Eugene Weekly

“I was born on the bayou,” says Dennis Hebert of Houma, Louisiana. “When a hurricane came, we’d board everything up and feel the house shake.” Hebert left the University of Southwest Louisiana in Lafayette to get married, but instead got drafted. He received a Dear John letter and a Purple Heart in Vietnam. He finished a marketing degree on the GI Bill, moved to Phoenix and started doing carpentry. He traveled the West for three years in his 1961 International van, the Turtle, picking up jobs along the way. Returning to Phoenix in 1981, he met a lady, Larena. Continue reading →

“My original plan was to be a high school choir director,” says Mo Robeson, who studied music and art at her hometown school, San Diego State University. “That’s where I met Denny Robeson.” They got married, he joined the Coast Guard and she finished up her degree at the University of West Florida in Pensacola while he went to flight school. She sang with the Honolulu Chorale and Symphony when he was stationed in Hawaii as a search and rescue pilot. They spent five years in Aberdeen, Washington, where he worked in air traffic control and she taught at Grays Harbor College. Continue reading →

“I learned to read at age 4,” says Isabelle Rogers, who entered first grade at Oak Hill School a year later. She skipped kindergarten and eighth grade on her way to high school graduation from Oak Hill this year at age 16. Rogers started writing stories when she was 7. She won a Glitterary Award from the Young Writer’s Association the next year for her story “If It Rained Down Soda.” “I liked to write,” she says. “My parents encouraged me. I still bounce ideas off my parents.”  Continue reading →

Born on the farm near Cairo, Georgia, where his great-granddad was a sharecropper, Hershell Norwood migrated north with his family as a young child and started school in Orange, New Jersey. After one year of high school, he got a scholarship to Hampton School, a boarding school in New Hampshire. He excelled at football and moved on to Tufts University near Boston. “I played quarterback in high school and running back in college,” he says, “and got a degree in theater.” He began work on an MFA in acting at Brandeis in the late 1970s, then spent a decade selling ad time on NBC Boston. Continue reading →

“My parents started an arts co-op in Boulder in the 1970s,” says Colorado native Mitra Chester, who studied anthropology and religion at University of Colorado Boulder, then moved to Austin, Texas, and got married. She worked in clothing resale and began to design clothes. She and her husband, Aaron, did some research, chose Eugene for its cool climate and cool people and moved here in 2003. They ran two boutique resale stores, Deluxe and Kitsch, and she put on a yearly local fashion show beginning in 2007. Continue reading →

“My dad worked for Rhythm and Blooms,” says Alex Ruiz, who was born in Eugene, two months before his parents moved back to their hometown of Santiago Apóstol in Oaxaca, Mexico. “They wanted me to be a U.S. citizen.” Ruiz returned to Oregon at age 11, lived with his older brother Lorenso and began sixth grade at Cal Young Middle School. “I didn’t know English,” he says. “It was challenging.” He took ELL classes and learned the language, but got into trouble with friends who were experimenting with drugs. Continue reading →

Farm girl Mia Nelson grew up outside of Glencoe, Minnesota, where her dad managed the local Green Giant packing plant. “The world’s largest corn-packing plant,” she says. “I worked there summers.” After two years at Rice University in Houston, she transferred to Oregon State to study biochemistry. “I wanted to be a vet,” she says, “but I quit school to work for the Green Tortoise bus company.” GT had a shop in Lowell, where buses were converted for cross-country touring. Continue reading →

“My goal was to work at the Los Angeles Zoo,” says Karen DeBraal, who grew up in nearby Glendora. She earned a two-year vet tech degree, studied zoology at Cal Poly Pomona, then worked as a zookeeper for four years. “I was severely disillusioned,” she says. “I thought zoos should be genetic arks and participate in reintroduction.” DeBraal moved to Santa Cruz, where she worked for Greenpeace, served as media rep for Earth First! and returned to school at UCSC for a degree in environmental science. Continue reading →

“In sixth grade, I went to environmental camp for a week, in the woods near Placerville,” says Shelley Villalobos, who grew up on a 5-acre walnut farm near Chico, California. “I came back changed, aware that our choices matter for the planet.” Villalobos played softball all through school in Chico, for one year at local Butte College and for three years at the UO, while she completed a degree in journalism and wrote a weekly column on the environment for the Oregon Daily Emerald. Continue reading →