Martin Blaise:
CLASS OF 1978
Waltrip High SchoolClass of 1978
Houston, TX
Texas A&M UniversityClass of 1982
College station, TX
Jacksonville CollegeClass of 1979
Jacksonville, TX
Northwest AcademyClass of 1975
Houston, TX
Our Savior Lutheran SchoolClass of 1974
Houston, TX
Martin's Story
Life
I have to start my life biography by talking about my children. I have two children - and both of them have disabilities. My son has Functional Autism and my daughter has Trisomy 18. She is fed with a g-tube, cannot speak, cannot walk and cannot feed herself. As you can imagine, my family has many challenges. The best thing we can do is face the challenges one at a time and deal with them as we can. Notice I did not say "problem" but challenge - I know it is difficult dealing with handicaps, but I am also very fortunate to be married to someone who is patient and very loving. If you have autistic or other disabled children you can probably relate to what I am saying. -- I was born in Houston and grew up on the northwest side of town. I lived a few blocks away from where the North Loop was being built. My family lived in that neighborhood until 1972, when we moved to another subdivision about 2 miles away from there. Many things have changed in those years, but I still have lots of memories that I'll try to share as I add on this bio.
School
I attended five different schools. Our Savior Lutheran Elementary from K-8th grade, Northwest Academy for 9th grade (big mistake), Waltrip High School 10-12, Jacksonville Jr. College 1 yr and then Texas A&M University. Memorable events including being the manager of the varsity basketball team at Waltrip for all three years. I received a partial scholarship to be a manager at Jacksonville College after being recommended by a former Waltrip classmate. - Another memorable event was the basketball team winning the bi-district championship in 1976. Although I wasn't a player, I was part of that team as the manager. - A funny time I remember is when the loudspeaker came on at Waltrip and names of several students were called - to go to the main office. That usually meant bad news. My name was called. I was kidded about being in trouble. It was actually to announce that a group of students had an outstanding score on some kind of test. So I wasn't in trouble after al...Expand for more
l. - I was a sports writer on the Waltrip newspaper, not even knowing that some day I would earn a journalism degree - I was all set to be some kind of engineer, but in the end I went into journalism. - Earlier memories: I was valedictorian of the 8th grade class at Our Savior and I had to give a speech at graduation. Way, way before that I remember going to school in rooms with no air conditioners, just fans. - I guess I had many teachers that inspired me throughout the years, too many to name. - I participated in sports in elementary school, but by high school I was not of the quality of the students who were athletes, so I took part in other activities.
College
I attended junior college for one year - Jacksonville College 1978-1979 and Texas A&M University from 1979-1982. I have memories from both schools. I received a partial scholarship to be one of the two basketball team managers at Jacksonville. That was good - the bad thing was that the team still practiced and played in a gym built in 1938. The roof leaked so bad that we actually had to move a game to another school because of rain! We also traveled in this old junky van that we always had to push to start and it used more oil than gas. We had adventure after adventure. Our record was not too good, but we were entertaining. I kept a diary of funny events, some of which are not printable! -- I was active in several extracurricular activities while attending Jacksonville College - one of them was helping young children with asthma learn how to exercise. I was a class officer and also served on the school newsletter. -- I had an opportunity to go to Texas A&M so I decided to not take a second year of junior college, but go on to TAMU as a sophomore. I started out studying engineering, but soon found I wasn't cut out for physics and other classes. Eventually I changed to Journalism. I received my BS in Journalism in December 1982.
Workplace (I am now retired and drive Uber and Lyft)
I was a webmaster (web page designer). It was an interesting job.
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Yearbooks
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Reunions
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Photos
