Donald Benchoff:
CLASS OF 1955
Lincoln High SchoolClass of 1955
Philadelphia, PA
Donald's Story
After leaving high school, I joined the Navy and after a tour of 4 years on a destroyer and after having fallen overboard in the winter--and survived, I decided it was time to go to school again.
I went to Penn State-1959-62 and Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and after graduation, got a job with CDC as an epidemiologist. As a Commissioned Officer in the US Public Health Service I managed a Medical clinic within an alien (from Mexico and Cuba mostly--not Mars) detention center run by INS in the middle of the Everglades.
I also managed several Indian Health Service Hospitals on indian reservations in out of the way places, as well as medical clinics within federal prisons. After retirement, I was a hospital director of an indian hospital on a reservation near Tucson and after hanging that up for good and retiring again--I decided to stay here in Tucson. I am still married-after 44 years to my wife Nubia.
Of our two boys, one--Erik is married with one daughter and another in the oven. The other fellow-Ted, is not married, lives in San Diego and is a LCDR in the Navy. We travel a bit-mostly to Nubia's home in South America (Colombia). By the way, the whole family is bilingual (Spanish). I have been working on Italian for years and can read it fairly well, but need more practice speaking. But I do better now than when I was stationed in Naples so many years ago.
I am a prostate cancer survivor, having gone through proton therapy in Loma Linda Medical Center and came through tha...Expand for more
t with flying colors and no side effects.
Just finished up with the gem show here in Tucson, a trip to San Diego and another to Colorado Springs to see Erik and Isabel-our grand-daughter. Nubia's 92 year old mother lives with us part-time--her mother lived to be 106--and she is as spry as a woman 20 years younger.
We have often thought of moving somewhere else to be nearer the sea--preferably the east coast where the water is warmer in the summer and where one can fish and crab. But every time we consider it seriously, we read about all the horrible winter weather back East with snow and then in the summer, the hurricanes wreak havoc everywhere east of here. Here in Tucson, nothing happens--it gets hot in the summer, but there is no better winter to be found in the US. We lived in Florida for 10 years (Ft Lauderdale) and I would never consider that part of the world as a place to live--too hot and too much humidity--and the people--too many of them, even though we do speak the language.
For hobbies, I play the organ, the harmonica and the accordion, go to the gym daily-except when I am too lazy to go. We also take the occasional cruise and are considering Alaska as the next stop. I spent two years in Anchorage after college and it was only 45,000 people then. I guess it has changed a lot. Should anyone want to contact me directly, my email is donbenchoff at comcast dot net and I am in the book in Tucson. Sorry about writing it that way, but this site only wants you to contact each other through them.
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