Comments:
I still have relatives living in PA, but most of my family now reside in midwest and Colorado. We love the more extreme mountain areas, though we raised our children in the Chicago area because of my husband's job as a city planner. Our return to NJ for the reunion will be the first back East since my mother died. I'm looking forward to it.
After high school I attended Earlham College in Richmond, IN for four years. It is the sister school to Swarthmore College, Quaker in background and also very strenuous academically. After graduation I worked with The American Friends Service Committee's VISA program (a precursor of ) and worked mostly in a settlement house in Berlin, Germany. From there I was able to go back and forth across the Wall frequently, helped guide American teenage groups around East Berlin, etc., etc. I also did some simulaneous translation work on guided tours. I took several trips into East Germany. On one long bus trip from Berlin, across Poland and eastern Russia to Moscow and Yaroslavl, I help chaperone a group of West German industrial youth when they met Russian (Soviet) industrial youth. East-West relations in the mid-60's were quite interesting and tense.
After returning to USA in '65 it was hard to feel a part of the hippie movment after what I had seen, and I was too caught up by changes in race relations anyway. I worked for two years for the YWCA before going to graduate school at Case Western Reserve University (and meeting my Ernie just before that) to get my Masters in social work.
We married in 1969 after I got my degree and lived in Shaker Heights, OH for four years, where both our children were born. In the recession in the mid 70's Ernie was laid off just when our son was born, and we then ended up moving to DuPage County, IL. For over 20 years we stayed there, raising the kids and Ernie helped changed the face of the fastest growing county in the country as a city planner. I worked in two treatment centers for children and adolescents while setting up a private group practice with a partner. We employed other therapists and had the practice going for almost 18 years until differences between partners forced me to leave. I continued on my own for several years until our children had graduated from college. Ernie took early retirement, I closed my practice and we traipsed our to Colorado's magnificance. I work as a therapist in the schools in immediate area of Columbine High School right after the shootings for two years. After becoming tired of dealing with abuse and suicide for 35 years, and feeling unable to impact elephants in the community and the clinical community, I decided to leave. I went to work as an educational assistant with severe needs students in the school system. Last year I retired due to a neuropathy disability which is chronic, progressive and increasingly debilitating. I love my freedom now, but am busy as other retirees are with many volunteers activities, such as being president of the Neuropathy Association of Denver. We have three wonderful grandchildren now and our lives feel complete.
