Not long ago, a man named Jeff e-mailed his old buddy Clay. He wanted to express a thought he'd been having, a thought childhood friends share after they collect diplomas, marry, establish careers, have children and go gray.
Doesn't time fly? Isn't life strange?
Jeff wrote: Forty years ago, who would have thought that you'd be there and I'd be here?
A normal, middle-ager's note, except that Jeff Raikes clicked “send” from Vietnam.
He was visiting Southeast Asia because he's the CEO of the Gates Foundation, a job he took after rising to become the third-most-powerful person at Microsoft.
Clayton Anderson read the e-mail while orbiting the planet at 17,500 mph. The astronaut was finishing his second stint at the International Space Station, where he can go outside and float weightlessly, hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface.
On his first space mission, Clay sent an e-mail to another old buddy, Chris.
That would be Chris Greene, an atomic physicist in Colorado and the first person on this planet to correctly predict the existence of a certain type of molecule.
The Microsoft multimillionaire, the nationally renowned physicist and Nebraska's first astronaut all knew each other back when they had curfews and zits.
They grew up within a 10-mile radius of Ashland and graduated from the same small high school between 1972 and 1977.
They played golf in the same foursomes, acted side by side in school plays, and hung together during less-than-successful double dates.
Ashland legend has it that at least one of them celebrated teenage life by taking off his underwear and streaking naked down a deserted Main Street.
Then the three Ashland boys put their clothes back on, grew up and became what is quite possibly Nebraska's most powerful homegrown power trio.
Maybe it was the water, they say. Maybe it was our mothers. Maybe it was luck. Maybe it wasn't.
“Maybe we were all just cocky enough to think that we could compete at the top level of our chosen disciplines,” Greene said. “And so we did.”
Greene serves as the prototype for this succession of Ashland success stories.
He grew up the fourth of six children, splitting time between the family farm south of Ashland and his parents' home in nearby Greenwood.
He grew up busy: During the school year, he acted in class plays, edited the yearbook, sang in the swing choir, set school records in golf and cross country, won the high school's Sportsman of the Year award and graduated as valedictorian of the class of 1972.
During the summers, he wrote fan letters to NASA, spent nearly every daylight hour at the Ashland Country Club, and built and floated kayaks down the Niobrara with his father on the weekends.
One summer, frustrated that the school didn't offer advanced calculus, he went out, bought a textbook and taught himself.
“At a big school, you have to choose one narrow thing and focus, but (in Ashland) I kind of deluded myself and maybe Jeff did, too into thinking that I was good at everything in the world,” he said.
Greene did one other important thing as he graduated from high school and then moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
He caught the attention of Jeff Raikes, four years younger than Greene, who watched the older student's every move, noting how ferociously he competed in academics, athletics and everything else.
“He was sort of my idol,” Raikes said.
And the attention of Clayton Anderson, five years younger than Greene, who once approached his elder at the Ashland Country Club restaurant. He was thinking about majoring in physics, the major Greene had chosen at UNL. Anderson was looking for advice.
Said Greene: “I told him physics thrilled me.”
Greene hasn't lost that thrill. He has been a physics professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder since 1989 and serves as a fellow at JILA, a CU-based physics research institute that boasts three Nobel laureates.
In scientific circles, Greene is known for using theoretical physics to predict the existence of the Rydberg molecule, a relatively gigantic and bizarre type of molecule that had never been seen until researchers identified it in an experiment last year.
Earlier this year, Greene won the Davisson-Germer Prize, one of the top awards given to atomic physicists.
Still, let's be honest: He's a little less famous than either the astronaut or Bill Gates' money man.
“I don't think I could be viewed as successful as (Raikes or Anderson) until I win the Nobel Prize,” Greene said. “Who knows? Keep checking your newspaper every November.”
Jeff Raikes was always destined for fame, say his friends and classmates.
Except they figured he'd be on the cover of Rolling Stone, not Fortune magazine.
