Spouse:  Gary


Children:  1 Son & 2  Daughters


Grandchildren:  Five


Activities/Hobbies:  Aerobics, Hiking

After high school, I went to Germany where Gary & I were married October 17^th, 1959 (50^th coming up soon).  I returned in December of 1960 and our first daughter Cathie was born April 3, 1961.  She now lives in Mill Creek, WA and just completed her 30^th year with Nordstrom’s, traveling all over the world to buy products for their accessories, handbag, and jewelry departments. 

After our service days, we moved to Seattle where Gary worked for a brief time with Boeing, and then we moved back to Walla Walla where he worked briefly for Stone Machinery Co. before going to the Northern Pacific Railway Co.  


Our son Kevin was born in 1965 and now lives in Spokane, Wa. where he appraises real estate.  He gave us two grandchildren, Ashton now 19, and Devin, 16.

We moved to Portland, Or. with the railroad in 1969 where our daughter Colleen was born in 1972, she now lives with her husband Tony and there three children Ben 7, Sam 5, and Ava 1 in Mukilteo, WA.  She and Tony are both teachers in the Mukilteo, WA. school district.

Gary was promoted and we moved to Spokane, WA in 1984, then again moved to Mill Creek, WA. (near Seattle) in 1986.  He retired in January of 1995 from Burlington Northern RR.

Besides raising three children, I also worked in Portland and Seattle for a department store selling china and crystal goods part time.

In 1998 we started building our winter home in Surprise, AZ and moved there in January 1999.  We still spend 6 months in AZ enjoying the mild weather, and 6 months in Mill Creek, WA. enjoying ourchildren and grandchildren.

After graduating from Wa Hi, I immediately began a high-paying career pitching peas into a viner. The cramps in my scrawny arms, the long monotonous days and a lack of any marketable skills convinced me to attend college. I spent one year at the University of Oregon and way too many years at the University of Washington, where I completed B.A.’s in Business and in English.

After a year at a bank in Portland, a year on the family farm north of Walla Walla writing unpublishable stories and poetry, and a year driving truck for a paint company in Kirkland, WA, I settled into family life and teaching English in Seattle. Along the way I met and married Jonlee, a wonderful woman from West Seattle.

Although in high school I had played handball and skied--my only sports--with Gary Snyder and Gary Forrest, my physical activities were soon limited to practicing basketball, soccer and tennis with our son and two daughters as they grew up. All three kids played soccer for many years and we watched what seems like hundreds of soccer games as well as basketball, tennis matches, band concerts, crew races and high school plays. Our son Chris, his wife and two children presently live near Vancouver, WA. Chris attended Walla Walla Community College, in the machinist program and took welding classes from Gary Buttice. Chris and his wife run a prototyping business, machining and finishing prototypes for companies like Intel, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard and continue to play indoor soccer together.

Our older daughter Wendy was a mountain guide in British Columbia before she began teaching History and Street Law at the high school I retired from. She and her partner are presently living in Winthrop, WA to be close to the mountains they both love. Our younger daughter Elizabeth, whose poetry and prose are much better than her father’s, lives with her husband in Lowell, Ma where she is Director of Cultural Affairs. The two of them hike, bike and cross-country ski and are looking forward to starting a family.

When I was 35 and trying to quit smoking, a co-worker mentioned that people who jogged found it easier to quit smoking. And so began an activity that lasted for nearly 30 years and engendered a commitment to what my cousin Robert (Bobby) Davidson (who attended Pi-Hi) calls “the fitness lifestyle.” My jogging worked not only to help me stop smoking but also seemed to help Jonlee leave tobacco behind as well. For a number of years I ran 15 to 20 miles a week, took our family cross-country skiing each winter, and trained for and road the Seattle-to-Portland Bike Classic three times. 

In 1996 Jonlee and I retired, she to paint watercolor and I to write a novel—an occupational hazard of many English teachers. After writing a hundred pages or so, I realized that writing a novel was way too complicated for me. I switched to black and white photography which came in handy when I started putting together hiking books for the Yuma, Arizona area. Yuma is a farming community not unlike Walla Walla near the California and Mexican borders, only Yuma has summers with 100+ degree days for seven months. We have been traveling to Yuma for 11 years, but only for the lovely, sunny winters. During that time I have published three hiking guides for the area. It turns out that there were plenty of trails and even a few mountains, but no one had written any hiking books. So far, I have had the market to myself.

In summer we bask in the moderating winds and frequent rains of Puget Sound where I grow raspberries, string beans, lettuce, spinach, etc. “You can take the boy off the farm, but you—“ I’m sure your can fill in the rest. Between walks on the beach at Edmonds, visiting family, and reading books, we enter our work in local art shows.

Over the past dozen years I have enjoyed swapping life histories and old memories with Bob Baker, Gary Buttice, and Gary Snyder. Although I haven’t attended any of the Wa Hi reunions, I recall a number of you fondly and have many pleasant memories gleaming brightly from the darkness of adolescent angst. I hope you all are enjoying this portion of your lives; I certainly am.