I was born in El Centro, California, an agricultural community twelve miles north of the Mexican border. Imperial Valley is one of America's breadbaskets, and it was a long time before I realized that most people bought lettuce in a grocery store, instead of picking it from your friend's field. My dad was the city manager (ie, mayor), and I thought he was so clever because he could drive all the way through town without ever having to stop for a red light. When I was ten years old we moved across the border to the town of Mexicali, in Baja California, where Dad became the manager of an American cotton company.

I went to Pomona College, and there met John Lombardi. He was my best friend, and for three years we solved each other's problems, before we finally decided we were more than best friends. I was a botany major, and he was a history major. We got married at the end of college and went to Columbia University for graduate school. New York City and John's Brooklyn-Italian relatives were quite an eye-opener, but his aunts were just what I needed. They fed us a real Italian dinner every Sunday, with lots of food and lots of noise. I learned a lot from them.

John and I went to Caracas, Venezuela so that he could research his dissertation. I taught biology and English, and he rooted away in the national archives. A year and a half later we came back to the States; he had his dissertation and a mound of data on punched IBM cards.

John took a job at Indiana University, and we spent twenty years in Bloomington, Indiana. Our son and daughter were born there. John started as an assistant professor of history and ended as the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. I was super-mom and ran a free-lance cartography business to keep my mind from becoming rusty. It was all John's fault; he said that anyone who could draw a picture of a flower should be able to draw a map, and he needed one. I drew it, and it was horrible. Unfortunately, the book can still be found in the library. Then he needed twenty-two maps for another book on Venezuela, the one that used all those punch cards, and I decided to really figure out what I was doing. That started my cartography career. For fifteen years I drew maps for professors or presses. I let the business die a natural death when we moved to Baltimore, Maryland.

We spent three years at Johns Hopkins University, and I had time to indulge my genealogy hobby.

Then in 1990 we came to Gainesville. During the decade of the 1990s I had little time for hobbies and my needlepoint, quilting, and genealogy suffered, although occasionally I took a trip to hunt for "dead ancestors" in a library somewhere. I filled my time during that decade with the appointments and meetings necessary for the job of president's partner. After John left the presidency in 1999 and returned to teaching and research, we moved into our own home on the outskirts of Gainesville and I've had a chance to return to many of my neglected interests while continuing to work on a wide range of university and community projects.

From 2002 to 2007, John served as the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and so we completed another chapter of our life with enthusiasm and commitment as we packed up and moved the Lombardi enterprise to Amherst. Our time in the center of New England between 2002 and 2007 introduced us to a new set of superb friends and colleagues and a dynamic community.

From 2007 to 2012, John served as the President of the Louisiana State University System, and we lived in Baton Rouge. Those years introduced us to a whole new set of superb colleagues and good friends, and taught us much about life in the deep South.

In 2012 and through calendar 2013, on leave from LSU, we returned to Massachusetts to our home in Pelham (outside Amherst) and John continued his teaching and other activities with the University of Massachusetts Amherst and we both reconnected with many old friends.

The kids have grown. John Lee received his Masters in Political Science at the University of Florida. He currently lives in Brussels with his wife and two daughters, Alex and Sam, where he works on intelligence activities within NATO. Maryann graduated from the University of Michigan. She currently lives in Washington DC with her daughter Molly. She works for The George Washington University in arts administration.

Cathryn L. Lombardi
2012