because I found it so entertaining.
Shortly before attending my first SHS reunion in ’84, I was contacted by my ex, Edward, who found me through Wendy (he was also living in NYC)… he called to say he’d been looking for me so he could return my books, which included a special antique set of Shakespeare plays given to me by my 6th grade English exchange teacher, Miss Edith Greenwood (does anyone else remember her?). Those books now sit with other antique volumes of similar vintage in my house. Just before hearing from Edward, I met my current husband, Bruce Seibert, when we both attended the premiere showing of “The Right Stuff” at a local theater. We “accidentally” met in the lobby and sat together for the movie, but he wasn’t “available” then, and we said goodbye that night with no expectation of meeting again. Three months later we bumped into each other at another theater; this time he was alone and in the process of getting divorced; we both knew this wasn’t a coincidence. Bruce is a pilot and Vietnam veteran and in early August we drove to Oshkosh WI for the ’85 Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in, my introduction to his world of aviation. We were married on Columbus Day ’85, and Nicholas was born the following year, 5 months shy of my 40th birthday. Bruce gave up his aviation job to stay home with Nick, and we lived on my high-tech income, even after I left DEC and was contracting.In late 2002, Bruce went to work for the TSA and was trained as a baggage screener on the large X-ray machines, believing he could serve his country again. (At that time, the TSA was populated by people who believed in its original mission, inspired by the events of 9/11; now he’s embarrassed to admit he ever worked there.) While there, he conceived the idea for an aerial surveillance company providing full motion video imagery to help the government protect the borders, thinking that the government could save taxpayers a lot of money by using a private commercial company (we’ve since been disabused of that notion!). Subsequently, the Indonesian Christmas tsunami and Hurricane Katrina convinced us that emergency/disaster response would be a better market to pursue. We wrote a business plan in 2004-05 and began looking for seed money and investors. It didn’t help that the airplane he wanted to use cost nearly $6M fully outfitted with the surveillance equipment … I began to think it would take a miracle for us to ever find investors (I became a Christian in ’97 – thanks to Barbara Bryan for planting that seed in me during 8th grade when we both worked in the school office; it only took 35 years to finally take root! -- so that concept had a whole different connotation for me then than when I was a Unitarian). His work at the TSA meant that he met a lot of people, especially after he was transferred to passenger screening, and one day in 2006 he screened a man wearing a hat with the military version of “our” airplane on it. Bruce learned that the man’s son (Chad), an Army pilot getting ready to retire, was looking for opportunities in the private sector, so Bruce slipped the dad a business card, Chad emailed him soon after, they met up here (Chad was from New Hampshire and vacations there in the summer—his camp is about 4 miles from the Seibert family camp). Then Chad took the business idea to a longtime friend (Bill) who’d just moved back to NH from Hilton Head and was a high-net worth investor. Bill liked the company idea and became our first investor. We formed a management team of soon-to-retire Army pilots, including Chad and some of his colleagues, Bill, Bruce and me. Soon after that Bruce met a passenger returning from Chicago to his NH home one night at the airport, they struck up a conversation and that man, Matt, became our first sales rep, delighted to have a job closer to home. Bruce and I began to see a Providential hand in how our fledgling business was unfolding at that point.
During those years, I was still contracting as a training professional and was hired to develop some training in 2006 by a man named Gerry at another high tech company. After a year, my contract ended and Gerry was laid off and went into real estate sales. I worked briefly at Fidelity and then in late 2007, I was hired full-time by SeaChange International to develop online training, which was to add some new skills to my professional tool kit. Meanwhile, in my other life we were working hard to get the company going. In 2007 Bruce had relinquished the CEO position to a newly-retired Army Colonel (formerly Chad’s mentor in the 10th Mountain Division) with more executive experience. Thanks to Bill’s investments, we ordered our first Pilatus PC-12 in mid-2008 and had a second one on order with promised bank financing when the ’08 crash pulled the rug out from under us. Several people on the team bailed, including the CEO and sales rep, along with the banks, and we were on life support for the next two years: none of us was being paid by the company; fortunately I was still working in high tech, and Bill had to return to Hilton Head to prepare tax returns for his old CPA firm. Then in early 2010, Bill’s dad, another high net worth investor, agreed to fund us for 18 months. Aerial Surveillance & Security, Intelligence Systems Technologies-U.S (ASSIST-U.S.®) became operational at the Concord, NH, airport in April 2010, right after I was laid off from SeaChange, with Gerry as our CEO and another Chad/Bill high school buddy as our salesman. We’ve been in business for 4 years now (and have gone through 3 more sales reps—now all of us do business development); last year we changed the name to ASSIST Aviation Solutions (keeping the old trademarked acronym that was too difficult to explain). Our largest client is the New England Aquarium, whose researchers fly in our airplanes as observers with their still cameras doing surveys of the right whale and other large ocean mammal migration paths off of Cape Cod as part of an environmental impact study for an offshore wind farm. Our fleet currently comprises a Cessna 182 with our full motion video camera, two Cessna O2As (Vietnam era surveillance twin engine aircraft that the Aquarium required us to use), and we just took delivery this week of a Robinson 44 helicopter with a special mount that will accommodate just about any camera/sensor that exists. This significantly expands our capabilities and will let us service the utility industry and other markets (like media) that we previously couldn’t penetrate. I’m responsible for all marketing communications, created and manage the company website (www.assistaviationsolutions.com) and all the company documentation. (I also created and manage our church website.) Everything I ever learned professionally has come to fruition in this role, just as has all of Bruce’s experience in aviation and homeland security. So at age 68, I’m still actively working – oh, I forgot to mention that I’ve been a freelance editor for the past 13 years in my “spare” time, which also had a Providential impact on the company – in 2005, I edited a marketing survey on the international remote sensing market, and via a very remote association on LinkedIn, I managed to meet its author in person in 2013, who has since become an important adjunct member of our company.
