Above: Howard with his wife Chris and their new family - Lili and Gryff.
Notice the bike with our school colors!

I really don't like to write bios. I have a tendency to remember every little detail of my life and then I sit and wonder which details are interesting enough to include. For this exercise I will relate nothing prior to high school and try to keep any lurid details to myself (yeah, like there are any). Here goes.

Graduated with you in 1963, and proceeded directly to AVC. Spent 3 years there, the last fighting with a computer (one of the originals) that was convinced I had enrolled in 27 semester units in the fall of '65. It issued me a report card with 11 units of 'F' then cancelled 3 of the 11 'F' units because it was discovered that I had already passed that class with an 'A'. After several months of battle I was able to convince the damn thing that it was all Austin Jordan's fault (bless the man). I moved on to Cal Poly Pomona. Over the next two years I roomed with Bill Studt (AV '62), Dave Smith ('63) and a small, Oriental math major, in an even smaller dorm room. I got kicked out of the dorms when I held the little fellow out a window at 2:30am because he and his friends wouldn't stop playing bridge. Strange game, bridge, I find that it induces extreme anger in those observing, especially at 2:30 in the morning. Does that qualify as lurid? Probably not, just stupid. The dorm mother relented the next quarter and let me back in. I discovered later that I got a room by myself because no one wanted to take a chance on my nocturnal fits of anger. That worked out pretty well because then I could leave out my KFC chicken buckets and no one complained.

Left Cal Poly in '68 thinking that I had graduated and enrolled in Mc George Law School in Sacramento. I soon discovered that all of my last quarter's work at Cal poly had been lost when my faculty advisor had stepped off a curb in downtown Pomona with his Seeing Eye dog and was struck and killed by a bus. You can't imagine how bizarre that sounds until you see it in writing, but a true story anyhow. Apparently, he had turned over all the projects to his student asst. The assistant had done his part and gone home for the summer where he decided to transfer to a school back east. Never to be seen again, as were my assignments, on these Pacific shores. Until now, as you can see, my decisions have been, sure, steady and nigh on to perfect. Alas, that was not to continue.

My first marriage began with my move to Sacramento and ended during that first year in law school. No big deal and hardly worth an afterthought. I returned to the AV and worked in the insurance industry where I met my second wife. I married her in 1970 and I believe that those were16 of my most boring years. Her? She's still in denial. I don't know how she explains the kids. That might really be ear popping. There were some important occurrences during this time highlighted, of course, by the birth of the aforementioned children, Jessica now teaching Sp. Ed. in Palmdale and Eben, still confused and wandering around on some volleyball court nearby. We separated on Mother's Day of '86. May 11th, I believe. I think she thought of it as her present to herself.

Post divorce years. Did a lot of things. Owned a house cleaning business and a liquor store. Worked in plant maintenance for a local school district. It was the maintenance job that changed my life. In 1988 I was injured badly enough that an operation was required in 1990. In '94, I was no longer able to do that job and was required to make a decision about my future. A very important person in my life had been telling me, for years, that I needed to become a teacher (said I had a gift for communicating with young people). He finally won and I went back to Cal Poly, finished my BS, started and finished my Teaching Credential at Point Loma University and took on the challenge of teaching convicted juvenile felons (Bloods and Crips) at Challenger Memorial Youth Center in Lancaster. I soon realized that to be a teacher is to never finish your education so I enrolled at Grand Canyon University and completed my Master of Arts Teaching in 2001. In 2000 I met a lady in my bowling league and married her in Oct. of 2002. She seems able to put up with my eccentricities, including the one involving me, rolling around, on the front room floor with as many big dogs as I can fit in the room. Bless the woman. She let me buy my dream motorcycle this year and the other day she bought me a revolving fan with a remote control. Life seems to be on a definite upswing.

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