Eugene Weekly

“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 →

“I’ve had a garden every year since I’ve been an adult,” Kevin Hillman says. “My largest garden at home was 1,000 square feet.” After high school in Fremont, California, Hillman worked in steel fabrication for 24 years. He came to Oregon in 1978, found work at a machine shop in Springfield and lived in Cottage Grove. In 1985, he moved to rural Lane County outside Marcola. He left the machine shop in 1996 to work for the Springfield School District. He drove a school bus for a year then became a vocational assistant in the metal shop at Thurston High School. Continue reading →

A third-generation Eugenean, Dan Gleason attended Harris Elementary, Spencer Butte Middle School, South Eugene High and the UO, where he got a degree in biology and took a particular interest in birds. After a couple of years as a substitute teacher, he returned to the UO in 1972 for a job, preparing student labs for a variety of biology courses. Every summer since then, even after his retirement in 2004, he has taught a four-week field ornithology course for seniors and grad students. Continue reading →

“I was known as ‘eco-girl,’” says Kelsey Juliana, recalling her K-8 years at the Village School in Eugene. “I ran down the hall, turning off lights, and went through the recycling bin to find usable stuff.” The daughter of Catia Juliana and Tim Ingalsbee, who spurred on the Warner Creek timber sale protest, she was two months old when her parents got married at the protest site in May of 1996. “I grew up around adults who made it their life’s work to protect these places,” she says. Continue reading →

“We had an amazing world-lit teacher who introduced us to Greek literature,” says Johanna Mitchell, who was then a high school senior in Miami. “There was a lot of mention of planets. That’s astrology!” Mitchell went to a bookstore and found Sun Signs by Linda Goodman. “I devoured that book,” she says. “I knew then that astrology was a vocation.” She spent a year at the University of Miami, but dropped out to protest the Vietnam War, and for 10 years worked at retail jobs in fabric and jewelry stores in Iowa City and Berkeley. Continue reading →

SoCal gal Donna Riddle spent childhood summers at Outpost Camp on the trail to Mount Whitney. “My mom, my sister and I ran a trail camp for a pack station that hauled people to the summit,” she says. “I have love-of-nature genes from that time.” Riddle got married just out of Corona High School, had a couple kids and did anti-war work in Orange County. “I went to a protest in Century City,” she says. “People sat down, and police attacked with clubs.” A year later, in 1968, she and the kids moved to Eugene. Continue reading →

“I had an Irish Catholic upbringing,” says Maggie Donahue, who grew up in Chicago and attended an all-girls high school. “When I was 9, I did therapy, every day, at the home of a child in the parish who had brain damage. It led to a career in special ed.” She spent two years at an all-girls college in Colorado, then returned to Chicago and Loyola U for a degree in psychology. Continue reading →

“I always loved drawing,” says Ken O’Connell, a San Francisco Bay Area kid who arrived in Eugene in the 1950s to attend Woodrow Wilson Junior High School and South Eugene High School. “I had an amazing art teacher, Larry Goldade. He got me on a pathway to study art.” After graduating from the UO, O’Connell served two years in the Navy off Vietnam, married Gwyneth, a fellow South Eugene grad, and spent a year in Eastern Oregon, teaching art at five different high schools. He returned to Eugene for an MFA and got a job at Treasure Valley Community College in Ontario. Continue reading →

The son of a doctor and a nurse, Peter Ogura grew up in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. “It was a Leave it to Beaver kind of childhood,” he says. “We were big patrons of the St. Louis County Library.” After high school, he headed west to Colorado College, where he changed his major from English to political science. “I came out to Eugene for a couple of weeks in 1975,” he says, “to visit friends from home.” He continued westward to San Francisco for law school at USF. “It was there that I got into reading fiction,” he says. Continue reading →