David Bonn:  

College After high school, I went off to Oregon State, my parents filled with hope. I hated it. I loved being out of The Dalles, but I knew Electrical Engineering was not for me. After a forgettable academic effort that first year, I went back in the fall of ’68, pledged a fraternity and discovered drugs. By January I had been kicked out of college and had my draft notice. Whoa! Son, my father counseled, You don’t want to be a foot soldier in Viet Nam. Maybe you should join the Air Force. So I did. I went to Texas for basic, and Biloxi for training. They sent me to Tucson to repair U2 spy planes. As it turned out, I was not adaptable to the military way of life. I stuck around Tucson and went to the University of Arizona. Really all I did was party. That went on for five years, then my live-in girl friend and I moved to Ithaca, New York to live in a commune. I ended up getting married and then divorced, built a house in the woods. I began an unintended career in housing. I married again, moved back to Oregon for the ’81 recession. I was in Portland for the birth of my son in ’82, and then moved back to Tucson. I lived in Tucson for five plus years, and had three more kids, all girls. I got to be a stay-at-home dad. I made wall hangings as Christmas presents one year, and became a street artist. Then I became the token white guy at the Tucson Urban League, weatherizing homes in the barrios of South Tucson. My folks still lived in The Dalles and my brother was in Portland. We had a chance to come back to Oregon, to Corvallis, where white people go to breed. I worked for the City of Corvallis managing housing programs. Eventually I left to start my own business. As it turned, I was not adaptable to the business way of life, either. I moved to Portland in ’95 and went to work for a non-profit CDC as the affordable housing developer. I left that to work as a consultant doing the same kind o...Expand for more