Valerie Brown Endres

After graduation from MHS, I spent four years at Middlebury College (VT), which actually offers skiing as a course. I majored in Spanish and attempted to minor in skiing, but it wasn't permitted. Just in the nick of time, during the last week of college, I finally met a man, which turned out OK, since I've been married to him for 44 years now.

Leland and I started our married life in El Paso, Texas, where he was stationed at Fort Bliss, affectionately known as the only overseas post within the borders of the United States. I landed two jobs simultaneously, teaching 8th grade English and, in the evenings, teaching English to Mexicans. The Mexicans were great and squirmed a lot less than the 8th graders.

After Leland was discharged, we decided to try graduate school, and seeing a poster advertising the University of Oregon and believing (due to our limited knowledge of U. S. geography) that the weather would be similar to Vermont's, we went there. Three years later, waterlogged and pale, we applied to the University of Arizona, hoping to dry out a bit.

After three years in Tucson, and armed with a couple of Ph.D.'s and dragging two children, we left for positions at the University of Nebraska. A year later, Leland was offered a job at 3M Company in Minnesota, which appealed to us because we reasoned that Minnesota must be a lot like Vermont. (Wrong again.) I once again managed to teach, adding French to my repertoire.

But Leland really wanted to be a professor, and so, since I could type well (having taken typing at MHS), I came home after work every day for weeks and typed application letters to every college we could think of that was in what we deemed to be an acceptable location. No one needed a chemistry professor then, it seemed, but amazingly we at last received a positive response from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA.

We packed up the three kids and the tortoise and headed west, having moved ten times in ten years. I soon found out, after having been told differently by the department head, that nepotism rules prevented me from teaching at the same school as my husband. This, of course, was illegal (even then), and we became part of a grievance filed with the state against the college. But by the time the ruling came in our favor, I had already discovered that real estate was a pretty good career for a mother of four, and I've stuck with it all these years.

Soon after our arrival in San Luis Obispo, I joined the League of Women Voters, which sparked my interest in politics, especially locally. I was appointed to the local Planning Commission and even ran for City Council (but lost; one of the big issues was that a woman should be home with her children, not attending meetings). I worked hard on other people's campaigns and was happy to see one of them, Leon Panetta, rise high in the national scene.

My defining political moment occurred at a meeting of our local Board of Realtors when the speaker, from Pacific Gas and Electric Company, was trying to explain why we should support his company's building a nuclear power plant within ten miles of our city and three miles from an active earthquake fault. I asked why they had chosen that location, and he responded that if there were an accident, a lot fewer people would be killed than if it were near San Francisco, where he lived. (I kid you not; that's what he said.) I signed up to help those who were doing all they could to stop that plant, even getting arrested and spending a night in jail. We didn't win, of course, but we probably made the plant safer than it would otherwise have been. Now, 20 years later, there's the waste, and we're still fighting.

During the years that our children were home, our family hosted six exchange students, attended a gazillion swim meets and track meets, spent a week at the county fair every year while our 4-H daughters showed their sheep and rabbits, went on ski trips every winter, and didn't notice we were all growing older. A runner for 25 years, I ran one marathon and lots of 10K's, but now I hike instead. Every week I play recorders with a dedicated but definitely amateur group of friends. I bike, I garden, and I devote a lot of time to our local land conservancy.

We now find ourselves living in a small (42,000) city that often appears on lists of Best Places to Live. . .Retire. . .Visit. And U. S. News and World Report always names Cal Poly as a terrific place to get an education in the sciences. Our children all live in California, and so we get to see them and the four grandchildren often. Life is good.