Biography of Algis Ratnikas

I was born in a refugee camp in Munich, Germany, in 1947, to Lithuanian parents. Our family emigrated to the United States in 1950. I remember waking up to the sound of an engine and looking out an airplane window. Below me I distinctly remember seeing the statue of a large woman. I had just turned 3 years old.

Prior to leaving Germany my father had arranged for a job in the US picking tobacco in North Carolina. The job did not wait, but he was quickly able to contact a former school friend, already settled in Detroit, who agreed to act as our sponsor. I grew up on the West side of Detroit and attended McCarrow public grade school through the 3^rd grade and then transferred to St. Cecilia through the 6^th grade, where I also took piano lessons for 3 years.

In 1959 we moved to Dearborn, where my father had advanced, via an apprenticeship program, to work as a draftsman for the Ford Motor Company. In Dearborn my mother enrolled her 4 school-age children at Sacred Heart School, which was taught by the same IHM Sisters as we had at St. Cecilia. I soon began playing the accordion because our old piano had been left behind on Tuxedo St. We lived only a mile or so from the Greenfield Village Museum. One summer I happened upon the deserted Ford Fairlane mansion, while hiking in the woods along the Rouge River.

I graduated from Sacred Heart High in 1965 and was accepted to the Univ. of Michigan with a small state scholarship. There I pursued a 4 year pre-med program and concentrated in cell biology. I was very interested in immunology and had spent 2 summers working for a family friend at the Children's Medical Center on Detroit's near East Side in the electrophoresis laboratory.

At the end of 4 years in Ann Arbor (1969) I received my graduation certificate and draft notice in the mail on the same day. I chose to enlist and selected service as a laboratory technician. I was very much opposed to the war in Vietnam, but figured that my time would be better spent working within the system rather than outside it as a fugitive.

Boot camp was at Fort Knox, Ky., and in the 6^th week I contracted spinal meningitis. I was fortunate enough to recover and was sent home for a few months recuperation before returning to start boot camp all over. I then went to San Antonio, Texas, for advanced training as a laboratory technician. Most of my class went on to Vietnam, but I was held back for special orders for paratrooper jump school, which was part of my initial delayed enlistment signup deal. Since this was a volunteer assignment, I respectfully changed my mind and was placed on another hold for new orders. This time I was assigned to Fort Carson, Colorado. After one year in Colorado I was transferred to the 2^nd General Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

In Germany I bought an old VW bus my 2^nd week there and drove to wine and beer festivals just about every weekend.  I had a little opportunity to travel and spent a few weeks in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and London. In 1972 I received an early out and returned home and soon I enrolled at Wayne State Univ. for a Master's in the Humanities Dept. My interests in the sciences had severely waned and my lifelong love of reading and music, coupled with new interests in art and history made this a natural choice.

During my first quarter at Wayne I found a huge roll of white paper, perhaps a foot wide and 40 feet in length, that I hung on the basement wall of the family home in Dearborn. I used this to pencil in names a dates along a timeline as an educational assistant for the numerous names and dates encountered in my humanities courses. Very soon large amounts of data began to accumulate in bands of years associated to such periods as the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and the rise of technology. The initial neat timeline in pencil on paper quickly developed into a mess of erasures under scotch tape inserts.       

I soon moved onto the Wayne campus and connected with a group active in publishing the Fifth Estate Newspaper. The 'alternative'� newspaper had gone through numerous changes and at this time was settling into an Anarchist phase with no external advertising, no pay, a monthly schedule and bills covered by fundraisers, subscriptions and some book sales. I wrote a few short articles, helped publish the paper and learned some of the details of the publishing process as well as a lot of history on left wing politics and the labor movement.

Upon graduation in 1976 I found myself working in a rubber molding plant, where the products included gaskets, rubber bottoms for car luggage racks, and gas masks. It was time to go. A girlfriend helped departure along and our travel plans focused on Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and then San Francisco, with preliminary side trips to Iowa and Florida.

In San Francisco I settled into a single rented room in Chinatown for $50 per month and lived off of unemployment benefits and food stamps for some 6 months while completing a novel I had begun in Guatemala. Funds ran out and I began working for the manager of the hotel at odd jobs and then as an assistant tile setter. The manager was a major alcoholic. I soon connected with a plumber and learned enough of the tile trade to begin taking jobs on my own.

I moved to a house in Bernal Heights with a new girl friend and joined with a small group of people to found Yellow Phone, Inc. an advertising service that attempted to link customers using the new personal computers that had just become available. The service managed to generate some money, but only by offering computerized dating. At this point I lost interest in the business but, excited by the hardware, enrolled in a SF electronics school. After one year I took on a full-time job with Oakleaf Corp. servicing small computers in the sales offices of automotive dealerships across northern California. One year later I married my girlfriend, became the father to a wonderful daughter, and hired on with Becton Dickinson Corp. to service their Automated Radio-Immuno-Assay laboratory equipment.

In 1995 I began my history project. My intention was to use my new PC to create a reliable and easy to use universal timeline, beginning right from the Big Bang. Numerous tools all fell into place that made the project work: the computer, the WWW, my own background and interests, and then search engines and other assorted web page tools. The project quickly grew to a large collection of files. Web page counters and e-mail feedback proved that the project was useful to a wide variety of users. The addition of a local search engine soon enhanced the popularity of the site.

In 2001 I began to host a newsletter for users. In Aug 2001 my site host, theGlobe.com, underwent major restructuring and suddenly dropped all hosted web sites with almost no warning. Fortunately I had a spare blank site and managed to transport all my files one day before losing all contact with theGlobe.com!

The NL Archive file at www.timelines.ws contains all the old newsletters.

In December 2004 I took an early retirement from BD in order to devote full time to the timeline project. Also in 2004 I took on an associate in order to transform the thousands of timeline text files to a searchable database (http://www.timelinesdb.com). As of 2007 all new data has been entered into the online database. As of 2011 the transition of old text-based data, moving backward, reached the mid 1960s.

Algis Ratnikas