APRIL 1992 - A BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AT THE ORCHID TREE INN A get-a-way weekend trip to Orchid Tree Inn, Palm Springs With Gary and Phylles to celebrate Jean and Phylles’s birthdays. Jean and I found this little hotel downtown in Palm Springs several years ago.. It was right in the center of town about a block off the main drag. It was 1920’s bungalows around a pool. We really liked it because it was so convenient to the downtown area. Just one of our get-a-way places.

JUNE 1993 MY FIRST BORN SON DIED MICHAEL WAYNE MARTIN
b. January 1, 1959 d. June 22, 1992

June 22, 1992 the unthinkable happened. My first born son died from the complications of AIDs. He was only thirty-three. That will always be one of the worst days of my life We make mistakes and have misunderstandings that we think we have time to correct. My son died thinking I didn’t love him because he was gay. He came to me and told me he was HIV positive. I simply did not know what to do. I could not handle it. First, I did not want to accept the fact that my son was gay and had that horrible disease. Was I homophobic? I didn’t think I was. It was during the holiday’s and we had a house full of people, including my mother and dad and Jean’s mother. Mike was with his friend (who also later died of AID’S) and we didn’t get a chance to talk But I figured we had time to resolve the issue. They left in a huff, and I never saw my son again. I kept telling myself to call and work it out. Then I got the call from my ex-wife’s sister informing me that Mike had died. It was at that moment that I realized that I had lost my only chance to tell my son that his sexual preference was simply his choice, and I loved him very much.

SUMMER OF 1992 WILLMA’S BIG MOVE TO CALIFORNIA Wilma moved to California. We found her a very nice place down by the dairy on Glendora Ave. We figured she was spending more time here, and there was no one close to her in Seattle. So she sold the house to Nick at a bargain price. This put her in a place where Jean could watch over her.

1993 NEW YEARS PARTY AT THE MARTIN’S We had a hell of a party that New Year. Kevin and Rick were home and Michele invited her new friend Bob the Fireman. All the neighbors were there. The guest list included Vic and Lois, the Schobers, Gary and Phylles, George and Carole. That’s the night we had the Velcro hats and balls. It was really silly. You would throw the ball and your partner would try to catch it with his head. After a few drinks it really made you look stupid. Marci brought her Karaoke and we set it up in the garage. We had arranged in advance with everyone that when Jean and Dawn Hoeger got up and started to sing, everyone would just leave. It was funny.

FEBRUARY 1993 SKIING TRIP TO ELK MEADOWS Elk Meadows was a great place to ski when they had a good snow because it was squeaky dry. Besides that Dan and Eyvon ran the concessions at the lodge and we used their passes to ski. This time we took Scott and Marci. He took his first ski lessons. He did pretty well.

RETIREMENT TIME WAS HERE AHEAD OF SCHEDULE MARCH 1993
RETIRED AT AGE FIFTY-EIGHT

It was time to make a decision, Honeywell had sold our division to Hughes Aircraft two years earlier and they were moving our division to Arlington Texas. Jean and I looked at the alternatives between making the move and taking the retirement package. I had always planned on retiring at 62, but the sale and relocation of our division put a kink in the plan. We decided that we didn’t want to make the move at this stage in our lives, so I chose to retire. I had thirty-three years with Honeywell and two with Hughes. I started at Honeywell as a draftsman, got my Mechanical Engineering degree at night school and ended up as the manager of Mechanical Design. What’s really strange is I get my checks from Raytheon, and I have never been in a Raytheon facility in my life. Raytheon bought up everyone in the trainer and simulation business.

