What happens when you combine job burnout with wanderlust? Ask Bruce and Julie Madsen. Six years ago, the couple had high-paying jobs and a comfortable home in Shaker Heights, Ohio. But Julie, a psychotherapist, was tired of hearing people's troubles all day, and both felt demoralized by the violence that filled the nightly news. They decided to ferret out good news on their own.
In 1995, Bruce, MS '68, quit his management job at General Electric, and Julie closed her practice. They sold the house, hitched a travel trailer to a truck and set off looking for uplifting people and upbeat stories. They found plenty -- from the one-armed woodcarver in Texas to the parish priest in Florida who single-handedly cleared a swamp to make a soccer field. In fact, the Madsens met so many ordinary people doing extraordinary things that their first book, Inner Views: Stories on the Strength of America (Quixote Publications, 2000), will spill into a sequel.
Tired but inspired, the pair ended their wandering in San Francisco, where Bruce now manages computer-assisted design at an architectural engineering firm and Julie works on a UCSF lung research project. They'd hit the road again in an instant, Bruce says, "but for now, it's back to work."
