Mark Amanns:
CLASS OF 1972
Amelia High SchoolClass of 1972
Batavia, OH
Mark's Story
Life
After graduating from Amelia and the Electronics Trades and Industries program at Glen Este, I continued repairing TVs and other electronic equipment. From 1974 to 1998 I was a volunteer at the headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York. Yes, life was frugal but I was richly rewarded by having so many friends and welcoming visitors from all around the world, all true Christian brothers and sisters despite coming from many diverse cultures. I lived in a number of apartments there and my last one had a wonderful view of Lower Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, Governor's Island and Staten Island. I had a ringside seat for many fireworks displays. I often walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and it was only another mile's walk to the World Trade Center and nearby shopping and subway stations. If I walked briskly I could walk from home to the WTC within 45 minutes. To save my 35 cent subway tokens, I sometimes even walked all the way to Times Square in Manhattan or the Brooklyn Zoological Gardens and farther. Among numerous responsibilities, I learned database programming and wrote two custom accounting and tracking applications.
I married there in New York and we had friends in both the English and Spanish community. Eight years later we came to Cincinnati. For the next three years I worked at a programming company in Blue Ash where my primary focus was on debugging existing programs, adding functionality and rewriting them to be Y2K compliant. Then in 2001 I started working at a retirement plan services company in West Chester as a programmer, systems analyst and administrator. I was there for nearly 16 years until the site closed in 2017. You can find me on LinkedIn.
In the past few years I've had to learn quite a bit about personality disorders, especially the ones with "acting out" behaviors.
Although no longer married, I have so much joy seeing our young son discover the myriad facets of life in grade school, parks, vacations and with family. There's nothing quite like seeing his eyes light up with all the fun things to discover and experience in life. He still remembers the crawdad we brought home on a rainy day and released near our little creek. While I cannot be a child agai...Expand for more
n, I can be happy for him in these his special years and contribute to them as best I can. Of course, my family started later than most and his graduation in 2020 may overlap with my retirement!
School
As I look back on my school days, I still find myself interested more in the sciences than in English and history, though I've since learned that history can be made more interesting. If the subject tells a story, if you make sure the facts are connected with each other and highlighted with respect to their background, then it will come alive. As I researched my own genealogical roots, I discovered that those nameless ancestors became interesting people as I learned their names, residences and stories. If only history had been delivered that way! Despite being average in English composition I learned how to write well and deliver lengthy discourses. I did well as a freshman in Plane Geometry, got a class medal that I've since lost (found again in mother's estate) and even made the upper third when I represented the school in Columbus. In the second half of my second year of Spanish I went from a B student to the top of the two classes, all because I saw the patterns in verb tenses. Of course, now the experts know that in order to be comfortable and fluent a child needs to learn foreign languages when still under 10 years old, so for me and so many others at age 14 it was a struggle. I remember that my best hours were spent in the library where I literally devoured books. While majoring in the Electronics courses for most of the day, I remember the Glen Este librarian let me take out books so new they hadn't even been processed yet. I figured I read about 100 books in one year! Strangely, I got some of my worst grades there. I consistently got As and Bs during the semesters but on the final semester tests I found out, after the school year was over of course, that I got terrible grades on those final English and History semester tests. I still don't know how that happened.
Military
I am a loving, peaceful man, as I live by the Biblical wisdom such as treat others as you wish to be treated. Yes, sometimes you have to draw a line and make a stand, so I make my stand with Bible principles. That's me.
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