Pam Kellogg Parks After graduation from St. Mo's I went on to USC and majored in English Lit. From there I married an Irishman from Chicago and I taught Kindergarten in that area. My son, John, came along in the late sixties and grew up to get a B.S. in Rocket Science, a Master's in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D in the same discipline from RPI in Troy, New York. He interned, then worked as a full-time employee at JPL in the late '80's and early nineties where robotics and interferometers were his specialties. John moved on to the corporate world (General Dynamics), then decided after several years to teach, and has been producing Ph.Ds himself for about 8 years now. He develops new control and robotic technologies, also. Two of John's hobbies are bike racing and playing rock tunes on his electric guitar. I have a wonderful daughter-in-law from the Ukraine, who teaches also. At about 15 Alyona showed great promise in technical subjects, testing very well in math and physics. This won her acceptance in the early '90's to the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, a prestigious university in that city. After about four years at Kiev Polytechnic, credits in hand, she followed her mother to the United States in 1994, where she mastered English in a matter of months, and went on to finish her higher education at the University of Maryland. From there she went on to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where, along with obtaining her Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, she met my son, John. They were wed in August of 1999 and are still happily married and living in the western US. We both worked for Transamerica when we met (1983). My career centered on IT technical writing, systems analysis, and product planning. I worked in the financial, academic and medical sectors. Steve spent most of his years in IT Quality Assurance for financial organizations. We moved around primarily for proximity to new technology, keeping up in a very fast paced industry. We lived in Santa Clarita for 15 years and during our time there, Steve loved creating huge vegetable gardens. He grew everything from apples to zucchinis. I pulled many a weed and enjoyed, along with Steve's numerous department friends, an almost weekly bounty of delicious organic fruits and vegetables. In 2006, after several decades of hard work, we decided to retire. We now live up in the high Sierra in a very small train town and enjoy snow shoeing in the winter, hiking, swimming in the summer, traveling in our RV and volunteering at church. We had planned for years to retire up here as Steve's father brought him to this area when Steve was about 18 and they skied, hiked and had great times together. Steve had summer jobs with the USFS and the mountains got into his blood. Even before we married, Steve brought me up to the mountains and I, too, fell in love with the awesome beauty. We can see Eureka Peak from our living room window and the millions and millions of pines that look like a carpet between us and it. I wish we were painters! Well, as I think back, my favorite memories of St.Monica's were belonging to the Navigators and hanging out with my gang--- some fun teenagers! I loved the football games, the dances, and Hi-Jinx. I cannot believe all that happened 50 years ago! Congratulations to all my fellow classmates! You're an awesome group! |
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left Chicago, came home to LA in 1981, and was married in 1984 to my second husband, Steve. Steve was on the USS Constellation up and down the Viet Nam coast. He was a Petty Officer who specialized in data processing and who helped run the on-board mainframe, performing all kinds of manpower studies. This was the first war in which military decisions were computer-initiated and supported, and Steve was one of the first of the military data processing specialists. He was also one of the first graduates in the U.S. with a degree in Computer Science. After he got out of the Navy he received his MBA, then entered the business workforce.