Happening People

October 2004: One of two RNs with the Bethel School District, Annemarie Hirsch divides her time between Danebo, Fairfield and Malabon Elementary, Cascade Middle, Willamette High and Calapooya Alternative High Schools. “I try to go to each school one day a week,” she says. Hirsch grew up in Norway, then moved at age 18, to a commune near Crow. She got a nursing degree from LCC and worked at Sacred Heart before returning to school for a BS and certification as a school nurse. She started work for Bethel in 1998.

The son of a Navy test pilot, Skeeter Duke lived all over the map before landing in Oxnard, Calif., for junior high and high school. “I married my high school sweetheart the day before the Tet Offensive,” he says. “We broke up a week before Woodstock.” Duke taught preschool in San Jose, studied for a bachelor’s in history and lived in communal housing with pot-smoking antiwar freaks. “On the first Earth Day in 1970, my friends bought a brand-new Pinto, dug a hole and pushed it in,” he says. “A week later, I sold my VW.

A native of Mission, Texas, Carlos Barrera traces his family history back to Spanish colonial times in the mid-1600s. “Half the town is related to me,” he says. “The Rio Grande River is three miles away.” After earning a bachelor’s in fine arts from Pan American University in nearby Edinburg, Barrera became an electrician and an electrical contractor. He worked three years in Austin, then 21 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. “I was the go-to person for historical renovation,” he says.

Born in France, Christine Menager had a chaotic childhood. Her mom died when she was 2 and her father, a rural veterinarian, sent his two kids to his parents’ farm in Normandy. “I was a high school dropout, a pregnant teenager,” says Menager, who got married at 17 and had two kids before she divorced her abusive husband. “He had a lawyer and got the children.” She went to nursing school in Paris, worked at a psychiatric hospital, and began to study psychology, then ran off to Berkeley with a guy she met in Greece.

When his father, an Air Force pilot, died in Vietnam, and his mother remarried, Harper Keeler went from grade school at the Air Force Academy to middle and high school in Pleasantville, N.Y. After two years of college at SUNY Potsdam, he worked for five years at a plant nursery in Bedford, N.Y. “That got me interested in plants and designing with plants,” says Keeler, who spent two years living the “hippie life” off the grid in Vermont before he moved west in 1990 to study landscape architecture at the UO.

The daughter of a film and video editor, Melissa Stock grew up in Orange County, Calif. “I was the ‘La Mirada Matador,’” says Stock, drum major for her school’s marching band, but also an accomplished musician. “I played percussion with several symphonies and sang with the Pacific Chorale.” She spent five years at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a bachelor’s degree in music in classical piano, then returned and became a music director at the Crystal Cathedral, home of the Hour of Power TV ministry.

An avid student of music in Medford schools, David Adee played in the Rogue Valley Symphony at age 13 and had a 20-year career as a French horn player, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lifelong gardener Joan Connolly started a landscaping business when she moved to Eugene from the Puget Sound area in 1985. The pair met at a contra dance soon after he arrived in 1998 to pursue teaching credentials, and they married two years later. They adopted newborn Corinna in 2005. Adee has taught music in Eugene schools since 1999.

“My mother always read to me,” says storyteller Yvonne Young, a native of Grand Junction, Colo. “My dad, his dad and my uncle all told stories.” Young studied elementary education at CU in Boulder, married a seminary student, moved to California, and taught for eight years at Hamilton Air Base. They moved north for his one-year post as campus pastor in Corvallis, where she gave birth to a daughter, Heather. Two years later, he left the family, and she went back to work.

Growing up in Hinsdale, Illinois, Tom Blank got a start in theater production by way of his father, who managed the Hinsdale Summer Theater. “I started as house manager at 18,” says Blank, who studied film and TV production at Northwestern. “I moved up to producer as a senior in college.” He joined the Navy to avoid the draft, became an officer and served off the coast of Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Later, he was assigned to a public affairs office on Sunset Boulevard, advising the studios.

“I grew up outside,” says Tom Titus, whose parents moved, when he was 3, to 25 acres on Cedar Flat, east of Springfield. “I had the run of pastures and hills. Our family vacations were outdoor activities.” Titus graduated from Western Oregon with a degree in biology, then worked seasonally at the Sunriver Nature Center where he met his wife, Kim. They moved to Kansas and had two kids, Alex and Laurel, while he earned a Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics.

Albuquerque native Jodie St. Clair began violin lessons at age 9. “I got serious when I was 14,” she says.  “I played in the Albuquerque Youth Symphony. I started teaching at 16.” A violin performance major at Northern Arizona University, she trained in the Suzuki teaching method, modeled on language learning.  “Young children listen to music, then learn to ‘speak’ on the instrument,” she explains. “They learn to read later on.” After graduation in 2005, St. Clair moved to Eugene to continue her Suzuki training.

“I’ve always been a writer,” says Dana Furgerson, who was editor of her high school’s literary journal in suburban Lombard, Ill. She was an English major for two years at Northern Illinois, then eloped, ran off to Phoenix, and gave birth to her son Keith Moses, who is now an art teacher in Corvallis. Divorced after five years, she finished an education degree at Arizona State, married Cecil Furgerson and moved to Halfway, Ore., in 1978, for a job as a special ed teacher.