On the family front: in ’97, disgusted with the MA public school system, we enrolled Nick in 6th grade at Twin City Christian School, which was affiliated with a Baptist church. I became a Christian that year after we started attending the church (again, thanks Barbara). The following year, we decided to home school him. I say “we”, but it was mainly Bruce who did this. When Nick decided he wanted to attend West Point (carrying on the military service tradition from both sides of the family), and I learned that the military academies at that time were not giving serious consideration to homeschoolers, we put him back at TCCS for grades 10-12 (he’d skipped 8th), where he graduated as salutatorian in 2003. Two weeks after graduation, he was in Basic Training in the Army Reserve, having been turned down for West Point (he was 16 when he applied, they told him not to give up, get some experience under his belt in the Guard or Reserves and apply again). His MOS was in intelligence with a top-level security clearance (at age 17); while in his advanced training, he decided not to reapply to West Point and returned to MA, where he worked at Fort Devens for awhile as well as at a high-tech company involved in manufacturing baggage screening systems (the opposite end of the scale of those his dad was using at TSA). In Jan. 2009, he was finally called up to deploy to Iraq for a year with others with the same MOS. He’d planned to marry his first and only sweetheart that June, whom he’d met at the karate studio where we all trained (did I mention I’m a 4th degree black belt?), and we convinced them to get married before he deployed. He returned home unscathed in May 2010, and William Patrick Henry Seibert was born on June 27, 2012, a month before Nick finally left the Army; they’ve been living with us since Dec. 2012 while Nick works at New Hampshire’s largest and most successful firearms store. William dotes on his grandpa, who has already instilled a love of Mopar cars, monster trucks and airplanes in him. We’d once hoped that Nick could work for our company as an imagery analyst, but so far that hasn’t panned out, and he’s thinking now about moving out west someday. He’d been to Oklahoma with me in Dec. 2001 for my dad’s memorial service and in August 2002 for my sister Christine’s memorial service, but I didn’t really have an opportunity then to show him around Stillwater, so it doesn’t hold any attraction for him.
One final note: I started taking piano lessons in first grade and continued until I was 15, when I decided my social life was more important and quit. Before quitting, I used to play on Sunday mornings at the Unitarian Fellowship in Stillwater, where I learned many traditional hymns (hearing those hymns many years later while attending church with Bruce’s parents in the late 80s-early 90s was instrumental in drawing me back to the church). After I moved to Massachusetts, I had piano dreams for the next 20 years until I finally found one I could afford (and the dreams stopped), but then I had no real occasion to practice for until we began attending church. In ’98 I was invited by the choir director to accompany the choir’s Christmas cantata performance, so starting in October that year, I was training not only for my first degree black belt but also returning to playing the piano after a 35 year hiatus. It all came back very readily, but it was a complex and long cantata, so in essence I got my black belt in piano at the same time as my karate black belt. Since then I have continued to play in church, which takes me back to those years in Stillwater as a teen-ager. Amazing how things can come full circle.
Needless to say, I AM looking forward to eventually retiring, but I believe I’ll be editing until I can no longer sit at a keyboard (though technology may have changed by then allow verbal editing). I just couldn’t edit my life story down to one page. I hope you can understand why now.
©2009 Stillwater High School Class of 1964