Nancie Tenery:  

I graduated quietly, attended Chabot for a year, married a Hayward High guy in '63, moved to Dublin in '64. We had three kids and we both kept going to college at night. I went to Cal State East Bay got a BS in Health Science (Occupational Health) with a minor in Physics with an independent study specialty in Health Physics (nuclear radiation work hazard surveys). I worked periodically for Clorox, Lawrence Berkeley and PG&E, and with my husband in our own computer consulting firm all over Silcon Valley (material and inventory management system implementations). Tired of the feast or famine life of a consultant, I finally joined a small system development skunk works team at AT&T in Pleasanton. I stayed in this same group with a couple of other guys for 14 years, being sent all over the country cleaning up data system messes, designing and developing system applications and turning over our complete systems to Bell Labs for maintenance. AT&T consolidated Network Engineering to Atlanta, I divorced, and I was transferred with my three children and their families to Atlanta in '92. I retired in '98 when AT&T made an offer I could not refuse ($$s + health benefits for life). My two partners also retired, one has died and the other is still working as a freelance Unix system admin guru. I have a son, Michael, who is an Info Architect for Bank of America (Atlanta). My older daughter, Diana, is also an Info Architect at Wunderman in NYC. My younger daughter, Janel, just had twins in October which pulled her away from her work at Borders. I have 6 grandchildren, four of them here in the Atlanta area. I dream of relocating one final time back to the west coast, but am thinking the Oregon coastline is calling to me. I seem to need the smell of sea salt in my air to be totally happy. Adding a story I told my children in my blog -- Mr. Deutsch, Asilomar and Simon on Canes In 1956, when I was 12 and in the seventh grade at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in San Leandro, Sabra Weber moved into the neighborhood. I was a beefy tomboy girl with short kinky "perm-ed" hair and crossed eyes. I was not much of a charmer to the boys, except that my well-developed breasts were beacons of "come hither" sexuality. However, at that time of our lives we were experimenting with pairing off as boys and girls. There was a ritual of 'going steady'. It entailed rings on chains and kissing. I watched as most others in my class went through the process, and worried that I would not be picked by any boy. Finally, Larry Pacheco asked me if he could walk me home. Larry was a beautiful brown skinned boy, but was not too bright. I carefully selected two textbooks to take home that afternoon at the end of the school day. I tried to straighten my corduroy skirt and tuck in my blouse. I went into the girls restroom, found the small Avon sample lipstick of Mauve and outlined my lips and combed my hair. Larry was nonchalantly leaning against the brick facade outside, waiting for me and trying to look cool. I came out, he reached for my books, I handed them over, and we walked together out of the school yard. Everyone watched us. We had declared we were a couple. We were wanted. We had been chosen. A boy, or a girl, 'liked' us. We were demonstratedly 'like-able'. We were now officially on the boy-girl market, potentially date-able, someone to pass around in our school group. We walked the few blocks to the nearest corner of my house. I knew better than to have Larry walk me all the way home. My mother would slap me, maybe slap Larry, and would most certainly embarrass me in front of Larry. So, on the corner, Larry reached into his white shirt pocket and pulled out his ring on a chain. He asked me if I would wear it. I stammered yes and gave him a kiss on the mouth. I put the ring chain over my head and looked at the football ring. Larry told me that he had taken it from his father's jewelry box and to be very careful of it. I promised I would be. We held hands and talked for a few more minutes. Larry had a large toothy grin. He was a sexual champion and he had gotten his kiss. I went home humming. I changed my clothes and I did my homework in my bedroom. My bedroom was my sanctuary. Later that evening, I was making the dinner salad and in my pride at the event, I screwed up in the general kitchen conversation and said something about now I was 'going steady' to my sister. My sister argued with me and said I was not. I said I could prove it, and pulled out the ring on the chain around my neck. My mother overheard and went ballistic. She came into the kitchen and pulled the ring off my neck, breaking the chain. She said that no daughter of hers was going to be 'going steady'. I was not going to be going out with boys and neither was my older sister Judy who was a junior in high school. When my step-father came home that night, my mother told him about the ring. He asked who the boy was and when he heard it was Larry Pacheco, HE went ballistic and said none of his girls were going to be going out with Mexicans smelling of pachouli oil. It was like my parents were trying to slam security doors around us. When they remembered, we had to stay in the house after school all that year. This was not so bad, we would come home on Tuesdays and Thursdays to watch the episodes of Spin and Marty that were being shown on the Mickey Mouse Club that year and watch American Bandstand. My seventh grade class was a tight knit group of about 28 of us. We had basically gone to school with each other from kindergarten on. Sometimes a kid would leave, sometimes a new kid would show up. Sabra showed up for seventh grade. Academically, I was the lead girl in my class. Best in spelling and in math and had been for years. Only one or two of the boys equalled me in math and none in spelling, reading, writing and art. There was much shuffling around with aptitude testing going on. The school district was trying out a new set-up for junior and senior high school. They wanted to do eighth and ninth grades in Junior High School and then grades 10, 11 and 12 in Senior High School. The college prep 9th grade curriculum had to be designed and the appropriate number of teachers estimated and hired. The estimation was based on several IQ tests administrated to the incoming 7th graders and parent-teacher conferences about potential college enrollments. My mother was convinced that she could manage to pay for my college, if I got the grades. I was then officially slated for the college-bound group. That was the life script that she and school dictated for me. I was IQ tested about 6 times that year. My scores were all over the board. I could read upside down and saw my teacher's open attendance record book open on her desk. She had a page with IQ as the title, a list of our names down the side and our scores across the page, month over month. My scores ranged between 128 and 162. As I said, I was all over the board. The reason for this range was this - my home situation and my hormones on a day-to-day basis. Some days I was so stressed out by my home situation (my mother and her moods) that all I could do would be to just bawl and cry in front of the poor tester. Inevitably they would work at calming me down and then have me recite 7 digtt strings of numbers back to them in reverse order from how I was verbally told them. I could describe an orange in more than 700 words. My reading comprehension and vocabulary were off the scale. I developed a pattern of dealing with competition that I have followed all my life. I think it has to do with my home life and being the second of 4 girls in the house with a fairly unstableb abusive mother. I have a tendency to duck and cover when confronted by anyone else. I am a...Expand for more