Diana Gendron:
CLASS OF 1958
Leon High SchoolClass of 1958
Tallahassee, FL
Diana's Story
Life
After Leon & nursing school at FSU I was a staff nurse in Gainesville, San Francisco, Montreal and Syracuse, NY. I married Michel Gendron of Quebec, and in 1968 we moved to Toronto, Ontario where I taught nursing and Michel worked in the financial and related fields. We then had a large swine farm (and assortment of other animals) about an hour north of Toronto from 1977-1987, and I continued commuting to Toronto. The farm was hard work, but very satisfying despite not much income and fact Michel had a heart attack towards the end. We sold the farm, but lived "next door", where Michel went back to his original interest in computerized analysis of the stock market. I took early retirement in 1996 and began to research pioneers to our area of Ontario. I also experimented in gardening, planting over time almost every flower and bush found in the glossy catalogues. We began to find our more rural area of Ontario getting too developed ("spoiled", we'd say) and in 2001 built a house about an hour north, just into the Muskoka area of Ontario, on the edge of the Canadian Shield. It's more "cottage country" (forest, rock, lakes & rivers) for people from Toronto and area. So we venture out on the roads weekdays & stay put on weekends when traffic is heavy. Michel is always busy preparing his stock market e-newsletter and related computer work. I have been con...Expand for more
tinuing to do interesting genealogy/historical lookups for people with Canadian ancestors. Among just names & dates, I've sometime found "skeletons in the closet", black sheep, & spies in their families. Overall, it's interesting "detective" work. We do see some neighbors on walks around the area and monthly community lunchs, so don't often get cabin fever. Here "in the bush" we can only get dial-up Internet, so each week go down to Barrie where Michel can do some data downloads on high speed at a computer shop. I can spend that time at the library straining my eyes reading old censuses & etc. We spent 5 winter seasons at a retirement village in North Port, FL, but Canadian dollar dipped in 2003, and we sold there. I try to go down to Tallahassee for a couple of weeks in Feb. to see family & help my mother with tax figures. For the last 6 years my sister Robin & I have visited Tallahassee at the same time and had fun going to the Chautauqua Assembly in DeFuniak Springs that classmate Diane Picket revived. I've been on Elderhostel trips to the U.K in 2000 (Edinburgh Festival) and 2006 (hiking 6 miles/day on rough, rocky & steep sheep trails in Lake District of England & Scottish Borders). I selected the latter trip because the catalogue had it labeled as a "walking" trip. It was bit of a shock to find that their meaning of walking was much different than mine.
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