Brenda Tingley:  

I am DETERMINED to accomplish a 50-year- goal, completing my bachelor's degree! In the fall of 1971, I moved to Northwest Ohio and studied at The University of Toledo. My high school boyfriend, Craig Ellsworth, was a student at BGSU. Not surprisingly, we severed the relationship as soon as I moved to Toledo. I tried out for college cheerleading and made it...something that did not happen in Upper Arlington under Katie Fulton. In the fall of 1971, I met my future husband, Ray Wilson. He was a red-shirted freshman. He had graduated from a Toledo high school and was awarded a football scholarship at Morehead State University. He walked away from his Moorehead opportunity before classes even started! He waited until his parents were out of town and convinced his cousin-by-marriage, Deb Gensler), to pick him up at Morehead, and move him back to Toledo. Her husband was serving in the Army in Vietnam. They had a child, Jodi. Ray's parents, Glenn and Margret Wilson, were quite surprised when they returned home from the Cabin in Wolverine, Michigan, and discovered that their last-born was back home! Who wouldn't be? My Grandmother told me, 'When you marry, you marry the family." l loved Glenn and Margret Wilson. I married their son, Ray, at age 20., Why? Only I know. Ray was still living with daddy and mommy. I, on the other hand, had gone away to college, had completed a year of college while working three jobs, and had "cut the cord" and become an adult. After a year in Toledo, I went home for the summer and worked. In the fall of 1972, I moved back to Toledo, rented a room from a trusted Wilson family friend, got a full-time job, and took the bus to work to pay for my past-due tuition from 1971. When we married in 1974 he cried as I walked down the aisle at Grace Brethren Church in Worthington, Ohio. It was an omen. Not a big reader, he read two books on our honeymoon, one was the biography of Tom Landry. After 30 years of marriage and five children, we divorced in 2...Expand for more