Place and date of birth:
New Albany, Indiana, USA, June
27, 1931
Residence:
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Citizenship:
USA, landed immigrant in Canada.
Marital status:
Married since 1984, no children
Donald Wilson Zimmerman was born in New Albany, Indiana, in 1931. His father was Carl Arthur Zimmerman, and his mother was Mary Leona Wilson, both of whom received A.B. and M.A. degrees from Indiana University in Bloomington. Donald attended a high school in Logansport, Indiana (pop. 20,000), that had some unusually good teachers for a small-city school. His father was the local school superintendent; his mother taught English in high schools and colleges; and his two aunts were elementary school teachers in Mount Vernon, Indiana. He became preoccupied with various scholarly pursuits, most likely to compensate for poor social adjustment. After graduating from high school in 1948 at age 16, he attended many colleges and universities, most for brief periods, and received an A.B. degree from Indiana University at age 19. He changed his major field from chemistry to philosophy to psychology in that order. He was in the US Army for two years, stationed in Richmond, Virginia, where he administered intelligence tests to recruits.
He received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Illinois in 1958, working under the direction of O.H. Mowrer. Afterwards, he spent two years on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington in Seattle under the direction of R.B. Loucks. Later, he held several teaching and/or research positions for brief periods. He moved to Canada in 1967 and taught undergraduate and graduate courses and carried on research at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, for twenty-six years.
Zimmerman conducted research in several areas in psychology, including operant conditioning, using the experimental methods introduced by B.F. Skinner, and test and measurement theory. Near the end of his teaching career, he ventured into applied statistics and computer simulation of statistical significance tests. He also published some articles in methodology and philosophy of science. Altogether he has published about 160 peer-reviewed journal articles since 1957. Apart from professors encountered in universities, he was influenced by the ideas of J.R. Kantor, B.F. Skinner, the logical positivists, Alexander Romanovich Luria, W. Ross Ashby, David Bohm, Alfred North Whitehead, and many other people. Going back further, while in high school he was enthusiastic about Spinoza, Kant, and Bertrand Russell.
Zimmerman retired from teaching in 1993 and now enjoys living in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area with his wife and two dogs. He is doing more research and publishing articles more frequently than before retirement. His wife Doreen, a psychotherapist born in England, was formerly the Director of the Eastern Ontario branch of a US based health care facility and was involved in counseling people with addictive behavior. She holds dual citizenship—UK and US—and is a landed immigrant in Canada. Since moving to the west coast, Doreen has renewed a former interest in making and costuming antique replica dolls, and she maintains a web site and mail-order business devoted to Victorian fashions and doll-making accessories. She teaches doll-making classes and has organized the Mad Hatters Doll Club. Doreen and Don share an enthusiasm for classical music. She especially likes Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; his favorites are Beethoven and Wagner.
In 1993, after retiring from teaching, Don and Doreen purchased a 5-unit apartment building in Berkeley, California, and moved into one of the apartments. They turned the remaining apartments into a rooming house for foreign students at the University of California. Over a two year period this adventure led to some friendships with fascinating people. All the while Don and Doreen enjoyed roaming around the San Francisco Bay area and doing their own thing without responsibilities or deadlines. In 1995 they moved back to Canada.
In the Spring of 2001, Doreen and Don purchased a 100 year old vacation home in Bar Harbor, Maine, for many years one of their favorite holiday destinations. In the summer they drove across Canada and the USA with their small trailer and arrived in Bar Harbor in time to do some renovations on the house in the warm weather and indulge in a lot of hiking and eating of seafood. They returned to British Columbia in 2002.
Also in 2002, Doreen and Don traveled to London, UK, for a two-week visit––the first time Doreen had been back to the place of her birth since 1967 and the first time ever for Don. They returned again in 2003. Most of their time was spent attending concerts, browsing in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, seeking out of the way bookstores and restaurants around Piccadilly Circus and Soho, visiting flea markets, and getting on the top deck of a lot of buses, enjoying the sights wherever the routes happened to go. Doreen took the opportunity to increase her inventory of fabrics, laces, and trims for her doll-making business from some of the premier London suppliers. They returned to London again in 2005 and again in 2007 and 2009; and they spent 5 months in Bar Harbor in 2007. In 2010 they visited the Oregon coast twice and a few other Pacific destinations. In February of 2011 they spent a week in San Francisco and in August of 2011 began another 4 months in Bar Harbor.
All models over 18.
Exploring beaches of the Pacific and the Atlantic in winter. Doreen on Long Beach, Tofino, BC, and on Sand Beach, Bar Harbor, ME.
at Mt. Washington, NH
At Ben and Bill's emporium. "Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality."—George Bernard Shaw
Benny, unimpressed by high places, on the Beehive in Acadia National Park
Time-lapse photography. The picture on the right was taken 10 years after the one on the left. The person, the restaurant, the location of the table, the napkin dispenser, and the ice cream flavor are the same. Only the pictures on the wall show signs of aging and change.
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Doreen in Marin Headlands, San Francisco, February 2010
Eating lunch at the remains of the Rockefeller estate and thinking about Shelley's poem, "Ozymandias."
A few of Doreen's creations and a special creation, a Circle Dot Bru
"They claim to be swingers the Prince and Princess invited for the weekend, but I still don't think we should let them past the gate."
"Can studying humans teach us anything about dogs?"
Hiking in the mountains with Doreen, Phoebe (Golden Retriever, now deceased), and Benny (Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, now deceased), playing with Willie (Golden Retriever, above right) and Charlie (Dachshund, above left), bicycling, swimming, camping, cross-country skiing, browsing in used bookstores, reading all manner of things, listening to classical music, attending concerts and operas, especially in Vancouver, Seattle, and San Francisco, watching TV, surfing the web in the late hours of the evening.
"We never remark any passion or principle in others, of which, in some degree or other, we may not find a parallel in ourselves."—David Hume
"Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way."—Bertrand Russell
"... human life is mainly a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait."—Eric Berne
"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen."—Ludwig Wittgenstein
"If you're a research scientist what you want is not retirement but another 500 years."—Edwin Land
"Don't skate to where the puck is. Skate to where the puck is going to be."—Wayne Gretzky
"If I am unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy."—Alfred Renyi
"Go not where the path may lead. Instead go where there is no path and leave a trail."—Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There are those who look at things the way they are and ask why ... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"—Robert Kennedy
"You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists."—Abbie Hoffman
"Non illegitimati carborundum."—General Joseph Stilwell
"I was dead for millions of years before I was born, and it never inconvenienced me a bit."—Mark Twain
"Keep buggering on."—Winston Churchill
Gaily bedight
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had
journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o'er his heart
a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like
Eldorado.
And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim
shadow—
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be—
This land of
Eldorado?"
"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon
Down the Valley of the
Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied,—
"If you seek for
Eldorado!"
—Edgar Allan Poe