Marsha Katz:  

Life After living in Michigan for my first 52 years, and working the last 20 of those years for the same organization, just before Christmas 1998 my husband and I moved to Montana, his home state. Not only do I love it here in the Northern Rockies, but I also found out, happily, that I could successfully "start over" career-wise. My husband Bob and I both worked for the Rural Institute at the University of Montana, and amazingly,they paid me to work in picture postcards! I worked as a teacher/trainer/consultant of sorts, which I guess is the status one obtains when one is as "old as dirt" and has worked at something long enough to be able to pass it on to others. Much of my work is assisting people with disabilities to start their own businesses, researching abuse of people with disabilities, and also training others on a variety of disability related topics including federal disability benefits. I do a lot of work in Indian/tribal communities which has resulted in spending lots of time in places like Glacier National Park and the red rocks of northern New Mexico and many other beautiful rural and frontier areas. My work has taken me all over the country where I have been able to meet many wonderful people. When my brother Roger (class of '65) ended a seven year battle with a rare cancer by entering hospice in 2012, I traveled every other week to Vermont to spend time with him and help him settle his affairs before his death on my April 1 birthday, 2013. Then as his executor I spent the next year readying and selling his home, etc., while also providing support for our then 94 year old dad who lived in his own home until the last three weeks of his life at the age of 97. Thus, retirement became a necessity at the age of 67, several years before I had planned. In the fall of 2006, Montana's senior Senator convinced the U.S. Senate to appoint me to a 6 year term on the Social Security Advisory Board, so for six years I was in D.C. at least once a month for board meetings. After my term on the SSAB ran out, I was appointed to the Panel of Outside Scholars for the Disability Research Consortium of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and I served on that until 2018, which required fewer trips to D.C. My husband Bob passed away at our home from bladder cancer on May 7, 2019, after a grueling, valiant two year fight that included multiple hospitalizations, chemo, radiation, immunotherapy, a heart attack, and much more. He and I were married in 1993, an event that surprised me most of all because I had no intention of marrying again after my first college-short-lived-practically-childhood marriage to a former Michigan football player. While that union was ill fated, it produced two incredible sons who now seem older than I feel (maybe it's an aging hippie thing?). Chris is now self employed after working for ten years in the Sonoma, CA, wine industry, which followed 3 years of being a stay at home dad to a beautiful...Expand for more