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Greetings to you all from chilly New
England, where my wife Ruth Hannon and I have lived just outside of
Boston in Milton, Massachusetts for the past 37 years. We are both now
retired for the past 3 ½ years, prior to which Ruth was a psychology
professor at Bridgewater State University for 34 years, and I worked as
a social worker and family therapist, the last 29 years for a youth
counseling center run by the Town of Burlington, MA.
Right Now This winter has been an exciting one for us as our daughter Katie, 33, and her husband John gave birth to our first grandchild Darla June in January, and our son Ben, 30, became engaged to his girlfriend Sarah at Christmas. Katie, John, and Darla are living in Chicago, where Katie is finishing her dissertation for a Ph.D. in Linguistics at U. Chicago, while John works as a partner in a music talent buying agency. Ruth and I have been in Chicago since early January providing them with some family back-up, due to head home at the end of March. Ben and Sarah are both in Bethesda, Maryland, where Ben works in business development for a family firm that contracts with the Department of Energy, and Sarah works with her father in his donor search company. Back Then At least some of you will recall that Stan Teixeira and I joined you all in the fall of 1967 at Saint Patrick’s, coming from the former Ryan Preparatory College Seminary in Fresno. At that time our diocese, the Monterey-Fresno Diocese was on the verge of splitting into Monterey and Fresno, and all the rest of our classmates from Ryan went south to LA and St. John’s. We had to plead our case with vigorto get our bishop to allow us to go north instead of south, but he let us go after the Ryan class ahead of us had eleven of their twelvegraduates leave the seminary less than a year after they entered St. John’s. I spent the next four years with you and have some great memories ofthat time, including wrestling with Ron Chocol’s required paper on the Subjectivity of Knowledge and Intersubjective Validation, helping out the members of Gene Boyle’s Social Policy class assemble that provocative analysis of what Bay Area churches were essentially not doing to help people in need, then joining the entrenched group that refused to move back to St. Joe’s during our senior year while they renovated St. Pat’s. I remember Chuck Lathrop introducing me to the music of Richie Havens; playing guitar to Bob Hammans’ flute; helping Paul Page study to pass our biology final with Sr. Marie Bernadette(?); and TAing for Fr. Giguerre’s Notre Dame philosophy and theology classes with Tom Hansen.After two years of theology and a couple of very stimulating internships with Cuch Moriarty in San Jose and with Jack Kavanaugh in Redwood City, that surrounded a life-changing summer running the Sacred Heart Youth Center in San Jose, I began to think that perhaps the priesthood was not my calling after all. So with much soul-searching after ten years of seminary life, I left in June of 1971. I spent the next 6 months driving a forklift in my grandfather’s apple orchard, then headed east to Catholic University, where I got amaster’s degree in psychology and met my eventual wife Ruth. We married in 1974. After 7 years working as community counselor for the Town of Crofton,Maryland while Ruth completed her Ph.D. in social psychology, we moved north to her hometown of Boston, where Ruth joined the faculty of Bridgewater State University. I worked for three years at Children’s Hospital while getting post-graduate training in family therapy andthen an MSW, after which I worked for another 29 years as an adolescent and family therapist for the Burlington Community LifeCenter, a youth and family counseling center run by the Town of Burlington, MA. Both Ruth and I were blessed to have very satisfying careers working with people we loved and respected. We are now thoroughly enjoyingretirement, spending a lot of time at our summer home in Naples, Maine, golfing, gardening, kayaking, sailing and playing music. And now with a new granddaughter to play with, our lives have become that much richer. April 6, 2017 |