In high school, Raikes gained local renown and $50 every Saturday night as a drummer for a local swing band called the Revelairs. He stole the show at Ashland's basketball games, pounding on the drum set as the pep band belted out halftime tunes.
Raikes' other early talent was social, Ashlanders say.
Through golf, he got to know Greene.
Through theater and speech, he befriended Clay Anderson. They eventually squired two young ladies on several double dates, Raikes says today.
What Raikes doesn't say but Greene does is that a young Jeff Raikes had a bit of a reputation for disrobing.
“Rumor has it that Jeff could be seen in the buff, sprinting around the city of Ashland,” Greene said.
Raikes went from small-town streaking to Stanford University, started tinkering with computers, graduated, took a job at Apple and seemed destined for Silicon Valley success.
Then, in 1981, a company he never heard of cold-called him about a job. He accepted the job interview only because the start-up company would fly him to Seattle. His sister lived there, and he could visit on this no-name company's dime.
Before he knew it, though, Jeff Raikes found himself taking the gamble of his young life. He shook the hand of a 26-year-old stranger named Bill Gates and accepted a job at a place called Microsoft.
Family members thought Raikes had lost his mind. Steve Jobs, Raikes' old boss and the king of Silicon Valley, warned that his new employer would go bankrupt.
Instead, Microsoft grew into a $60 billion behemoth and lodged itself into the American imagination, just as Ford and Coca-Cola had in earlier decades.
Raikes retired in 2008 as the third-most-powerful man at Microsoft and one of the richest men in the country.
For an encore, he accepted a job running the Gates Foundation, which controls a $38 billion endowment much of it wealth from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and seeks to feed the hungry, teach the poor and cure diseases.
It's a long way from the Revelairs.
“It's a little hard to grasp, isn't it?” said Kirby Anderson. “I mean, I see the guy at graduation, and the next time I see him, he's a corporate giant! And yet, he's still pretty much the same. It's mind-boggling.”
Anderson, a genetic technologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, has a little experience knowing Ashland natives who go global.
His older brother, Clayton, went from dressing up as an astronaut for an Ashland parade costume contest young Clay got second to suiting up as an actual NASA astronaut.
As a teenager, Clayton Anderson was almost religiously optimistic, an attitude that drew adults as well as kids to him, Raikes says.
That optimism was put to the test when he applied 14 straight times to be an astronaut. Fourteen straight times, he got rejected.
“He wasn't sure if he could go down that path again,” Kirby Anderson said. “He thought maybe he should give up on his dream.”
Instead, he applied a 15th time.
Anderson was unavailable for comment because he was aboard the space shuttle Discovery, flying home for a Monday landing after a mission to repair small parts of the International Space Station. It was his second trip to space.
His ascendancy has striking similarities to the paths of both Jeff Raikes and Chris Greene.
Like them, Clay Anderson was involved in almost every extracurricular activity you can imagine. Like them, he toyed with music Anderson played the piano and organ and excelled in a sport. The Ashland High graduate of 1977 played football at Hastings College.
And, like them, Anderson had a mother committed to education.
Alice Raikes was a stickler of a junior high science teacher.
Helen Greene, Chris' mother, served 12 years on the State Board of Education.
Alice Anderson worked as a teacher and gave English-language lessons to immigrants.
All three moms knew each other socially through church and a bridge club. All three weren't about to let any of their children skate by with a “B.”
“They instilled it into their kids,” said Lorie Hartzell, Clayton Anderson's older sister and a social worker in Hastings. “There was no question, no choice: We were going to college, and we were going to be something.”
That's the sort of thing Jeff Raikes was thinking about as he sat down to e-mail Clay Anderson last week.
He was in Hanoi, where the Gates Foundation has funded projects to build public libraries, improve the Internet and educate mothers on early childhood medical care.
He was writing to Anderson, who recently took a spacewalk 215 miles above the Earth and said, “Too bad more people can't have that view. Maybe one day.”
Chris Greene was back in his Colorado lab, trying to predict things we have never seen.
Raikes thought about all that, and here is what he decided.
“I think we grew up without any sense of limitations.”
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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