Another thing MacLaren remembers is the crush he had on his homeroom teacher, Ruth Bunse.
    "I think I was a big pain in the neck because I liked her so much. I tried to hide it by throwing spitballs etc. She really was a nice woman."
    What was important to him was spending time with the guys and having fun away from school. One of his favorite memories was joining six or seven friends and pooling money to buy an old 83 foot long steam yacht for $100. The group used it for summer fun on Lake Geneva. Most earned their money working summer construction jobs or at places like the Coca Cola bottling plant. MacLaren said he worked at International Harvester building farm tractors.
    Not everything was perfect. There were some kinks in restoring the 1893 yacht.
    "We wanted to restore the old steam engine, but a major part was missing. So we bought a big old gasoline engine and installed it instead."
    We spent weekends on Lake Geneva on this big boat. It was quite an experience just keeping it afloat. We would invite our parents up to go for a ride, hoping they would pay for the gas. It took about a hundred gallons to fill the thing. I think our parents were very proud of their kids."

Grant MacLaren in 1954

In high school MacLaren was a jazz fan and admired musicians Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong. He once met Armstrong and his entourage at a Lake Geneva nightclub.
    "I was very enamored with Armstrong but never expected to meet him," he said. "He was a wonderful guy, friendly, gregarious; a warm person. He was also very hip, just like a musician's supposed to be."
    There was also time to create mischief and pull a few school pranks. When asked about the theft of the Abraham Lincoln statue, MacLaren said he could not remember who took it, but is confident the culprit was "not one of the 20 or so people who were our good friends."
    One covert operation he divulged was the making of home made beer in a friend's basement and moving it from house to house so that parents would not suspect what they were doing. However, the beer made itself known at school one day.
    "Before it was finished fermenting, we bottled it, which was a big mistake," he said. "We crimped the caps on the bottles and took them to school. We put them in our lockers to show off to classmates. Because we capped them prematurely, one afternoon the bottles in a number of people's lockers all decided to explode at the same time. I don't remember getting into any trouble from the school officially for that episode."

Finding his way
MacLaren thought he was going to be an engineer like his father. His guidance counselor, Erwin Stasek showed him other options that would change his life.
    "Mr. Stasek suggested I take an aptitude test at the University of Chicago -- probably because I wasn't doing well in classes that I should have being doing well in if I was going to become an engineer. I never had a strong desire to become an engineer; I just figured that was what I was going to be."
    "The test showed I had a strong aptitude for the arts and design field. I never thought about taking courses leaning toward a career in 'the arts.' I was grateful for Mr Stasek's suggestion because the test restults changed my whole attitude about myself and my strengths."
    The road to the future was uncertain for MacLaren even after graduation. He attended the University of Illinois to study Industrial Design, but "didn't do well there" and made up credits at North Central College in Naperville.
    He briefly attended the University of Rhode Island because his family had moved there. After the short stint in Rhode Island, he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1959.
    He spent almost two years in the Medical Corps in France. Discharged from the Army in 1961, he entered Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he earned a bachelor's degree in design.
    At SIU he was employed by famed architectural designer R. Buckminster Fuller who MacLaren described as being "interested in the function of architecture."
    Fuller hired MacLaren to help him with special projects like constructing geodesic domes that are used for, among other things, shelter, radar antenna enclosures and agricultural storage bins.
    It was at Southern Illinois University where he met his wife, Phyllis Swim, an art major. They were married in 1964.

