Hal Gunardson – In His Own Words

Who is Harold Henry Gunardson?

At the age of seventy two after more than a decade in retirement, I can look back in retrospect over the past seven decades and say it’s been a pretty good run. The poet laureate of Key West, Jimmy Buffett, summed it up pretty well; “Some of its magic and some of its tragic, but I had a good life all the way”. When I break it all down there were four distinct episodes: the first, was childhood through high school, the second, was college, marriage, children and starting a career, the third was, raising the family and building a career, and the fourth final and current chapter, semi-retirement.

NOTE: I love this profile picture of my dad. It literally made me crack up laughing out loud (LOL) when I first saw it. When he was visiting, I asked him about this picture. He told me that it was a long story, but will try to make it short.  You see, he just purchased a new cell phone.  One morning he was on his sailboat, s/v Free Radical, and he just came up on deck and saw a Pelican on a dock post in the next boat slip. My dad said he was just “hanging out” and he thought he’d take a picture with his new cell phone. The problem was he had no idea how to use the camera.  The camera lens was flipped toward him instead of away from him towards the bird. He  took the picture – which is what you see here. Hilarious… and of course, he thought it was so funny that he made it his Facebook profile picture.  He said friends of his said he looked like Merle Haggard in this picture.