Eugene Weekly

December 1997: “I’m the brokest famous man in town,” says veteran musician Eagle Park Slim, talking his blues. “I’ve had trials and tribulations.” As a kid, Slim learned Chicago and Delta blues from artists who played his parents’ roadhouse in Eagle Park, Ill. “Harmonica Sam could blow out a brand-new harmonica on the first song,” says Slim, who started blowing Sam’s castoffs at age 9, learned guitar from Johnny Wright at 11 and fronted his own band at 13. In the 1960s and ’70s he had bands in East St. Continue reading →

November 1997: “Volunteering is an excellent way to explore a career,” says Sarah Grimm, education coordinator for BRING Recycling. Five years ago, as a “career waitress” at Delfina’s in Portland, Grimm took a master recyclers class through OSU Extension Services. Her work schedule allowed time to volunteer for nonprofit recycling programs. “Do what you love — the money will follow,” says Grimm, who was soon working fulltime for Metro Recycling’s telephone hot-line. Continue reading →

“I grew up surrounded by bars,” says Germaine Bennett, who was raised in Hurley, a small town in northern Wisconsin notorious for its raucous nightlife and prostitution ever since lumber and mining boom eras in the 1800s. Every summer in high school, and later in college when her family had moved to Oregon and she was at the UO, Bennett returned to Wisconsin as head waitress at the Dairymen’s Country Club, a private lakeside resort. “I was self-sufficient,” she says. Continue reading →

“I decided I was going to be a nurse when I was 5,” says New Jersey native Kallen Korin, who grew up in Burlington, earned a bachelors from Rutgers College of Nursing in Newark and married Joel Korin of nearby Camden. They lived there for 35 years and raised two sons in Haddonfield, where he was a trial attorney and she was a public health nurse. “Since 1978, I’ve been a childbirth educator, working in doctors’ offices and hospitals,” she says. Continue reading →

“My first attempt at college was a failure,” says Elaine Walters, who fled her unhappy family life in Santa Fe to enter college at University of New Mexico before she’d finished high school. “I had no study skills.” A year later, she was pregnant. She had a son, Kienan, and two years later a daughter, Nitara, but when the children’s father got violent, she gathered the kids again and ran off to another college. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

A descendent of Oregon pioneers who built the first wagon road to Triangle Lake in Lane County, Mark Roberts grew up in San Francisco suburbs. His older brother Ed got polio at 13 and afterwards relied on an iron lung, yet became a pioneering advocate for disability rights, a professor and director of the state’s Office of Vocational Rehabilitation Services. “Mom insisted he go to high school in person,” Roberts says. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

“My life has been a journey across the U.S.,” says choreographer Peggy Soomil, who grew up in a five-story tenement a mile from the Empire State Building. She took her first ballet class at age 5, studied modern dance in her teens and auditioned for Julliard at the suggestion of her gym teacher. “It was a tough place to be,” she says. “Out of 100 who started, only five of us graduated.” She spent four years as a member and soloist in the Anna Sokolow Company, and six years with her own Peggy Cicierska Dance Company. Continue reading →