Here I was, out of a job for the first time in my life. I didn’t want to retire this early. So I started shopping for a job . That’s when I realized I didn’t know how to do that. Fortunately I got a call from an old friend who I played football with at Rosemead and Citrus, Bart Bartel. Bart was a Dean at Citrus College and Jean (my wife) worked at Citrus as a text book buyer and our ex-son-in law Vince Mercurio worked at Citrus. George Vallance had kept in touch with Bart over the years. With all of these contacts Jean and I had established an old friend relationship with Bart and Jeanne (his wife). Through the grapevine he heard that I had retired as a mechanical engineer. And he just happened to be looking for an instructor for a mechanical design course. It was kind of ironic because I always thought I would enjoy teaching. The next day I meet Bart for an interview. I wanted to make it very clear that I had no teaching experience other than giving seminars on things like design to production coordination. The next day he called me to inform me I had the job. We also made an appointment for an orientation meeting. I figured that’s when he would give me the course outline, grading policies and other important information. When I got to his office for the orientation meeting he walked me out the door and around the campus and showed me my classroom. It was certainly a different school than it was in 1953. Back then there were 175 students compared to today’s school with over 1500 night school students. This is where he started to get serious. He said they had a gap in the required pre-engineering curriculum. He needed help in establishing a new class called Beginning Mechanical Design (or mechanical engineering for dummies).. He had selected a text book at random on Mechanical Engineering. They wanted to establish the curriculum first with one class at night. But first he wanted to develop a course outline and a basic description of the course. The text book they had selected was pretty basic, and about 50% was obsolete. I decided to use the book and instruct the students to ignore the obsolete chapters. That worked out pretty well with a lot of adlibbing. It turned out to be a lot of fun. I was winging it by sticking to my experience and going with what I knew I knew. I was really running on a free reign. And luckily they didn’t ask too many dumb questions I couldn’t answer. We added a day time class the following semester. We kept tweaking until I thought we were presenting a pretty good basic introduction to Mechanical Design. After three years of the teaching routine I figured I was spending an awful lot of time for the compensation. Another opportunity came along that sounded interesting. As I said before, Jean was a text book buyer for the Citrus College book store. The College worked with companies that came on campus and bought used text books from the students. Follett Used Text Books was the company that the book store contracted with to set stations in the book store to buy back books. Follett would ship the books to their warehouse in Chicago. Catalog them and resell them to Colleges and Universities worldwide. Great business. These used textbook companies send buyers at the end/beginning of each semester/quarter with a computer and cash to buy books at 10% to 70% of the books original value. The buyer gets all of their expenses plus an hourly wage and you only work one week at the end and beginning of the semester/quarter. I worked schools like UCLA, USC, Pasadena City College, Citrus, San Diego City College, Pepperdine, Kingman Arizona Community College. So for a couple of years before we made our move to the Colony I was a used text book buyer. Not long after we moved to the Colony I turned in my computer and became an ex-text book buyer and retired full time..

THIS WAS JUST A WEEKEND VISIT FROM SCHOOL

MAY 1993 ONE OF OUR MANY TRIPS TO SHANGI-LA

KEVIN GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE JUNE 1993 Kevin graduated from SDSU. He can thank his mother. She was a genuine stay at home Mom We decided when we got married that our children would be raised in a family where the husband/father brought home the bacon and the wife/mother would get stuck with the toughest job in the world, housewife. We wanted our children to be raised by mom and dad, not by strangers. It does make it tougher financially, but it was worth it. Then when the boys were in high school, she went to work part time at Citrus College book store as assistant book buyer She ended up at Citrus for about ten years, until both boys graduated from college.

SUMMER OF 1993 KEVIN TOOK A JOB IN PHILADELPHIA After graduating from SDSU with a BS in Finance, Kevin was still not sure what he wanted to do for a career. He spotted a job a group called Green Corp. A group of tree huggers that were looking for someone to take care of their finances. The job would be in Philadelphia. He thought it sounded interesting, so he applied. He got invited to interview along with about 50 other applicants. The interviews were to take place at the University of California, Berkeley. As part of the interviewing process, they borrowed a technique from Toast Masters as part of the evaluation process. They had everyone sitting in a circle. Then one at a time, each person would go to the center of the circle, where there was a box with small folded pieces of paper with a subject written on it. Each person then had five minutes to do a dissertation on the subject. If you were lucky you might draw a subject you were familiar with, otherwise you had to improvise. His subject was the best of Gilligan’s Island. He didn’t get the job he was interviewing for, but they were so impressed that they offered him another job in finance.

