David Blackbird

Women should love David Blackbird because he thinks they're smarter than men. It's possible to trace his peculiar belief back to his childhood. His father sadly died in an automobile accident when David was ten, and his single mother raised him and his brother. Then another exceptional female entered his young life when his Dallas high school class valedictorian played his wife in a one-act play that won first place in the Texas state competition. He continued his association with the stage in college in Lubbock and met his future wife, who was so smart he thought she was a graduate student, when they were both involved in a Shakespeare production. She, however, like David, was in her final semester as an undergraduate.

Upon graduation in 1951 with a BA in government, he received his Air Force commission and married. He was called to active duty a few months later and eventually served as an administrative office in Korea. After the truce in 1954, he returned to Oklahoma and although he had only a four-year commitment as a reservist, he applied for flight training and a "regular" commission. He eventually flew the Boeing stratocruiser refueling tanker, but he found it tiresome waiting at Goose Bay, Labrador, and bases in England, Spain, Germany, Morocco, and the Azores to refuel bombers during the cold war, and so after thirteen years he was sent to the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1964 he received a Masters in Public and International Affairs. This began seventeen years as an intelligence officer, both stateside and in Vietnam and Europe. He retired in 1981 as a colonel.

Along the way he had four children, two girls and two boys, and he faithfully performed his PTA and Cub Scout duties. He and his wife divorced in 1985. He followed another woman to Salt Lake City, "foolishly," he says, when he met his current wife, Leona, at a singles bridge group he was running. They continue to play bridge there, which is now called the Mostly Singles Bridge Group. As still another intelligent woman in David's life, Leona, of course, continues to teach David a lot about bridge and other things.

Consistent with his view on the superior intelligence of women, he is one of the few male members of the League of Women Voters. He finds the women very bright and loves the good they do. He's a political junkie and has found the LWV one of the few places where he can get into an intelligent discussion about politics.

Finally, he's a Unitarian Universalist as well as a humanist, believing with Leona that humans invented God many years ago. Presumably men.

--Earl Wunderli