What I find most interesting about reading my classmates' biographies is looking at what they supposedly excelled at in high school and then seeing what different paths they took during their lives. True to form my professed interests, Band and Pep Club had little influence on my future, except for, maybe, an affection for music. Within three years of graduation I laid my sticks down for good and hauled the drums to a music store where I believe I got the price of a couple good meals for them. The only thing resembling Pep Club was a stint on the student council at Glendale Jr College. In fact, I couldn't even pursue my real H.S. career of "goof off" for more than a year. You see, working in a hot and sticky root beer bottling plant did more to make me see the light than all the teachers at Burroughs. After all, homework was not half as bad as manual labor, plus Hires was certainly not the place to meet girls. Mrs. Wilkerson had been right, it was time to hit those books!

With a lot of catching up to do, academically, I entered Glendale JC in the fall of 1956. Surprisingly the C- average from high school rose to a B+, and I was accepted at UCSB for the fall 1958 semester. I really looked forward to it since the ratio of boys to girls at Glendale was 3 to 1 and UCSB had the exact opposite statistics. My Glendale fraternity brothers and I were going to make up for lost time when four of us transferred up together. Within three months of entering UCSB we were all going steady with our future wives! I married mine, Deanna, in August of 1960, and the two of us spent our senior year as an old married couple. We both graduated summer 1961 with degrees in education and moved back to our roots to begin our careers. By March of 1962 we had gotten the urge to own a home and moved out to Thousand Oaks where we have lived ever since. In the late 60's we both got our masters degrees in administration & supervision. The 70's were a time to start our family after 10 wonderful years of mar riage. Our son, Christopher, was born in Sept of 1970 and our daughter, Lisa, in June of 1973. By 1974 we moved into a bigger home in Thousand Oaks. My teaching career was great. I taught mathematics at Sutter Jr High till winter 1968 and then transferred to Taft High School in Woodland Hills.

All life has its ups and downs, but throughout the 70's things couldn't have been better.

The 1980's were another thing, however. Into every life some rain must fall. School integration was in vogue by the late 70's. In their wisdom, the US Government decided that integration in the public schools needed not only to be among the students but also in the faculty. LA City Schools, seeing this as a way to eliminate some of the higher paid teachers, jumped on the government's bandwagon. In October of 1980, 21 Caucasian teachers at Taft were forcibly moved to the inner city. For me that meant not only an assignment that I was unprepared to handle, but a drive from Thousand Oaks to 39th & Western that would take several hours. So ended the career I had loved so much. The sad fact was that not one of the 21 remained in teaching for more than one year.

During the eighties, I taught part time as a math and industrial arts teacher at Pierce College. The rest of the time was spent immersed in my hobbies, restoring antique juke boxes, nickelodeons and arcade machines, plus upgrading a new home/cabin we had bought in the late 70's in Big Bear Lake. In the late 80's, my wife became a principal out here in Thousand Oaks and I became Mr. Mom. My son had shown a keen interest in our other hobby, cars, and we spent several wonderful years restoring some rare models that I had had stored since the 60's. To this day, he still helps me with them, even though he has a full time job, is married and has obtained both his BA and MA in business. My daughter got her AA at Moorpark College and has been a medical technician at an animal hospital since the early 90's. She presented us with our only grandchild, Randy in 1995.

The new century brought retirement to my wife. We now spend our time visiting our cabin in Big Bear, as well as producing a large car show in Thousand Oaks every Father's Day. She has had a passion for antiques as well, so a good proportion of our time is spent finishing restorations on them. We are also building a home theater designed after the theaters from the early 1900's right down to the cast iron seats and lights in the floor. There is one exception. It has 6.1 Dolby-THX sound and a high tech projector, which is a lot of fun and real loud. We try to travel at least once a year, but have no desire to leave the USA. We both go to yoga twice a week, although I know I need a lot more exercise than that. Maybe I can take up another hobby!