A little bit of fun

To all my classmates - enjoy!

http://moreoldfortyfives.com/TakeMeBackToTheSixties.htm

That Yellow Line!

Family photo (Hawaii for Easter 2008)

This is my first blog ever so please be kind!

First off I felt the great need to post something on this site since only one woman from our class (Nisa) has done so (and I'm impressed since Nisa created a whole site of her own!). It is time, however, that more of the women from our class posted directly to the site. 4o years ago we had a lot to say (I don't think I was the only one who got poor conduct grades) and I hope we still do.

But back to that yellow line. I know back in the day it didn't bother me too much and it seemed to make some sense. (After all the guys were rowdier than we were back then.) However, once I got to high school and got to play basketball I realized how much fun it would have been if we too could have had basketball hoops on our side of the line too. And it wasn't until many years later when I was doing my third year paper in law school on Title IX that it occurred to me that we were also deprived of the opportunity to play lots of sports when we were little girls (notice the guys can talk about their CYO friends from back in the day - we didn't have CYO for girls back then). Anyway, I am glad the yellow line is gone and I am glad that times have changed. My daughter's friends (she is a senior in HS right now) used to laugh when I would tell them about the "old days" and the yellow line and that girls could not play basketball back when I was growing up because it was too physical for girls. My daughter has played sports since she was six years old and next year will get to play volleyball and basketball in college (only at the Division III level - she unfortunately is my kid and wasn't born with the genes to play at the Division I level).


And I keep trying to remember what we girls did on our side of the yellow line. Of course I only had 4 years at OLPH. I remember volleyball and four square (okay so we did get to play with a ball) and hopscotch. I remember lots of talking. (Little did I know what all the guys were up to on their side of the line.) We had lots of slumber parties and for many of us Girl Scouts. Were we boring? I can't remember!


For those I haven't been in touch with at all through the years, I went on to St John's after OLPH (go Class of 73 from SJU -which includes a number of our classmates), then on to Cal (where I was roommates with Donna Abrahamsohn) and then on to Harvard Law. I practiced law in San Francisco for about 24 years before I quit law firm life. I got married about 25 years ago (upcoming 25th wedding anniversary this summer) to a lawyer I worked with and have two kids. My son is a junior in college down in Southern California and my baby goes off to Philadelphia for college in August. We live in Oakland. This next year, as an empty nester, I will need to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life (definitely not law firm life!). (Wow, a whole life in one paragraph).

So hi to all of you. I will be sending emails. It's hard to believe that I have gone so many years without even talking to people who were my whole life back in the day.

Rick (see I can say Rick!), thanks for starting us all off. It is truly a gift.

Twila (still go by Foster)

Patti's Party House

Just recieved a short note from Patti S .and I can't help but think of the parties at her house in the TOP OF THE HILL 'hood....now , was she a party animal ? Did she have the biggest house ? Did she have cool parents ?......I want to say Patti's Mom and Dad wanted to keep an eye on her and what better way than to host the parties......Now that makes them pretty cool in my eyes !!!....Jean H. ( all the way from Chicago ) wrote me a short note and she says she just remembers everybody with our 13 year old little faces .........I had to laugh to myself because she's right .....anybody that left the hill after 1969 would only have those smiley little faces stuck in their memory banks for 40 years ......OK Gang everybody break out the old and new photo's and let's e-mail a ton of pics to Jean , allowing her to erase those young faces from her memory and replace it with our forty year older faces .....Come to think of it , not a good idea ......Jean , I will send you a picture of when I was thirty and that will have to do ...All kidding aside , I hope everyone is feeling the excitement and looking forward to THE EVENT in 2009.......



Since music is my passion and I know that music is a powerful medium, let me throw you back a few years , OK how about forty years .....



Enjoy,

Rick

Passages OLPH Class of 1969

When the last teardrop falls.......We will stand tall
..........And hold onto the wonderful memories......
Of how they used to be......

Please take a couple minutes out of your life to remember

General Information

Here is a brief synopsis of my life since OLPH (consider yourself were warned)

1969 - 1973 Lick-Wilmerding High School (yes, I was accepted at Riordan but that was not my path as the saying goes)

1973 - 1975 College of Small Minds. Some of you just smiled, didn't you? What can I say, the price was right and the teachers were good.

1975 Summer is where things got interesting. As a result of work at the above mentioned "college" I was accepted at Cal-Poly SLO. Neat, having worked for the last 6 years or so I had saved up enough money to cover the costs. The problem, Intel offered me a job to design CMOS and PMOS but the folks that caught my fancy was a small group out in Livermore, a national lab across the street from the one most think about. The problem, instead of the summer job I asked for, they offered me a full time one with the additional temptation of... paying for me to go to school "later." Wow, double my wage, full time, health benefits, and a free education? I jumped at the opportunity. I bought a 1969 Mustang and headed "East" to start a new life. Later became much later for formal education but I learned my real education started in the Fall of 1975. Not much later the Lab actually pulled a war powers act on many of us to keep us working 12 hour days! That caused me to re-evaluate things and soon I was back in night school (SFSU this time).

