If I had to point to ONE thing that had the most effect on my life, it would be that my father was unfaithful to my mother on the day of my birth, which set into motion a series of events that completely affected my life from day one. As it turns out, it was very possibly the best thing that could have happened.

6 years active duty Army, I entered the Army as a WAC, and I was also ASA. That and my mom died when I was 14, my dad remarried the stepwitch from hell, which prompted my decision to get the hell out of his house. He or they would not let me go to college because dad would have to sign the papers and he was not going to be financially responsible for me. He still had to sign papers for me to go active duty, but as I had two brothers who were active duty he'd have been on shaky ground refusing. The Army helped me find a great big world beyond my small midwestern town.

The headmaster in the final year of primary school. He was a fundamentalist Christian and a bully. He turned me into a rabid anti-theist: anybody who is idiot enough to try to ram his religion down my throat very soon regrets it.

He pushed me in the direction of being a highly analytical thinker, which sometimes manifests itself on this site.

No one single thing, just lots of steps along the way.

With regard to religion/atheism though: The death of my wife through cancer, despite her being very devout. The realization as a child that Christians were not the good people, I had thought they were, thanks to a largely secular upbringing. The vicar who told me that he was not interested in people like me who were searching for something. The religious teacher, who tried to convince us that animals had no feelings, and that therefore animal cruelty was not a crime. The teacher who punished me for reading too many books.

Each moment once.

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

There were many, and I'm not ready to talk about it.

For me, that time and place were 1957 in college when I tossed religion and realized that my life was mine. It freed me to study what I wanted, science, at my pace. I accidentally discovered computers and found that people would pay me well for doing what excited me.

I was lucky and found a woman who, like me, did not want to add to the earth’s population. We didn’t. We split, and I was able to retire early.