He had worked for Green Corp. for a year when they decided to move from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. He figured that with the fly by the seat of your pants operation they would go broke anyway. So he declined going to D.C. and came home.

Instead of just flying home, he would make an adventure out of the trip. He rented a moving van that would hold his mattress and the few things he had accumulated and drove the back roads. He wanted to get an unobstructed view of our country . I don’t know the exact route he took,,but I do know he traveled through the Bad Lands and ended up in Bozeman Montana. This was during the winter and he was freezing badly in that van. He recalled that his mother had mentioned that she had good friends Barbara and Mike Ewiing, who had moved to Bozeman from Seattle. He asked this mother to call Barbara and ask they could use company for a day or so. Barb and Mike are really wonderful people and were genially thrilled to have him. He stayed three days and fell in love with the Ewings and Bozeman..

OCTOBER 1993 - MICHELE MARRIED PAUL LANGSTON Michele married Paul Langston Oct 2nd 1993. Paul was a concrete contractor and was doing very well, making a ton of money. He had a new Corvette and a 48ft sport fishing boat. I liked Paul, we got along like friends. When I retired I worked in his office for a while. But, this was a union designed by the Devil himself. First of all Michele was allergic to alcohol. Any alcohol at all turned her into a monster. They were fighting constantly. It’s a wonder they didn’t kill each other. She helped him get rid of his money. Then they got a divorce. They could not live together, but are still friends and talk on the telephone quite often

MARCH 1994 - KEVIN AND MIKE HULL GO TO MAUI Kevin and Mike Hull left for Maui in March 1994. Kevin was just home from Philadelphia where he worked for Green Corp. for a short time until they moved to Washington D.C. and Mike was working construction. They got one of those car and condo packages and took off for Lahaina in Maui to look jobs. They had jobs and rented a house in Lahaina within two weeks. The idea was to have some fun before they settled down. Mike only stayed for a short time before he decided to come home. Kevin decided to stay for a while. I turned out to be a very lucky decision.

MAY 1994 JEAN AND I VISITED KEVIN IN MAUI Jean and I visited Kevin and Mike Hull in Maui. They both got jobs the first week. Kevin had landed a job as a bus boy at the Aloha Cantina. We had to take Paul’s long board to Kevin and besides that we were nosey and we missed him, so we just decided to see for ourselves. We got a condo and car and had a great week. . They were even lucky enough to find a car that ran most of the time. I think it was a 19 something Justy for transportation. It turned out that after two or three months Mike decided to come home to pursue his own contracting business, They had originally agreed to hang in there for a specific period of time, so Mike agreed to pay his half of the rent as long as Kevin stayed. By this time Kevin had been promoted to waiter. He was in fat city. He had a place to live, a Justy (that’s a car) and Paul’s long board that we brought with us. How good can it get?

JUNE 1994 RICK WAS THERE WHEN KEVIN MET STACI Both Kevin and Staci came to Maui to hang out and surf after they graduated from college. She from Toronto Canada and he from California. They both were working at a restaurant called the Aloha Cantina in Lahaina. Kevin had been there for a while and Rick was over there visiting when this new girl dropped in from Toronto. Rick said he and his brother were sitting in a bar across the street from the restaurant. She had just started as the hostess at the Cantina. Out of the blue, Kevin said, “see that girl, I’m going to marry her”. Rick almost fell of his stool, because Kevin had always said he was not getting married until he was 35. According to Rick, she gave him a hard time when he made a move. But he was persistent and she ended up moving into his place. That was over 20 years ago.

