Eugene Weekly

“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 →

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. Continue reading →

Growing up in small-town Portola Valley, Calif., Allen Hancock had time to spend with nature. “My fourth-grade teacher took us to a meadow and pond near the school,” he recalls. “A couple years later, I watched as bulldozers arrived. It broke my heart.” Always an avid cyclist, he biked eight miles to high school in Redwood City. Continue reading →