Linda Garens :  

You can find me and other classmates on Facebook. There are also a few Brunswick High School Classmate pages. I am retired now. I moved back to the Wooster, Ohio area where my 2 daughters and their families live. One daughter just moved north up near Cleveland in Feb. so it is now just my oldest daughter and her family in Wooster. I owned my own business that allowed me to be with my children before and after school, while they were growing up, and could make my own hours. My husband Mark and I were also foster parents for 3 years. It was very rewarding and interesting to say the least. After my youngest daughter graduated, I then decided to go to college, something I wanted to do since high school but the religion I was in frowned on a college education at the time. (I am no longer in any religion, after researching religion for 16 years. I found religion extremely lacking and am now spiritual, and much happier and content.) I absolutely loved college and thrived in the academic setting and winning awards such as Woman of the Year and getting special scholarships and more! I am very proud of working hard and discovering a whole different side of me. I worked in the social work field after getting my degree in social work, and 3 related certifications, as an older student in 2004. (I was divorced in 2002, but continued my studies.) I started out with Boys' Village in Wooster, Ohio. I worked with children who where all sex offenders from ages 12 to 20 for 2 years. It was a very interesting job and I learned a lot! I then found a job in Pepper Pike. Ohio and moved to Cuyahoga Falls. I worked at Beech Brook with children in crisis in a lock down unit in residential care. Everything was done in that unit. The children lived, schooled, played, were counseled, and did all activities in the unit. And yes, they did run, as they do from all of these places. There was an easy way to open the door, even in a lock down unit, if you know how and children in care on and off for many years know these things. It was a really enlightening experience and I loved working with the youth! However, after being injured by one of the children, (Happens a lot!) the company retrained me and I became a Records Specialist. After a year and a half of doing that, they found me to be versatile in doing many things, and transferred me to Secretary I/Records Specialist at another of their branches where the treatment center was for outpatients of these same types of children outside of residential care, and with children in foster care. It was an amazing job and a great company to work for in both places. This last job was on the East Side of Cleveland in the neighborhood where Anthony Sowell murdered all of those women, and we were in a building with guards even before that happened, just a couple streets away from Sowel's house. Not a good neighborhood. Now, that job, too, was an interesting experience for many reasons! I miss the great people I worked with there. After being transferred to Cleveland, I moved to Cleveland because the job was way too far away from Cuyahoga Falls. While living on the West Side, I got to explore all my families past. I was born in Cleveland before moving to Brunswick when I was 18 months old. My mother and father were born there too, along with my older siblings from my parents first marriages, and many other family members had lived there for 3 generations from coming over from Europe. My generation is the fourth. I visited cemeteries of relatives, buildings and ships and shipyards where my father did welding on and worked on in downtown Cleveland, where my father lived, and my mother lived as a child, etc. I have been doing genealogy with my...Expand for more