Tom Bean:  

Hello everybody.. school was a long time ago but life has been good to me and hopefully to you as well. After graduating with you, I tried college but that just wasn't for me and I joined the navy in the summer of '67. Signed up for four years and saw a variety of duty initially on a tin can in the south china sea, then on a support ship with the riverine forces in the mekong delta. Wound up in servpac and met my wife, now of over 51 years, just before my last deployment to wespac. We married when I returned and decided the navy life wasn't going to work with me going to sea and all and left the navy for what turned out to be quite a ride. Moved to southern Indiana where I was offered a job strip-mining coal but wound up harvesting soy beans and corn since coal miners went on strike. Moved back to southern california and went to work in the "oil patch" on the rigs both on and off shore. Our first of three sons was born and life was good. After a couple years of that I decided I wanted to be a firefighter and applied for and was accepted on the El Paso Fire Department in November of '73 and proudly served for the next five years, used my GI Bill and earned an AA in Fire Technology before returning to the "oil patch". While living in El Paso, my wife Sharon and I were blessed with two more sons and so we returned to California as a family of five. Life was still good...I ran a production rig for a couple years, servicing down-hole equipment on oil wells, before hiring on with Long Beach Oil Development, where...Expand for more