When my 17 year old daughter was in third grade she asked me a question at dinner about the Civil War. My response included some silliness about my commanding the Union fighter aircraft wing at Gettysburg.

The next day her teacher Mrs. Simon called and asked me if I had ever met General Lee. Today Carolyn's high school work/study includes being Mrs. Simon's third grade teaching assistant. I learned my lesson about being careful when discussing my history. With that caveat let's start at the beginning.

Born in a Kentucky log cabin February 12, 1809 my first Macintosh was a cloth coat woven by my mother....then I became a lawyer.

BSF (but seriously folks) fortunate to be raised by first generation American children of the depression who professed honesty, responsibility and Rockwellian patriotism we lived in Wynnewood, Lower Merion. My dad's interest in aviation began prior to World War II . Dad spent three years overseas, returned, married his high school sweetheart, found a house, I arrived, bought a plane, we all watched Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Life of Reilly, and Bonanza. My flying lessons began with my sitting on a couple of phone books so I could see over the instrument panel. Landings were easy because you only looked out the side windows anyway, guessed how high off the ground you were, closed the throttle and waited for the arrival. The object was to keep it to one bounce or less.

My parent's mantra was "scholarship coupled with curiosity," something they relinquished to circumstance and necessity. My typical adolescence was fractured on December 8, 1963 by the loss of my dad who was on an ill fated Pan American 707 flight returning to Philadelphia. A lightning strike at high altitude caused a fuel tank explosion, wing separation and crashed it while the flight crew radioed "91 is going down in flames." Never before had a commercial airliner been lost to a lightning strike. I attended the FAA hearings in 1964 held at the old Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia. I was emotionally drained by the facts, but fascinated by the process.

Pursuit of my pilot's license continued surreptitiously out of concern for my mother's feelings. When she discovered I had bought an airplane she insisted on a ride, thereafter treating me like a charter service. In retirement I shall write the Great American novel sequel "Mom Is My Co-Pilot."

College led to a job in the early information industry where I labored for three guys with an IBM 360. We made and I sold what amounted to a word processing system for the creation of the book of directions known as the architectural specification. By selecting numbered paragraphs from hundreds of pages of boilerplate language and sending them to our company by overnight Greyhound bus, we would print out a set of smaller volumes of numbered paragraphs that became the instructions for constructing the building. Paragraph 0001 "Dig a hole in the ground 40 cubits by 40 cubits," paragraph 0002 "Dig a hole in the ground 50 cubits by 50 cubits." The architect would check off one with a red pencil and we would print it in a book. This was pretty sophisticated for 1969. A year of hotel food, and travel convinced me I could always do this , but I wanted to do more.

My sister by then had met my brother-in-law the famous surgeon-in-waiting and I decided my mother deserved a matched set, so I went to law school. The timing was perfect, we both finished professional school in 1973, so one party for the doctor and lawyer sufficed.

I flew myself from airport to airport starting at the Delaware and moving west to the Susquehanna meeting and greeting fellow aviators and trying to establish a practice. A strange thing happened. Instead of becoming an "aviation attorney," I became the "flying lawyer." Got a problem call Mark, he'll fly to you! I spent more time in hangars and coffee shops than in my own office. The work was only tangentially about aviation, mechanics collecting bills, pilot partnerships in new airplanes, divorces because of the airplanes, bankruptcy because of the divorce. The best was an upstate pig farmer who wanted federal funds for the runway he put on the farm to his antique airplane collection sheltered in a non-profit corporate foundation to perpetuate the roots of barnstorming. Magnificent old beautifully restored airworthy antiques bathed in an odor that brought tears to the eyes.

A recurrent problem with pilot licensure is the medical certification required either at 6 month, 2 year , or 3 year intervals. An intervening illness or surgery requires a combination of medical and administrative review. Here my flying friends introduced me to the world of law and medicine and since the middle 1970:s I have been involved both as plaintiff and defense counsel in the world of medical malpractice.

I met another flying lawyer in my travels who had me join his firm and in turn we were absorbed by one of the large center city firms. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For eleven years I lead hordes of young associates into courtrooms all over the country committing wholesale justice for my clients. With the recession following The Gulf War, remember "It's the economy stupid!" the firm first faltered, fell, and finally failed, I left during "falter."

In 1985 with our second child on the way Randi and I went house shopping. In one of the homes for sale sat this little beige box with a screen displaying a map of the US on the screen. I spent twenty minutes with the owner and got my first lesson on the original Macintosh. We didn't buy his house, but soon thereafter went to The Computer Store, (now Mac Outfitter) and bought our first Mac. Thereafter moved up through the ranks with a Performa 600, Performa 6200, Power Mac 6500, Blue and White G-3, now resting a tad we have an iMac SE/DV, Dual 450 G-4, and Sidney's 500MHz Pismo Powerbook.

Finding MLMUG provided the resources, information and courage to commit the consummate act of computing excellence. In the summer of 2000 I threw out all the office Compaqs and replaced them with Macintoshes. Just to keep the rebellious at bay I bought the staff new iMacs for their use at home, and sent them to school for three days of Mac OS familiarization. Dale Fletcher assembled a file folder system, and Chris Nye tutored the intricacies of Apple Works. Thereafter the McMobile crew installed an Ethernet network and we went to a virtual law library.

What's next is figuring how to need OS X in the office so bad that I have to upgrade the hardware and put all those new cute iMac desk ornaments everywhere!

— Mark Corchin
— Maria O. Arguello

Update: Sadly, to everyone's shock, Mark Corchin died suddenly on June 28, 2006. Mark was truly loved in our group. He contributed so much to the group and to many of us personally. We will all miss him. We have assembled a tribute to his memory here.