PATRICIA PARNELL:  

After graduating from St. Stephen's in 1960, I went to work as the secretary for the City Engineer in Hickory, N.C. The following year, I married Roger Covert, who was a radio announcer for WNNC in Newton. We lived in Newton until 1965 when we headed west to look for a new life. We wound up in Colorado where I had relatives and lived there until 1968. I worked as the secretary for a finance company. Roger had attended an office machine repair school in New York for the first 3 months after we moved to Colorado. When he graduated, he went to work for Remington Rand office machines and worked there until we left in 1968 when he was promoted to the Manager of the Santa Clara, CA Remington Office. I was pregnant when we moved with twins. Unfortunately, they were born early and only survived for a day. The next year our oldest son, Drew, was born in 1969 and our youngest son ,Tim, in 1972. We moved back to Denver in 1973, as we did not want to raise our children in California. Roger remained with Remington for quite a while and wound up going into partnership with 2 other men in the office machine repair business. He retired in 1999 when he became gravely ill with pulmonary fibrosis and had to retire under disability that year. This was also the year he turned 65 (he was 8 years older than me). We remained in the Denver metro area until 2004 when I retired and we moved to Roswell, New Mexico. During those years as a stay-at-home mom, I attended classes at a cake decorating school in Northglenn, CO. After I had completed all the courses, I had planned to use that as a way to bring in a little income and work at home while my children were young. I very much enjoyed that and had a business for 20 years. A large part of my business was wedding cakes, which were fun and challenging to make. This business became an job when I went back into the work world in 1977. I also during this time attended a ceramics teacher course and taught ceramics part time. My work world resumed in 1977 when I went to work for a private non-profit school for children with developmental disabilities. My youngest son attended at that time (he did , however, start public school when he was 3 and graduated from a local high school at age 21). I started off working as an assistant in a classroom and remained in that position until 1990 when I became the records secretary for that same school. I had worked some summer school programs at our school for several summers and so I "knew the ropes". When the school secretary retired, I was asked to fill that position and I did so until 1997. Our school was under contract with Jefferson County Public Schools all that time, but we were not employees of the school district. In 1997, I started attending some meetings on the creation of a new program for the school district for the 18 to 21 year old students in our county who attended our schools and the high schools in the county. The director of Intervention Services (special education department) asked me if I wanted the position of Administrative Assistant and I accepted. I managed the program of about 100 students in 5 different locations throughout the county. That position was the best job I ever had since I had such a diversity in my work and was also out and about doing things for our teachers, etc. I was officially hired by the school district in 2001 and stayed a total of 7 years until I retired in 2004. I guess the Commercial Arts Award I received upon graduation was for-telling for my future Roger and I had begun to look for places lower in altitude for his health and some place that would be less expensive to live where our retirement dolla...Expand for more