1978 Married the love of my life, Linda
1980 Son, William, born
1983 Daughter, Lisa, born
1987 Both kids old enough that I no longer had to worry if they were playing out of sight or silently sooooooo I started night school at College of Notre Dame to complete my BSCS. There is a funny story about USF actually asking me not to go there because they were afraid I would challenge their teachers, hey working in Livermore was a *real* education and I had been playing with Crays for awhile. 8^) CND on the other hand said why do you want a BS and when I explained welcomed me with open arms. It turned out to be the right choice, my professor was a pupil of a Von Neumann pupil. Talking about education not far from the CS tree.
1989 Quit on the the fourteenth anniversary of starting work in Livermore and switched jobs (look when your Wife tells you to quit, you quit! And her reasons were sound though doing research gets under one's skin). I was now working for NASA at Moffett Field
1991 Graduated from CND and thought "Wow, no more calculus!!!!"
1999 Accepted into a NASA development program
2000 Worked in DC
2001 - 2003 MIT. Yes sleep is *highly* over rated. Lots of stories here (for one class I was part of a team competition that designed a supersonic business jet, our design won), a truly crazy place and yes there is still an Einstein there. Oh, and I was SOOOOOOOOO wrong about "no more calculus" above.
2007 back in DC again and working to help us get back to the moon and beyond (Buzz Lightyear, where are you?) Oh, and while being 2,704 miles away I was working on this other task... (http://www.teresahalton.com/justmarried/lisa_julian.html) My program management side of the brain requires me to state that the task was successfully completed on time and within budget. 8^)

Oh yeah and less than a month before the aforementioned task was completed, Lisa completed her MS in Biomedical engineering at... Cal-Poly SLO, just as Will had done 3 years previous. So yes, I never went to SLO but both of my kids decided to. And their major ended up being an interesting blend of Linda (an RN) and myself (engineer). It is a great engineering school with a penchant for hands-on learning, but for many reasons (see 1978 above) I am happy I never went there.

2008 30th anniversary (yeah, not sure why she still puts up with me) was just celebrated!

That brings us up to today. I am still located at Ames Research Center but work part time for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, Directorate Integration Office at HQ. So travel around the US working enterprise architecture issues for them is my reality. And yes, I have access to some real cool pictures like this one that was taken, ummm, not from land.

General Comments (yes, ex-military must stand and salute!)

Ok Wayne you started this. 8^)

I posted my Altar boys memories as a comment to John's post (hey, this is sort of like playing clue!).

And yes, I remember the plays, I think I was part of a spoof of the three musketeers or was it Man of LaMancha in one of them? But we got to make fake swords (wood covered with foil if I remember) and I think there was a controversy about us running around with them and hurting someone. Also, what about the square dancing lessons? A lot happened down in the cafetorium (remember the sports "banquets" and such)?

Also, how many of you remember joining St. Vincent dePaul? The Sunday meetings after church with *free* doughnuts? Come on now.

Or trips to the library (OLPH and the Daly City library around the corner). yes actually checking out and reading books. I remember a certain person who used to check out the same book I did because we liked talking about them, especially science fiction!

Or recesses playing with the wiffle football? Running and flipping over the chain link fence (jump, hit the top of the fence around belt high, lean forward, grab, and try and land on your feet). When done well a feeling of exuberance. When not..., well I do remember ripping a shirt in a familiar upside down "L" pattern. And playing hard on top of asphalt (these days the kids have to have cushioned falls). Somehow scrapping a knee or palm of the hand seemed to breed character.

Or what about the "tie-fights" when someone thought young men properly attired included clip on ties?

Also, are we going to try and track down any of our transient classmates (Kevin Tinsley comes to mind).

Wow, thinking about this sure has opened the dam gates as the saying goes.

Altar Boys

Someone made a post about the altar boys. Of course I was one too and yes, we did have to learn a few latin phrases. I don't remember the "buzz" though, but I am sure those brain cells have probably left me. I do remember pairing up with Gary alot. I also remember loving to do weddings because you normally got paid for it, and hating funerals because you didn't.

When I was in the back getting ready and hungry I would munch on two things. I would eat sugar cubes and grab a few unleavened hosts (or whatever you call them now). Other than that I didn't get into too much mischief.

I did most of my masses for Father Bergen. I remember him as a very nice guy, for an old person, as he tolerated all my mistakes in the mass. The latin for "God be with you," and the response, "and with you also," still rings in my ears. Of course the hardest part was the long latin phrase we had to learn just before the wine and water. I can't recollect that at all.