JUNE 1994 JEAN WAS DIAGNOSED WITH PARKNSON’S DISEASE This was the year Jean was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She was the one that noticed that when walking her left arm did not swing like the other arm. Doctor Ismal, the neurologist, said that there are few people who were as in touch with their body as she was. We were stunned. We knew little about other than it was not curable. We were not sure what to do next. I remember we called Gary and Phylles and we decided to go to the Orchid Tree Inn in Palm Springs and think about the future. Well from somebody, somehow, Phylles got the name of a doctor at USC medical center who was conducting a study program on a new Parkinson’s medication, pramipexole.That doctors name was Cheryl Waters and turned out to be one of the top neurologists in the country. We called and got an appointment. We had to wait over two months to get in to see Dr. Waters because she was on leave having a baby. She was that young. It was one of the best choices we ever made. The drug turned out to be very effective, particularly in combination with selegiline, amantadine and carbidopa levo. Looking into the future twenty-two years from that day in 1994, we will be amazed at how well this recipe has worked.. After 22 years she shows no visible signs of the disease

JULY 1994 THE YANTIS GIRLS GET TOGETHER FOR THE LAST TIME

CHRISTMAS 1994 – KEVIN BRINGS STACI HOME FOR CHISTMAS Kevin and Staci and their cat Josh came home from Maui the week before Christmas 1994. She was with us a couple of days before she flew home to Toronto. She didn’t stay home for very long. She was back before Christmas and went with us to the Rose Parade on New Years day. You must see the Parade once in your life, but once is enough. During that week Kevin bought a Jeep and informed us of their plan to move to Bozeman Montana.

Well it seems that when he left the job in Philadelphia and decided to rent a U-Haul moving van and drive across the U.S. on the back roads (no freeways), through the small towns and really see our country first hand. And his subsequent visit with Jean’s friends Barbara and Mike Ewing in Bozeman Montana really made an impression on Kevin. He fell in love with Bozeman.

So the stage is set. When Kevin met Staci in Maui the story line fell right in place. He had just met the love of his life and knew the place they could live happily ever after.

So in the first week of 1995 they set off in their Jeep with their cat Josh (they brought him home from Maui) to the wilds of Montana to start a new life. It turned out to be a real growing experience for both of them. There was an abundances of jobs at $3 an hour like working for caterers, house moving and fast food places. The real jobs were going to residents and grads of Montana State. Kevin had a degree in Finance and applied for an entry level job at a bank and failed to get the job because he could not type 50 words a minute.

FEBRUARY 1995 - MY 60TH BIRTHDAY BASH You plan for that day that you can retire aqnd enjoy life. What you forget is you have to get old to get there. I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would ever be 60. Jean really puts on a great party. It was a real surpriise when Gary and Joann Cullins walked in. Hadn’t seen them in many years. Got a a good old higu school buddies picture.

JUNE 1995 - RICK GRADUATED FROM SDSU Rick graduated from SDSU in June of 1995 and after graduation he decided he loved San Diego and has been there ever since. He lived in the condo for a while and then he rented for a while until he bought a duplex about half mile from the condo and settled in with his new job as manager for Ace Parking. They manage most of the parking and valet services for the large hotels and airport downtown San Diego

AUGUST 1995 - WE’RE OFF TO BOZEMAN MONTANA FOR THE MARTIN FAMILY’S FIRST DESTINATION WEDDING All of the friends and families of Kevin Martin and Staci Parson were invited to join them at their wedding and celebration on August 5th, 1995. We made a real trip of getting to Bozeman.. We traveled up the 15 to Beaver. We tried to get my folks to join us on the trip, but my dad would not budge. It was a shame, because my mother really wanted to go. They would have had a great time. We continued north through Salt Lake and up through Jackson Hole Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park. This area of our country has to be the most scenic in the world. It’s absolutely breath taking. In Bozeman we met the Parson family. It seemed a little eerie to me because the two families meshed together like old friends. For example, Grant and Ann and Jean and I have become not just new in-laws, but good friends.

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