I was born in midtown Manhattan right as World War Two was drawing to a, uhmm... to a conclusion.  My Dad was a physics prof at an august institution roughly an hour south by train, and until I was two or so, my Dad did "wrong-way commuting" to work and back.  Finally our family found a flat and had a short stint living in that most Ivy of Ivy towns, but around my fifth birthday, my Dad got an alluring invitation to work way out in California, and so my folks, my baby sis Laura, and I all got into our car, took off on a cross-country jaunt, and soon wound up at Stanford.  I did most of my growing-up on campus, going to junior high and high school in Palo Alto, and so it was natural that I should go to Stanford (as did most of my cohorts, in fact).