William Bennett:
CLASS OF 1971
Paradise Valley High SchoolClass of 1971
Phoenix, AZ
William's Story
I have many happy memories from high school, especially my senior year when I was accepted into mixed chorus and concert choir. After graduation in 1971 I attended Arizona State University and took a while to settle on a major. My favorite subjects were foreign languages, and I studied 3 years of French, and 1 year each of German and Japanese. I also enjoyed history, geography, and political science. Around my junior year I decided to take business administration classes, but had a tough time with accounting, so I attended Phoenix College for a year with my friend David Sorensen where I got an A in accounting and took remedial Algebra. I returned to ASU but in 1976 I got a summer job with American Airlines reservations in Phoenix, and was offered a job with them in Los Angeles, so I left college for the wide world. After three years of working, traveling, and having fun, I transferred back to Phoenix to work as a full-time agent at Sky Harbor. I was laid off one year later and I started my own cleaning business and returned to ASU where I graduated in 1985 with a Bachelor's degree in History, specializing in Asian Studies, with minors in French, Political Science, and Business Administration, and a 3.67 grade average. I really had no clear-cut goals for my education, which is why it took me so long to graduate. School was mostly always easy for me, and in retrospect I could definitely have used some career counseling.
I had returned to work with American in 1984, and decided to transfer to San Francisco International Airport in 1986, where I w...Expand for more
orked for 10 years until I retired for medical reasons. My mother Frankie moved in with me for the last five years of her life, and I reconnected with my father Bill Sr. in Durango, Colorado for the last three years of his life. My two sisters Gayle and Beth, my brother Tom, and I all lived in the same county of Contra Costa in the East Bay until I bought a house in a small town about 100 miles N. of San Francisco, where I have lived for almost 8 years. I am single with a few cats, and I am treasurer and co-founder of the Lake County Stonewall Democratic Club. I volunteer in the community, attend City Council meetings regularly, do occasional carpentry and painting jobs, read lots of books, love Facebook, and otherwise immerse myself in landscaping and renovating my house. Currently I am interested in restoring bicycles for fun and to give away to whoever needs one. I have few regrets, as I have always been able to do what I wanted to do and go where I wanted to go, and I have seen and done much in my life. I have been in love many times in my younger days, and now at my age I am comfortable being independent, with lots of good friends in my community and county to keep me occupied and content. I miss the desert and open space of Paradise Valley where I was fortunate to grow up. Whenever I'm back in Arizona I always do three things: eat at Garcia's, climb Squaw Peak, and check out the old house on East Mescal Street, where oddly now the Paradise freeway sound wall intrudes on my old neighborhood only three doors down the block. That's progress, I guess.
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