Richard Hambric:  

My senior year of High School was derailed when my mother suffered a catastrophic car accident in Fort Worth, Texas, where she was visiting her father in August of 1966. She was in a coma for 54 days and the whole family had to move to Texas where we could care for her in and out of the hospital. I actually graduated from Boswell High School in Fort Worth, Texas. Afterwards, I returned to California where I had enrolled in Cal State Long Beach and majored in Chemistry, then Music. I pledged the Delta Chi fraternity and became the VP of our pledge class. The President and I decided to take the fraternity to Oregon State University where there was a defunct chapter. I majored in Spanish there. The following year my step father went bankrupt and my leased car was repossessed and I was without any financial assistance so I returned to California where the tuition was low. I applied to UCLA and was accepted there in 1969. I majored in Spanish Literature. I accumulated a total of 5 languages at University; Spanish, French, Italian, Russian and German. When I left UCLA I went to England to study comparative religion. While I was there I met my wife, Kathleen, and we married in 1974. When we returned to the states, I looked up an old friend in Louisville, Kentucky, who had given me a job in a restaurant in Fort Worth. I became a waiter, then got a weekend job as a Wholesale Greenhouse Manager. I had received some horticultural training while in Gloucestershire, England which allowed me to stay an extra year while my wife finished nursing school in London. I earned a decent salary as a gardener on a grand estate. It gave me a respect for hard work. We left Louisville in 1976 and moved to the Washington, D.C. area. ...Expand for more