It is so hard to believe that it was 32 years this June since we all graduated from Lajes! I look at the yearbook pictures of our class and many memories come flooding back. I can tell I'm getting older, because there are a couple of faces and names I can't remember at all! Well, let's see, what's happened with me since then? I went to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the summer of '69. My family had another year in the Azores. I spent the next 4 years in college, graduated with a BS in Nursing. When I was in school I thought I wanted to be a nurse anesthetist, but I found the operating room to be boring. Instead, I went into pediatrics. I spent the summer after my junior year doing a student internship in peds at Duke and fell in love with the place. Near the end of my sophomore year, I met a North Carolina boy and fell in love. We got engaged the next year and married after I graduated. Bill and I have been married for 29 years, almost unheard of these days. We have one son, 22 years old. He's a senior at North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, NC....and is a great kid (oops! young man).

My husband is a couple of years older than me, so he was already out of school and working for the Civil Service at Cherry Point Marine Station. He grew up in Newport, NC, just down the road from Cherry Point. I took a job at the hospital in New Bern and we settled in. Well, it wasn't long before we decided that wasn't really where we wanted to be. I wanted to go back to Duke and he wanted to "move away from home". I had no trouble getting a job on the pediatric unit and Bill was able to transfer to the VA hospital in Durham.

29 years later and I'm still at Duke. Bill went on to a career in manufacturing, mostly in planning & purchasing. He tired of middle management about 4 years ago. Our son was in the high school marching band, where we were active parent volunteers. They needed someone to drive the tractor trailer to carry all the equipment to concerts. Bill went to a 6 week truck driving school, drove for the band for 2 years and fell in love with being "on the road". 3 years ago he decided to leave the stress of the business world behind and we went into the trucking business. He drives a big ole 18 wheeler all over the Eastern region and absolutely loves it.

As for me, I still love working at Duke. When we decided to start a family, I started looking for a job where I didn't have to work shifts, Information technology was just beginning to move into health care, and Duke went into a development partnership with IBM to build a hospital information system. I knew one of the nurses who had helped install a small order entry system in the hospital, and she recruited me into the new department that was being created to build the system. I thought I'd work in IT for a couple of years and go back to nursing practice, but that never happened. I found (and still find) health care informatics to be very challenging. I'm now the Director of System Implementation in Corporate Information Services. Duke University Health System currently includes 3 hospitals, a home infusion company, hospice care, skilled nursing facilities and many physician practices. We are consistenly ranked in the top 10 hospitals in the US.

When my family came back from the Azores, dad was stationed at Seymour Johnson in Goldsboro, NC. I got married in the base chapel in June '73. Dad did a tour to Thailand and managed to come back to Goldsboro. Dad retired after 31 years and they settled in to stay. He went to school at the local community college, mainly to keep himself busy, and ended up teaching there in the aviation program (he was the aircraft maintenance supervisor at Lajes). He retired for a second time about 4 years ago when my mom's health was declining. After she passed away, my siblings and I talked him into taking the college up on their offer to come back and teach. He's 75 and still going strong. His program is one of only a few in the region and he turns out a handful of students every year who are quickly grabbed up by the major airlines.

My sister, Rhonda, is also a nurse, and she lives in Goldsboro. She was in elementary school when we were in the Azores. My brother, David, is married with 2 kids and lives in Roanoke, VA. He works for BellSouth in their IT department. He attended Lajes for his sophomore and junior years.