Who the Heck is George Cathcart?

By way of a biographical page, and in keeping with the travel theme of this web site, I invite you to follow me on a recap of the journey of life, or at least this journey so far. Parts of it have been exciting, especially the travels themselves, like the Appalachian Trail and the Lewis and Clark Trail and hitchhiking Europe. Other parts have been frightening and desperate, as you'll see. Not much has been dull, and when it was, it was my own fault for not paying attention.

Along the path of this journey, I've put some side trails in the way of links to other sites that might be of interest, too.

I was born in New York City and grew up in a strange little town called Tuxedo Park about 40 miles north of Manhattan. I attended a private school in Virginia called Episcopal High School, where I ran track and finished at the bottom of my class in 1965. I spent a year at the University of Denver, but I didn't ski, and I couldn't fake my interest in academics well enough, so I spent a couple months on my uncle's farm in Ithaca, Mich., and worked in the Kohn-Gratiot Pickle Grading Plant, which turned out to be one of the most important events of my life to that time.

A few months later I ended up in the U.S. Army. I got a commission (OCS) and went to Vietnam. I lived through it.

After the Army I went back to school at George Washington University in 1969. I majored in journalism, having decided while in the service that what the world most needed was more good reporting. I have no comment on that decision now. It was an interesting time to be in Washington, with demonstrations and Nixon and tear gas. I had a good time, but I managed to be a good student, too. I made the dean's list and was an officer in the student chapter of what was then called Sigma Delta Chi. The journalism department at GWU taught me to write news, a skill that most journalism schools fail to teach, as I've learned in the years since. And even though I'm now more of a "recovering" journalist, the disciplined structure of news writing, combined with the ability to ask good questions, remains an important component of my professional skills

The highlight of my post-Army college days was spending most of the summer of 1971 hitchhiking around Europe, visiting England, Scotland, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Belgium. I saw bullfights and concerts, slept in farmer's fields and city parks, rode with German hippies and English families and ended up in my ancestral homeland of Scotland, getting chills listening to bagpipes at the Edinburgh International Festival.

It sort of made my senior year at GW an anti-climax. I secured a job in South Carolina and left just a few weeks before the Watergate break-in, still three hours short of my bachelor's degree.

South Carolina Years

I moved to Hilton Head Island in June of 1972 and went to work for the Sea Pines Company in public relations for a little more than a year, then was invited to become managing editor of the Island Packet newspaper, which meant everything but ad sales and delivery. I got married to Nancy Duane Butler in 1974, and tried to enjoy the "good life" on Hilton Head, but that seemed to require playing golf and tennis, which didn't appeal to me.

I covered everything from bridge clubs to broken bridges for the Packet. I won a few reporting awards and helped the paper win some awards for overall quality. The award I've always been proudest of was for a story about the local high school track team that didn't even have a track to practice on but had won several state championships in its division. That story prompted the local Lions Club to raise the money and in-kind donations to build the school not only a state-of-the-art track, but a nice football stadium to boot.

Living on an island, and finding myself surrounded by water, I did a lot of fishing and became convinced that I could make a living writing magazine features about fishing. I sold a story to SaltWater Sportsman about catching sharks in the surf right in front of the house Nancy and I lived in, which made me pretty unpopular with the local chamber of commerce. In 1977 I quit my newspaper job and wrote for outdoor rags like Sports Afield and Field and Stream. I had some success, but not much. Then Nancy developed cancer in 1978.

I put everything on hold for two years, until her death in September 1980, then I went a little nuts for a while. I tried to write and sold a few things, but I was at loose ends. It was my first mid-life crisis.

In 1982 I started to regain some sanity by hiking the Appalachian Trail from end to end, then finished the year by marrying Katie Robbins. I went back to work for The Island Packet as news editor. Katie was working at the community playhouse running a youth theatre program. It wasn't a bad life, but neither of us was especially happy with our situations. That is, we couldn't imagine spending the rest of our lives on Hilton Head doing what we were doing.

Arizona Years

Before moving from her native Florida to Hilton Head, Katie had wanted to study child drama at Arizona State University, so we talked about it, did some planning and tried without success to find jobs in Arizona. Finally we just decided to pack up and move to Phoenix. That was 1984.

I got a job in the university news bureau as a writer that year and became director in 1987, the same year my daughter Anna was born. It was a pretty good job, managing media relations for the sixth largest university in the country. There was enough happening most of the time to keep the adrenaline running, whether it was race riots on fraternity row or football players getting arrested or faculty members winning the Pulitzer Prize. The university paid me reasonably well, good benefits, and all that, but I gradually lost interest. I worked out a deal to go part-time as a feature writer for the alumni magazine so I could spend more of my own time writing. I have completed one novel, "The Memoirs of Hugh Hall," an historical novel about a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Well, as you might expect, that was too good to last. The university beancounters figured out they could hire someone full time for less than I was making part-time, so as of July 1997, I left academe. I got a job with a small ad agency in Phoenix, where the ethics were thin and the owner took on clients who paid with tickets and perks instead of cash. I was neither surprised nor disappointed to get laid off there, and I found that I had regained an interest in higher education.

Maryland Years

I found a job as director of university relations for the University of Maryland and moved to the Free State in August 1998. So I'm back in the shadow of the nation's capital, and I love it.

The Western years were great. In addition to producing a couple of kids I managed to acquire a master's degree in geography while working at ASU. I learned to be a pretty good fly-fisherman and traveled to some of the finest trout streams in the west. Maryland is beautiful, too, and it has four seasons (it's spring as I write this, and outside my window are newly leafy trees and flowering dogwoods and tulips and azaleas and a chorus of birds.

Katie, meanwhile, has done right well, too. She got that master's degree from the ASU Theatre Department in 1988 (365 days after Anna was born). She became famous all over Arizona as "Katie the Puppet Lady," and she'll soon be equally famous in the Mid-Atlantic, too. A parting thought: