http://sweagles67.com/heil.html

Dave and Leila Heil

David E. "Dave" Heil

Married

Daughter Morgan (age 17) living in Cincinnati

Employer: U.S. Department of State, Information Management

Residence: Tanzania until retirement next year (then West Virginia)

Hobbies: amateur radio since 1963, guitarist since '63, computers,
audio recording


I consider myself lucky in finding a job that lets me travel and
experience the world.

This assignment to Tanzania was to have been my quiet retirement tour.
I was on home leave

between assignments when the August 7 bombing took place. Our embassy
is a total loss and

we are operating from a beach front house featuring barricades, razor
wire and a contingent

of Tanzanian military manning sand-bagged machine gun nest in the front
yard (now that the

60 or so FAST team Marines have departed). Construction continues at a
hectic pace on an

interim embassy that should be ready early next year.

My specialty is communications so I run the embassy comm center and
am system

administrator for the computer LAN as well. My career with the State
Department has

featured two tours in Helsinki and assignments in Guinea-Bissau, Sierra
Leone, Botswana and

finally to Tanzania.

I'm married to a lovely Finnish girl whom I met during my first tour
in Helsinki. I have

a 16-year-old daughter who lives with my ex-wife in Cincinnati.
Believe it or not, I was

an industrial electronics sales rep by day before joining State and a
guitarist with the

Big Joe Duskin Blues Band in Cincinnati by night. I called the
Cincinnati area home for

about 17 years before my globe trotting began. I still play music (as
I did at Southwest's

talent show) and hope to spend at least some of my time inretirement
putting together a

blues/jazz band. My other passions are amateur radio (I've been a ham
for 35 years) and

computers.

We left Miami for northern Kentucky/Cincinnati in early '68 and I
joined the Air Force

(radio op) in October of '68. I did a tour in Saigon where I ran into
one of our

classmates-Roger Mc-something. He had a twin brother named Carl, I
believe.

Back in my Miami days, my dad was the rector of St. Simon's Episcopal
Church on SW 34th

Street near the dirt road that was then 110th Ave. Classmate Terry
Bielecki lived across

the street. My friends were Gay Harris, Steve Benson (a year behind
us), Mark Hedger, Jeff

Asti (who dated my sister Marti), Linda Welbourne and Nicky Hidu.

I spent a lot of my free time working at Sears in Coral Gables,
performing in folk music

spots and in giving guitar lessons. I also went through the now
defunct Broadcast Training

Studios above the Gables bus station and afterward worked as an
announcer at WAEZ-FM in the

lower lobby of the Deauville on weekends.

I remember a few of the class by name-Marilyn Garcia, Nada Katz,
Sally Rosenfeld (?) and

remember other faces. I'll have to dig out our commencement program
and see if I can put

faces with other names.

As mentioned, this is my retirement tour and I'll be returning to the
U.S. for good in

about 2 ½ years. My wife and I bought a hilltop retreat in a rural
spot in West Virginia's

northern panhandle. I was born about 25 miles away so, in a sense,
I'll be going home.

Our place is about an hour-and-a-half from Pittsburgh and two hours
east of Columbus, Ohio.

We get back there for a month or so each year on leave.


Bio Date 11/21/98

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Thursday, September 07, 2000