Michael Sterner:  

Played Rugby at UW right after high school and attended UW several different times in the 70s & in '80 & '84. Raced Motocross from 1973 to 1981 then roadraced motorcycles as #88 from 1984 through 1989, when I fell down some stairs and messed up my shoulder a bit. Was in National Guard in 1985-86 & in the Army during 1986-87 until my knees gave out. Ran heavy equipment in the Army & in 1976-77 with Mine Reclamation Consultants until I tore up my knee. It was really neat to see how the prairie came back to look as if nothing had happened there in a few years after we worked on it. Lived in Modesto, California from 1981-83 with my first wife and was on the college track team throwing shot, javelin & discus, & high jumping, & played football, then moved back to Laramie after an accident & started racing again as soon as I got divorced. She had wanted me to quit racing when we got married in '80 and I ended up crushing my thumb so I did by accident. I intended to start racing again in California but got too busy to do so. I raised Arabian horses from 1980 to 1989, when I had to get rid of them because I hurt my shoulder and couldn't afford them anymore. I fell off my favorite horse, Latif, which my first wife got in the divorce, and cracked my pelvis in 1983, and it's bothered me ever since right at the base of my spine. I was in a severe car accident on the way to a track meet in '83 and fractured my skull, smashed my knees and lost a lot of memory. It took about 2 months for me to learn to speak clearly again. If I saw any of you after that and acted like I didn't know you now you know why. I really didn't know you anymore. I'm sorry about that. Denise thought I was going to be disabled for the rest of my life so we got divorced, but Dr. Kiefer took care of me after I got home to Laramie and I was almost as good as new. I was in another very bad car accident in 1984 and almost lost my right leg, but Dr. Kiefer took care of me then too. I crushed all the ribs on my left side and almost died, plus smashing up my face and hands in addition to tearing up my leg so badly. I look a little differently now than I used to because of the damage to my face. I'm still good looking though, at least so I've been told. I've always been really lucky and had good doctors to put me back together, but now I'm paying the price in pain for my past life. I have arthritis all over and have broken most of the bones in my body on one side or the other. I had fallen after ice climbing and fractured my back just before the car accident in '84 so I stayed in bed and let everything heal. It was Hell getting up and down anyway, so I tried not to move if I didn't have to. Dr. Kiefer had told me I had 2 choices, go ahead and race with my back broken like that and it would hurt for 6 or 8 months and heal okay or go to bed for a month and let it heal and the pain would be gone. I ended up going to bed for a month. LOL. I had to have surgery on my knees after that too. I was strong enough to play line on the football team at UW but I was in constant pain from smashing them twice. At the end of '89 I moved to California to eventually go to school here in Susanville for gunsmithing but took my time getting here. I lived in Sacramento for almost 3 years. By that time I had collected 19 different aquariums, from 5 gallons to 40 gallons in size, and was heavily into raising tropical fish. I attended American River College in Sacramento and was on their track team throwing shot, discus, javelin and hammer and also the lead high jumper and also played football there. One day I was warming up to throw the javelin at a meet and my arm just popped out of the socket. I was only gently tossing it about 10 feet so we knew something was very wrong. Jokingly the trainer told me to start throwing left handed until I could let my shoulder heal so I did. He didn't know that I'm fairly ambidextrous and can do a lot of things with either hand, including throwing a football or baseball, or writing. I was throwing about 90% as far as I had right handed. I couldn't do discus though, I couldn't figure out how to do the spin backwards. They were pretty pissed off when they saw me throwing the next practice until I pointed out I was doing it left handed like the trainer had told me to. Then they were amazed then. I helped the trainer out taping and icing others too, and doing ultrasounds, to get some credit for classes. I was considering becoming a trainer myself at the time. I was also learning to pole vault so I could do decathlons, but I made a mistake on my runup one day and the pole stopped moving before I got all the way to the top so I had to let go and fall from 14', trying to still hit the mat. I ended up only partially hitting the mat but also hitting the runway and tore up my shoulder a lot worse and my left knee too so I ended up having surgery on both. Then I was in a car accident and broke my neck not long after