Coming to your town, if your town is LIVERMORE, CA. Title: "Creating Our Future: Innovate and Educate". Not a bad topic for this day and age! Competing though with the Fastest Rodeo in the West, the fabled Livermore Rodeo and parade. Wow... is that coincidence or what?
TEDx Livermore will be June 8, 2013 at Las Positas College in Livermore, CA. Livermore is home of the fabled Lawrence Livermore Labs, and also home to the Nissens over the years.
This post is about Livermore, more than about TEDx. The next one is about TEDx
Livermore, with 82,039 folk in 2011, was 855 folk in 1890, 1,391 folk in 1900, 2,885 folk in 1940, and 4,384 in 1950. Lawrence Livermore Labs, a national weapons lab for the Hydrogen bomb work originally, was developed starting in 1949, managed by U C Berkeley. It quadrupled the town population, to 16,058 by 1960, and the growth has continued. The Labs today, no longer under Berkeley management, are part of the US energy program and a major fusion effort has been underway at LLNL for years. 6,700 folk work there today, so in some key way, the area is tied to this big think tank.
The Nissens, you say? Well, they predate LLNL by a lot.
Hans Nissen was born in 1848 in Denmark, emigrated to Murray (now Dublin), Alameda County, CA in 1869, and married Anna Christiansen in 1873. Settling in what is now Livermore (then part of Murray Township), they had eight children, five sons and three daughters, including the eldest son Charles Magnus (b. 1874, d. 1945) and the youngest daughter, May (b. 1884, d. 1981).
May Nissen became a schoolteacher, actually THE schoolteacher for the one-room Livermore school house. She was very popular, eventually retiring as a high school English teacher. Through an unspecified kindness, the first Livermore Park, May Nissen Park, was opened in 1962 at 685 Rincon Avenue. The park at opening had two swimming pools, six basketball courts, a public library, three softball fields, four tennis courts, and an elementary school. It was THE PLACE for a while.
The eldest son, Charles Marcus, married in town to Susan Graham in 1909. They had two sons and two daughters. The youngest son, Jim, b. 1915, fell in love with planes. There are some famous pictures of the great Pacific Clipper Ships (seaplanes) flying UNDER the Bay Bridge, and through the partially built Golden Gate. Jim flew the one "under" the Bay Bridge, a total violation of all the laws of the day, but he claimed (in the best "wrong way Corrigan" style) that the plane didn't have enough lift to go over the bridge. Jim built an airstrip at his Greenville home in Livermore; it is still there, owned by his grand-daughter Kate.
The keys to this man, who could have gotten the keys to Livermore for his deeds -- he built the San Jose Airport, he was awarded the Crystal Eagle plaque (along with Jimmy Doolittle and Chuck Yeager, two of America's most famous fliers), and his restored Curtis JN-4 ("Jenny") flew virtually every American and some foreign astronauts out of his Livermore airstrip around the valley. Plus, get ahold of this -- he wing-walked in the Salinas airshow until he was in his 70;s.
See http://www.flysanjose.com/fl/about/history/nissenplaqufin.pdf for his story.
The grand-daughter Kate is how I got invited to the TEDx conference. I've known her for thirty years, and she is one of those folk with a Klout index of 70+. Connected everywhere, as is her husband. No wonder that Livermore witll have a great TEDx.
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