John Mater:  

Life Hello out there fello DeVilbiss Alumni! After leaving DHS I went to Ohio University and received a BS in Agriculture and Biology. I also found my future wife and we married a week after graduation from OU. We moved to Michigan and both began teaching in Coldwater. We purchased our first farm a year later and in another year started our family. We stayed there until 1974 and moved to Owosso, Michigan (NE of Lansing) with our 3 children. The farming continued; crops, cattle, and a host of other critters over time appeared. I was teaching vocational agriculture and worked a lot with FFA. Life got very hectic, we added 2 foreign children to the family, a daughter from Korea and a son from Vietnam. Farming became more specialized with a major concentration on pork production, which expanded to just over 100 sows that resulted in about 1,800 feeder pigs/year for 10 years. As the kids finished HS and College the labor force was dwindling and the pace I was keeping was getting tougher and tougher. (Age has nothing to do...Expand for more