I got better from the surgeries in 81. I moved to a little town, Dunsmuir, with my girlfriend and her family, for a year while recovering before moving on to Reno with her. I loved Reno except for the heat. It only snows once in a while there and people go crazy then and crash all over the place. I don't know how they'd get by if they lived in Laramie with all our snow. I miss the snow sometimes. I don't gamble much, except for video poker once in a while or draw poker, but I took full advantage of the night life and the restaurants in Reno. I was a taxi driver in Reno and enjoyed that immensely, even though a few drivers were shot while I was driving. You had to have an instinct for where to go to get the good fares, but I did pretty well at it. I got a lot of trips to the Mustang Ranch for example, and that was usually at least a guaranteed $80 if you stuck with your passengers. You could just about take the rest of the night off, but I usually didn't. You could make a lot more on a single trip than that, depending on how much the customers spent. If my codrivers hadn't kept getting into hassles with management, and screwing me over, I might still be driving a taxi, but they got us all fired. There are only 3 taxi companies in the whole town and only the one I worked for let you lease your own taxi so I was screwed when they fired us. I was married for the second time almost as soon as we got to Reno but we separated almost as quickly. We stayed married for another 7 years before finally getting divorced, even though she moved back to Dunsmuir several times during that period. We used to go to the swingers clubs as a couple and have a lot of fun, but we couldn't stand to live together. She finally met another guy and wanted a divorce so we got that in a single day. We're still best friends and I got along real well with her husband too. Now she's divorced and has a girlfriend and I get along fine with her too. I was also a bartender &/or bouncer at several different swingers clubs & strip clubs during the period that I was in Reno, & at a club in Sacramento. When I was in Laramie before that I was a bouncer at both Cowboy bars for at least 5 years & a couple of other bars briefly, when Marilyn fired me every so often. I'd go down the street and get a job at the next bar and then she'd see me sitting there having a drink in the Cowboy a week or two later and tell me to go back to work. I finally got tired of that. While I was in Laramie the last couple of years, after I got out of the Army because of my knees, I didn't want to work at the Cowboy anymore so I delivered pizzas for several different places. I set the record for deliveries at Pizza Hut several times during football weekends before moving to Sacramento. There I worked for a great place called Mountain Mike's Pizza and everyone thought I looked like the picture of Mountain Mike on the box. LOL. I was in another severe accident while I was driving the cab in Reno and hurt my back even worse when the seat back broke off at the base and threw me into the back seat knocking me out. I finally ended up getting disability payments from Social Security and I could afford to go to school again to become a gunsmith like I had intended to do when I left Laramie so about 8 years ago I moved to Susanville and have been pretty much hiding out here, staying home, going to classes once in a while and messing around on the computer. I always said I had no use for a computer until I started using one in 2000 and now I can't imagine not having one. LOL. I've got 3 corn snakes, mice to produce snake food, a tarantula and 3 aquariums full of fish, all that the manager will allow me to have. I've got 3 other 20 gallon aquariums, a 15 and 3 10 gallons that are sitting empty too. I haven't even gone hunting here in California. Its weird, Susanville is full of deer, but it's almost impossible to get a license to hunt around here, you have to go over the mountains 50 miles towards Dunsmuir to hunt, and then you find smaller Blacktail deer, not Mule Deer like we have at here. They won't let you hunt does either so they have a very unhealthy ratio of bucks to does now, and have for years. You should have something like a 4 doe to 1 buck ratio and in California its around 9 or 10 to 1 or worse. Half the does don't even have babies each year. The yearlings starve all the time because they can't compete with the older, bigger deer. Its extremely hard to get an antelope license too. I drew one in Nevada the only year I applied and everyone thought that was so wonderful but I couldn't figure out why until they finally told me how rare they were in Nevada and California. I've only seen a few antelope in Nevada, North of Reno and none in California at all, so its quite different for me. They're a lot smaller than ours are too. at least the horns. I'm used to shooting antelope that are on the edge of getting into the record book each ye...Expand for more