Discoveries
Along the way MacLaren worked at various jobs and became a trail blazer of sorts.
    From 1963 to 1966 he was the exhibits designer and curator for a children's museum in North Carolina. The museum taught visitors about the wonders of nature. He calls this job Ňone of the most personally rewarding jobs in my life. We were one of the first children's museums in the country."
    In 1966 he and his wife worked for the Peace Corps, training volunteers for Community Development work in Latin America. They lived in Puerto Rico for a year.
    During that time he traveled to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They stayed in the program only about a year because Phyllis was pregnant with their first child, Laurel.
    They moved back to Carbondale in 1967. Because of his experiences in the museum and the Peace Corps, MacLaren pursued a master's degree in instructional technology, thinking he might become a training director for a company like Xerox or Monsanto.
    But when he graduated in 1968 from SIU, MacLaren was hired by St. Louis Comunity College and moved to Creve Coeur, Missouri. He worked for the college system more than twenty-five years, becoming its Dean for Instructional Resources.
    In 1970, his daughter Heather was born.
    Computers have played a big part in American society and in MacLaren's life. He had only minimal experience with computers while a student of Fuller's.
    "In those days, computers were nothing like what we know of them today," he said.
    One of his achievements at the college was designing the first computer-produced book catalog, which caught the attention of the media back then.
    "That was quite an event," he said. "In my master's program I had taken Library Science courses and it seemed to me librarians were working in the dark ages.
    "They didn't even use automatic word processors. They were sitting around typing catalog cards. It just seemed this was a perfect application for computers -- organizing information in a logical and easy-to-use way. Instead of being scribes in the back room, librarians could be out helping patrons find what they wanted.
    "It (the book catalog's data base) was a milestone in the library field. Of course, computers advance rapidly, so just a few years later we eliminated the book-form catalog and went completely online (in the mid 1970s). We were all very proud of what we were doing."
    During that decade, MacLaren raced catamarans. He had developed a love of sailing as a youngster in California. in 1978 he finished 13th in the Hobie 14' class Nationals. Because of a bad back and the demands of racing, he no longer races.
    In the late 1980's he became fascinated when a friend built and flew an airplane designed in the 1920's, and soon began to edit and publish a newsletter for The Buckeye Pietenpol Association. It's named after Bernard Pietenpol, a rather obscure aviator who designed and built Model "A" Ford-powered airplanes about the time Lindbergh flew the Atlantic.
    In 1992, MacLaren retired, then designed, built and lived in a solar house in Placitas, New Mexico for three years. He didn't like the "laid-back" attitude there, so he and his wife moved to rural Byrnes Mill, Missouri.
    While living in New Mexico he exposed the pitfalls of some investment retirement programs for teachers in that state and in Missouri, attracting the attention of an editor at Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine. The editor wrote an article about MacLaren. It was published in September, 1997. It describes MacLaren's activities and has moved teachers to educate their school boards about suspect retirement plans.
    "When I took an early retirement, I was concerned that I couldn't afford to retire," he said. "I began an intensive study of various retirement plans, and discovered that many teachers who invest in supplemental retirement plans lose up to 50 percent of their potential retirement income to unnecessary fees and expenses paid to insurance companies."
    To him, all this is simply part of "being in the front." "I think it's a way of looking at things," he said. "Instead of just going along with the herd, you question why you're doing what you're doing. If there's another way to do it, try it out."

The Web Site
MacLaren thought of the Class of 1954 Web site when he started using e-mail in New Mexico. Making Web sites interested him enough that he started to create sites. While attending his 40th York reunion in 1994, he thought it would be a good idea "to utilize this technology." In 1994, he built a site devoted to the class of 1954.
    It's through the Web site that he's met, or become re-acquainted with, classmates like Mike McLane. They regularly swap ideas and problems about computer hardware and software on the Internet.
    This month, MacLaren and his wife are moving to Olivette, Missouri, -- closer to his wife's employment. She is an exhibiting artist, teaches art in a suburban St. Louis high school and performs in a string quartet. She also performs in a folk-singing group called Patchwork, and sings in a madrigal chorus.
    MacLaren is currently making a film (his seciond) about Bernard Pietenpol, the designer of the Pietenpol airplane and the namesake of the newsletter he publishes.
    MacLaren is also building what he calls a "nostalgia hot rod" -- a replica of a Model "A" Ford that might have been built in 1939: