My online friend, Bronwyn Lea, invited me to write for her Words That Changed My World series. When I read her invitation, I knew exactly what to write about.
I have generally been a mediocre student. Clever, but… my teachers would often say looking perplexed at me. But… the motivation was often difficult to find, I might have supplied had I known myself better.
My parents were each the first generation of their respective families to go on to and graduate from a university. My mother is now a retired pharmacist and my late father was an electrical engineer for Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Northrup Corporation in Southern California. The FACT that each of their five children WOULD acquire a university education was in the air we breathed and the water we drank. It was an of course in my mind. Life without a university degree was inconceivable. Being the youngest of five, I watched as each of my two sisters and two brothers graduated from high school and went on to area California State Universities.
I somehow squeaked through my senior year of high school and graduated low in the class. Finished with high school, poor grades in hand, and no driving career ambition led me to enroll at the local City College. There I merely took some acting classes my first year.