Roger Stillwell

As did the majority of my ROTC buddies, I too joined the military right out of high school. Although I never returned to live once again in Cheyenne, I’ve often thought about it. In many ways I’m still tied to the hometown that I grew up in. While in the Army, I moved around a lot; as most soldiers do. Soon I found myself living in Kentucky and then spending a year in South Korea. After my stint in the Army, I moved to Tucson, Arizona and have lived here ever since.
After leaving the army in 1987 and moving to Tucson, I went back to school using the college funds that I had earned along the way. However, I never completed my original goal of earning a degree in both pharmacy and medicine. The funds that I had accumulated in the army just wouldn’t cover such an ambitious goal. Thus, I entered the security industry. In short, for the next decade or so; I worked as a security guard.
It was during this time in my life when I met my wife, Mary. We had only been dating for about three months when we got married and my life would take on a whole new turn. Then, about a year after tying the knot; we had our first child. Of all the events in my life, these two have been the greatest blessing on this solitary life.
As my daughter entered school, my wife and I began volunteering our time and it wasn’t long after that, that I began working there as a playground monitor. Those were some wonderful times for me. Then, when Autumn left her elementary school and moved on to junior high (middle school here in Tucson); I moved from the playground and into the classroom working as a teaching assistant. After my first year, I began working with students that were falling behind in their reading skills. It been over ten years now, since I began working with students and helping the young to develop better reading skills. Working with children has become my most rewarding career yet.
During my off-duty time, you can often find me out hiking; photographing the Sonoran Desert or somewhere with my camera in the Santa Catalina Mountains. Although I have yet to publish any of my work, over the past five years I’ve taken well over four thousand landscape photos of the local deserts and mountains that surround the Tucson area.

Some of my fondest memories of our old high school days didn’t take place during school hours but rather on the weekends when most of my friends from the ROTC class and I would go out fox-hunting. For those of you that have never experienced it, it’s kind of like a game of hide and go-seek throughout a good chunk of the city. The “fox” would drive somewhere in town and hide and then proceed to give clues over the CB radio as to their location while the “hunters” would go out and try to find them. Some of the clues given were quite imaginative. After a few hours of hunting, we would often find ourselves at one of the local coffee shops until the early morning hours. So many times in life, I have missed those hunts of yesteryear and the times spent with my friends. Those were the good old days.