Johnathan Brown:
CLASS OF 1972
Thomas Jefferson High School (thru 1988)Class of 1972
Alexandria, VA
Sonoma State UniversityClass of 2007
Rohnert park, CA
College of William & MaryClass of 1977
Williamsburg, VA
Holmes Junior High SchoolClass of 1968
Alexandria, VA
Parklawn Elementary SchoolClass of 1966
Alexandria, VA
Johnathan's Story
After high school (TJHS, before it was a "Tech Magnet School"), I went to William & Mary, and a whole new world opened up to me. Coed dorms were just coming on line in VA, and at W&M, and the first, "Project Plus" started my freshman year.
In high school, Spanish had been my favorite subject, so in my sophomore year at college I went into the "Spanish House", one of the three newly started cultural immersion dorms. I next took off what would have been the fall semester of my Junior year to get some "real life experience" working in a boatyard in Massachussetts, then came back in the spring and moved in the Asian studies dorm where the bulk of my friends were. The die was set for all that came later!
The hippie and commune era was winding down, but I got to Steven's [Gaskins] Farm in Summerville, TN with some friends on Spring Break. The guru and ashram circuit was still going strong, and in a sense it was picking up where hippiedom was leaving off, grounding the new "vibe"!
After graduating in the spring of '77 (not with my original class of '76), I went out to the San Francisco Bay area with Norm Sohl (TJHS) and then stayed at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute for a few months where Jackson Metcalf a friend from W&M Asia House had gone. I worked about 70 hours a week, for all the bread and peanut butter I could eat, and for $2, which would get me a muffin at the Black Muslim Bakery down the street. (We were in Emeryville, at the east end the Bay Bridge, on the southwest side of Berkeley, and at the time was a blue collar residential community and warehouse district. Now it's the home to high tech headquarters offices, Educational Testing Service, Ikea and to three-quarters-of-a-million dollar townhouses.)
After a brief stint back East, I left for good, hitch-hiking with Dale Bennet (TJHS) to rejoin his wife Connie Mehmel (also of TJHS) in northeastern Washington State. I didn't stay long, as there was little or no work, so I went to the Gulf Coast for a few years, first working with my high school summer employer, the Naval Oceanographic Office, then teaching metaphysics and working as bank teller in New Orleans.
I then moved to Olympia, WA with my girlfriend of the time and got a job with the U.S. Geological Survey installing satellite transmitters for flood warning sensors around Mt. St. Helens, shortly after it erupted in 1980. Within the year, Norm Sohl moved into our communal household, but not long after, I moved to the Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA area to be "close to work".
Work was great, but my spiritual side was languishing, and I had no real career growth potential with the USGS. In the span of a few months I experienced three events, each a less and less subtle reminder that I had a purpose in life, and it wasn't being fulfilled there: (a) I slipped on a steep, icy slope while carrying a heavy battery back to the waiting helicopter, and my face missed the whirling main rotor blade by inches, (b) an old friend from junior high (Holmes) and high school (TJ), Katie Martin [Muñoz], reappeared after being missing and possibly dead for several years, and (c) I drove off an embankment and pitch-poled my work 4x4 o...Expand for more
nto its roof, landing a few feet from the river below.
If any of you ever saw the movie "Resurrection" with Ellen Burstin and Sam Shepard, I replayed the scene where she went off the cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway, where my entire visual universe was the slow motion disintegration of the windshield. As my life flashed before my minds eye, my next direction became clear, and seconds-that-seemed-hours later, I was hanging upside down from my shoulder-harness, unscathed and ready for the next step.
After a couple of visits to California, I left the U.S.G.S., and moved to the Ananda Community, at their sites in the Sierras and near the Pacific Coast, then finally to their "ashram" in a very upscale neighborhood of San Francisco. There I met a gorgeous blue eyed gal from another ashram community on the East Coast, Linda Johnsen. We moved out together and were married a few months later. We have been together ever since, sharing the highs (combined sets of friends and two trips to India) and the lows (each surviving cancer).
Now that I have my spiritual and relationship life covered, I am making constructive use of my mid-life crisis and working my way back to a geosciences career. I have gone back to college, getting a second BS from Sonoma state, where -at age 49- I was the FOURTH oldest Geology undergrad. Jennifer Thille (featured and mentioned in my photos above) was my field partner throughout, with occasional substitution by Tracy Mitchell.
- Note for you Sonoma Staters, I was in Dan Karner's first ever class teaching at SSU. Jen, Tracy and I (together with Dave Estes) made up Rolfe Erickson's last ever class before retiring (see "reunion" photo) and were also all in Terry Wright's next to last class. I just saw Terry last spring (2008) in Keeler in the Owen's Valley (west of the Panamint and Death Valleys), at a party that I attended with my new SFSU classmates (below). The circle is closing!
Currently I'm doing my M.S. in Geosciences at San Francisco State U. and working on and off with, once again, the U.S. Geological Survey. This time I'm researching earthquake history and ground movement along the Bay Area fault system, including the San Andreas, Hayward, Green Valley and -in my local neighborhood- the Rogers Creek-Healdsburg and Ma'acama faults.
For more catching up, you can email me at:
"bhairawa" at earthlink dot net
-or-
through Linda's website (that I maintain ;-),
"thousandsuns" dot org
JB
Of interest to TJHS students:
In memorium:
Chuck McCullar, Terry Fishkin and a live-wire named Jerry (whose last name I, sorry to say, don't remember), were all three gone within 10 years of graduation... and all three in Thomas Kelleher's Electronics II course with Norm Sohl, Dave Bachschmid, Steve Mahan and I. Terry died of cancer and Jerry was killed in a motorcycle accident, both routes that I, too, followed later, but with much luckier outcomes.
Chuck, who was a photographer on the TJ yearbook, went out to take photos in a blizzard at Crater Lake, Oregon, and was not seen from again. I think of him (and his sister Lisa) whenever I'm out in the Coast Range or the Cascades or at a mountain lake anywhere.
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