Robyn Pauley:  

This "story" will not be the typical portrait of a fellow classmate that is routinely shared on these Classmate pages. You probably would never have known that I came from a very troubled family and that I was the oldest of six, one sister and four brothers. I always had a smile on my face and was very cheerful at school, trying to make the best of a very difficult family life. My mom moved us four times during my six years of Junior and Senior High School, which was very upsetting to the six of us kids. She was usually "between" marriages and if not marriages it was boyfriends. She ended up being married four times in her life. The one stable enjoyment in my life was my dancing and music. I attended dance classes at the Baker Dance Studio In Lakewood from the age of 7 and taught many classes there as a teenager as well. I also danced at local places like the Hawaiian Restaurant in Long Beach, Edward's Air Force Base, and the Pomona Fair every year among many other places. I actually earned pretty good money during my teenage years in the Baker Dance Studio Show Class as a performer and a dance instructor with my own classes. I was on the Al Jarvis TV show, "Let's Dance" in 1959, and won the ballroom competition at the age of 12. I went up to Los Angeles with Charley (President of the Dance Masters of America) and his wife, Marguerite Baker to demonstrate ballroom, tap and Hawaiian dances for their master classes. When I was 17, Charley and Marguerite arranged for an audition with Jimmy Durante, the famous entertainer and comedian, and the Moro Landis Dancers in Hollywood for his popular Las Vegas Review. I was hired for the dance team and could have elected to choose a life in the entertainment industry. As you can see, I was pretty busy with my dancing, which left little time for participating in extracurricular activities in school. I wish I could have been more balanced with extracurricular school activities and my love for dancing, but that is water under the bridge. I did not take that Golden Ticket out of my troubled family life, nor did I finish Westminster High School with the Class of 1965. As I mentioned, I came from a very troubled family background, and met my first husband when I was 16 and married him at the age of 17 1/2 with the goal in mind of creating that stable family that I had yearned for all my life. I had enough high school credits to attend a couple of night school classes after getting married that summer, and completed the credit requirements to graduate. One of the big regrets in my life was not graduating with my class in 1965. Needless to say, I pretty much ended up with a very unstable character, and was divorced at the age of 23, 5+ years later. By that time, I had a two year old daughter. I had been working in Silicon Valley for several years beginning with Fairchild Electronics, Peripheral Systems, Memorex, and Ampex. I met my second husband at work, developing a great friendship first, being a little older and wiser, I selected a much more suitable life partner. We have now been married 45 years in January. We have a daughter who will be 50 years old Christmas Eve 2017 and manages an International Company, married with three children: a son who is 23 years old and twin daughters who are 13 years old. They all happily live in Palm Coast Florida. Our son, is 43 years old and has been in the Marine Corps and is an artist and self employed. As a family, we have lived in many fun places, besides the San Francisco Bay area for many years, we have lived on the Colorado River at the Parker Dam just below Lake Havasu for several years. I got started in the Medical Profession there and loved it. We really enjoyed the laid back life on the river and met many wonderful people and really enjoyed all the recreation literally right on the river at our doorstep: dune buggying, boating, fishing, floating down the river were just some of the fun things we did. However, it was like living in an oven during the spring, summer and fall. Temps were always much higher than reported on the news. Usually in the high triple digits. So, we decided to try living in the mountains and at a mile high, in Prescott, AZ. where the temps were much cooler. We lived in an agricultural community and our kids loved it. We even experienced our first snow storms and I learned to drive in them. I continued working in the Medical Profession and the kids joined 4H and we raised chickens, ducks, a goat and of course always dogs. My husband had a strong background in the Electronics Industry, but worked at and received his Certified Automotive Mechanic status there in Prescott. He is very intelligent and industrious and has the ability to learn anything he sets his mind to learn. A true renaissance man. We became very close friends with our neighbors from across the street and grew to love them like family. He was the Personnel Director for Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and she was the Administrative Officer there as well. We worked there for a while also. When he was hired as the Personnel Director for Stetson University (his Alma Mater) in Deland, Florida, they decided to move back there to their 40 acre farm and enticed us to follow them as well. I had been to Jamaica with a stop off in Florida and had fallen in love with Florida, so it didn't take too much coaxing for us to say yes to the invitation. We were so confident in our abilities to find good jobs and we were foot loose and fancy free so to speak, and that made it very easy to make a choice...Expand for more