Steve Frankiewich:  

Life October 2021 update: My original post from 2008 is below for reference. In preparing for the 50 year reunion next year I thought I should give an update on the rare chance someone looks! The years between 2008 and 2017 were pretty much uneventful - work, occasional vacation, grandkids, aging parents. Retirement for Leslie and me arrived in early 2017. When our first (and thought to be only) grandchild arrived in 2010, we expected our son to live in Las Vegas forever. Hoping to retire near the grandchild, we bought a future retirement home near them, only to be surprised when they relocated to Texas so our son could attend seminary to become a Baptist minister. Over the years, though, we developed a circle of friends in Las Vegas as we vacationed there, so stuck with the plan to eventually retire there. Come May 2017 we sold the house in Merced and moved to Henderson NV where we remain till today. The minister son eventually moved to Colorado (Eaton, an hour north of Denver) where he pastors a church. He and his wife Stephanie have 3 children. The days of expecting only the one grandchild are long past. Son number 2 now lives in Tacoma WA, is married and has one child. Most of us in the Class of '72 are retired now so I won't go into how great it is to be in the, uh, "mid-afternoon" of our lives with minimal cares and responsibilities. (I'll save the "twilight of our lives" analogy until we are all in our late 80s!) Signing off here until the next milestone in our lives that warrants a Classmates.com update! Steve 2008: After graduating from college (Chico State, BS Mechanical Engineering) I thought I had left Merced for good. That is, until September 2006 when my wife Leslie and I moved back into town. So what happened in the 30-odd intervening years? Out of college I went to work for PG&E in San Francisco. For the 12 years I worked for them I also lived in Sacramento, Concord and Modesto. Early on in that process I got married and had two boys. Organizational changes at work in 1989 left a choice: move or leave PG&E. I chose to leave PG&E and try something different since we enjoyed living in Modesto. For the next four years I put my Professional Engineers license to use as an engineering consultant. It taught me that any successful business must have three things- someone who can go out and get business (marketing), someone who can take care of office issues (administration) and someone who actually like...Expand for more