Chuck Lamb is a retired banker who lives with his wife Christine in the midcoast section of Maine and added motorcycling to his list of passions relatively recently. He has been planning a trip around America for several years.
Chuck is a native of Pennsylvania, growing up in the small town of Ardmore just west of Philadelphia, where he went to the local public schools and graduated in 1955 from Lower Merion High School (which also claims Kobe Bryant among its alumni). He still remembers his first-ever motorcycle ride, as a passenger on a bike operated by a high school chum. It was a memorable event, and probably should have convinced him this was a foolish way to transport oneself. But it didn't.
Four years later, and now possessing a Dartmouth degree and a naval officer's commission, Chuck began a three-year tour of duty aboard the USS Kawishiwi, a navy fleet oiler homeported in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He served as the ship's communications officer and later navigator, making four deployments to the Far East with the U.S. Seventh Fleet. And while on duty in Hawaii, he met Christine Steere, daughter of the force commander's chief of staff. They courted and were married in November 1960. And now, nearly 40 years later, they're still an item!
Christine presented Chuck with a son, Scott, in May of 1962. And soon thereafter it was farewell to Hawaii and on to New York City where Chuck joined Citibank for a long career. In spite of the slave wages Citibank was paying him, they managed to add a daughter, Sue, in 1965, and another son, Bob, in 1967. Today Scott is an investment banker based in Moscow (by way of Tokyo, Kazhakstan, and Vienna), Sue and her husband work for an electric utility cooperative in New Hampshire, and Bob is an attorney in Washington. Chuck and Christine's two granddaughters (courtesy of Scott and his first wife Wendie) live in Washington, DC, with their mother; Sue is going to add to the collection of grandchildren in September.
Chuck's Citibank career was spent mostly in Manhattan working with the bank's corporate clients, but also included 9 years of overseas postings in Sydney, Tokyo and Manila. He returned to the United States in 1984 and joined Citibank's Private Banking Group, where he worked until leaving in 1990. Soon thereafter he joined a Japanese trading group, in their New York office, and continued working for them until 1997, when he retired from the corporate and consulting life and with his wife Christine moved to their present home in Bristol, Maine.
But retirement is not an apt term for the former banker. He is busier than ever while enjoying the relative luxury of being able to pick and choose his interests. These include trying to master the French language, practicing his new career as a photographer specializing in studio and location portraiture, planning a book or two about life in Japan, with some corporate skulduggery thrown in, serving on the board of a local land trust, and maintaining the 80-acre property he and his wife live on in midcoast Maine. All this, of course, is when he's not motorcyling around the country, or at least the back roads of Maine.
