Candidate for
Trustee; South Orange County Community College District; Trustee Area 7

I was born in 1932, at the bottom of the Great Depression, in a San Francisco hospital. My father had arrived in the United States as an 18 year old immigrant from Denmark in 1910. He had met and married another Danish immigrant, my mother, in San Francisco. When I was born my father was working as a gardener for the wealthy and renting a small stationery store with living quarters overhead on Union Street in San Francisco. My understanding is that my mother was the one who spent most of the time managing the store.

During those difficult economic times my father was able to make contact with relatives in Denmark who helped him secure employment managing a large estate on the outskirts of Copenhagan. So in 1937 my father drove my mother, my younger brother and me in an old car across the nation, often camping out, to New York City. From there our family boarded an ocean liner to Copenhagen. I attended the first grade in a Danish school. That was in 1938. In 1939, a couple of months before Hitler invaded Poland, my father, aware of the rising tensions in Europe, brought our family back to California. A few months later Denmark was under the heal of the Nazi boot.

I'm very proud of my father for making a life for himself and family especially when one considers that he had only a fourth grade education. When only ten years old he had been "farmed out" by his father. He told me how he was allowed by his father to come home only on Christmas Day. Thus at the time he arrived at Ellis Island my father knew hardly a word of English.

Coming back from Europe in 1939 our family settled in Santa Rosa, California where I eventually became a teacher at Santa Rosa Junior High School. I had earned my Master's degree and General Secondary Teaching Credential at Fresno State University (The GI Bill had been very helpful.). Prior to my beginning my teaching career I had served in the merchant marine as an ordinary seaman, in the California Division of Forestry as a Forest Fire Truck Driver for two fire seasons, as a psychiatric technician trainee in two state hospitals and as a sergeant in the U.S. Army where I earned the Combat Infantry Badge in the Korean War.

After two years of junior high school teaching I became a graduate student at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California where I completed all the course work but not the dissertation for the Doctor of Philosophy degree. I thought it would be too difficult financially to leave Claremont for six months of required research work at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. As an alternative my mentor was willing to recommend me for a "temporary" position at Mount San Antonio Community College in Walnut, California. Six years later in 1970 when I was still teaching at Mt. SAC I applied successfully for a position at Saddleback Community College.

The smog in the Los Angeles basin was having a detrimental effect on my eldest son who had asthma so I had applied for a position as a professor of American history at the three year old Saddleback Community College. During my initial teaching years at Saddleback College I lived in Laguna Niguel and then in l998 I moved with my new wife to our present home in Rancho Santa Margarita.

My divorce after eighteen years of marriage had taken place in 1979. My two sons are doing well in their respective vocations. The woman whom I married was Grace Lange whose husband had died in 1995. Grace was a charter member of the English division at Saddleback College. The two of us have now had ten very happy years together. We are both members and liturgists at the Rancho Santa Margarita Methodist Church. We are also both members of the SMUMC reading group.