Ken Gill:  

After high school I joined the Navy to see the world. I spent the next year and a half training in Great Lakes, Memphis and San Diego. Then it was off to a small island in the Pacific where the people shared about 1 ½ square miles of sand with a few hundred thousand nesting albatrosses. Midway island, a real paradise unless you are 19 years old. What I would do now to go back to that place. After Midway I finished my tour in San Diego and left the Navy (didn¿t see too much of the world). I moved back to the Oak Lawn area, got a job at Westinghouse and played more softball then I really cared to. The times of being 21, 22 and 23 consisted of work, softball and hanging out at my favorite watering hole (John¿s Garage in Ford City). I decided to go to school with the GI bill so I headed to Indianapolis to move in with family and go to school. The first year was okay but I soon realized I needed to get out on my own again. To do this I needed to get a job. Luck was on my side as I went to work for a company called Hewlett-Packard. That was a great company to work for. I continued school at nights. I met a girl at school and was married. We bought a house, I stopped going to school, and we enjoyed life. We both weren¿t ready for marriage so after 6 years together we called it quits. We are still good friends and I have nothing bad to say about it. I was tired of the corporate life with HP and went to work for a small retailer. Two months after I started the retailer was bought out by Wal-Mart. Yikes, back to the corporate world. I ended up moving down to the home office of Wal-Mart in Bentonville Arkansas. When I first was offered a position, I kept getting flash-backs of the movie Deliverance, barefoot hillbillies and people with a lot of teeth missing. I was wrong. This part of the country is very hilly and forested. Wal-Mart is actually a good company to work for. There was unlimited opportunity for advancement. I spent 6 years working here. My parents were living in Oak Lawn. My father was taking care of my Mother who had Alzheimer¿s. I moved back to help him out, got a job with Walgreens and lived in Villa Park. My mother was at a stage where she would need to be placed in a nursing home. This along with the fac...Expand for more