TEDDY WARNER:  

My parents and I moved to Salina in February 1963 in the middle of my sophomore year, after I had attended 18 schools previously since first grade. I was one of the Air Force kids from Salina AFB. Then, we moved from Salina the week after I graduated in June 1965 to Austin, TX where I began studying aerospace engineering at the University of Texas in Sept 1965. I drove back to Salina in August 1966 after my freshman year at UT to visit old friends for a week, but then did not return to Salina until our 25th reunion in 1990. I really enjoyed talking with old classmates that weekend, but did not return to Salina again until our 50th reunion in Oct 2015. The 50th reunion was quite a different experience – my closest friends from high school did not attend, several people I had dated had passed away, and the atmosphere was rather more distant than the warmer one 25 years earlier, perhaps not surprisingly. I participated in all the reunion events, including the tour of Salina High itself – it seemed very familiar, yet rather different somehow. The two evening events were pleasant but not engaging it seemed to me – 50 years I suppose is just too long to be disengaged from folks you only had spent two and a half years of your life with. During those 50 years, I had lived coast to coast and been involved in many things. After doing well academically, in 1968 I dropped out of UT, having become disillusioned with engineering. I then joined the U.S. Navy Reserve in 1968 after losing my draft deferment, but I re-enrolled that summer, but the draft board refused to reinstitute my deferment. In Dec 1969, I got married at only 22 years of age to a very sweet, beautiful, bright young woman, whom I had met at UT. But, then I was called to active Navy duty in Feb. 1970 and was stationed at the Naval Hospital on Guam for 2.3 years treating Vietnam casualties as a Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class. In 1972, my wife and I returned to Austin, and I reenrolled at UT, but this time to study psychology with the goal becoming a clinical psychologist. In 1974, I finally graduated from UT, and I went to work supervising a locked treatment unit for adolescents in a psychiatric hospital in Austin for 3 years preparing to apply to graduate school, which I began at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 1979. My first wife and I had divorced in 1977, and then I married my brilliant beautiful Sharon the next year in Austin and we have now been to...Expand for more