Beth Rabkin:
CLASS OF 1977
Bellevue High SchoolClass of 1977
Bellevue, NE
Beth's Story
I'm on my fourth or fifth professional career depending how you figure it, but I'm married to the same guy after 29 years, and we've even lived in the same house (in Pittsburgh, PA) for the last 22 years - a mind-boggling concept for an Air Force Brat. My Dad was transferred to California right after graduation in 1977, and I went to college roughly 3,000 miles away in Massachusetts, so I pretty much lost touch with everyone from Bellevue. That doesn't mean I've forgotten things like Mrs. Patterson and the Forensics folks, or Mrs. Lewis' AP English class though!
Being frightfully young and idealistic (I was only 19 when I graduated from college), I made the mistake of thinking law school would be a good idea. I earned a J.D. from Duke University in 1983 but I knew pretty quickly that law was not for me; I loathed being a hired gun. I stuck it out and practiced law (mostly tax and business law) for five years.
Meanwhile, at Duke, I had met the man who is still my husband. We got married in 1982, and I graduated law school as Beth Rabkin instead of Beth Victor. When my husband graduated from Duke with his MD and PHD in 1984, we moved to Salt Lake City so he could study and do research in the Pathology Department at the University of Utah Medical Center. In 1984 our son was born.
A friendly suggestion; don't get a brain tumor while you are pregnant. Every doctor I went to told me the vertigo and other symptoms I was having were "hormonal." Luckily for me, the University of Utah got its first MRI machine in 1985 and I got to help calibrate the machine. The tumor was large enough by then that no doctor in Salt Lake City would touch it. I got the proverbial but much-needed hole in my head from a surgeon in California and I'm happy to say I am alive and well despite having had my brain stem and facial nerve mashed on for a while.
My brush with death helped give me the courage to leave law although I didn't make the fi...Expand for more
nal break until we left Utah. My husband did an additional year of training at the University of Alabama Med. School in Birmingham, where our son learned to count like a southerner (one two three four fiiiiv), and I enjoyed being a stay at home mom. My husband then got his first 'real' job at the University of Pittsburgh in 1989. It took him about a year to realize fighting over grant money and playing political games wasn't his idea of a good time. After our son started kindergarten, I went back to (graduate) school and picked up the credits needed to teach high school history. I taught in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, which I liked much more than practicing law, but when my husband left academics I had to choose between helping him run his private practice lab and continuing to teach. More than twenty years later, I'm still working at his lab which is one of the few indpendent, privately owned skin pathology laboratories in the country, and now has twenty employees. I guess AP Biology and HPP Physics at Bellevue weren't a waste after all!
I've only been back to Bellevue once - for our 25th reunion, but our son ended up going to college in the midwest. He graduated from Beloit in 2005, then came back to Pittsburgh to start an internet-based store for breakdancing videos and breakdancing protective gear. He is CypherStyles, also known as BBoyDVD. I help him with all the contracts, taxes and legalities of running a business. I gather his site is pretty well known among breakdancers and, most importantly, he loves what he does. He also breakdances himself. I acquired a daughter when my son got married in 2009. No grandchildren yet, but they are in the Pittsburgh area which is nice.
I'm finally getting around to beginning to write historical fiction which had always been a dream of mine! I'll update the posting here when I have my first novel published.
I hope the years have been kind to all of you!
Beth Victor Rabkin
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