DeeDee Wiitala:
CLASS OF 1981
Montclair High SchoolClass of 1981
Montclair, CA
Mira Mesa High SchoolClass of 1981
San diego, CA
A. Louis Ruhl SchoolClass of 1981
Kansas city, MO
Lincoln Alter Elementary SchoolClass of 1975
Corona, CA
Ruhl Elementary SchoolClass of 1975
Kansas city, MO
DeeDee's Story
Life
It was 'goodbye, Montclair! hello, Tulsa!' after graduating with y'all... but that only lasted one semester and then I returned to good ol' sunny SoCal. One job, some JC classes, and six months commuting to Anaheim, learning how to operate IBM mainframes (haven't heard that one in a while, have ya?) later... I left Montclair for good. My best friend and I found a 'room with a view' in San Clemente, where we enjoyed single life on weekly rotating shifts for a year. She always seemed to have her days off when I was on 'graves', and would usually shanghai me into a day of shopping/beach/movies when I was supposed to be sleeping! A six pack of Pepsi would get me through the night and then I could crash the next morning. But, alas, it was not to be forever. During that year of sand, surf, and lack of sleep, I met and fell in love with Dave. We were married in September '84 and spent the first 13 years of family life in Oceanside. All six of our children were born while living in San Diego county, four girls and two boys... but one month before giving birth to Dakota in August '97, Dave found out that the company he worked for had chosen him to transfer from their Nuclear Power division to their Hydro Electric division. One month after delivery, we were packed up and on our way to the beautiful, majestic Sierra Nevada mountains, just south of Yosemite National Park. We have enjoyed living at the 5000 ft level for 8 1/2 years now! Life is definitely different when your closest Albertson's, Costco, Wal-Mart, etc. are an hour and a half from your front door! You learn to buy lots of groceries all at one time and transport them home in two of the largest ice chests you can find! lol And, prioritisation and routing of your errands is a must! Budgeting for gasoline, tires, and brake jobs becomes more important than ever. BUT, when the valley heat hits Fresno in July and August, you thank God you live above the tree line! :) Just beware of the bears that wake up and start looking for breakfast in YOUR trash can this time of year. I heard one 'enjoying' a late night snack as I was loading pictures onto this website just a little while ago! :) Aside from raising our six-pack of Kiddo-D's and navigating winding, icy mountain roads in the winter time... we made the decision way back when our oldest daughter was just 3 years old to teach our family here, in our home. Since moving to this area, we have become very involved in an organization called CHEFA (Christian Home Educators of the Fresno Area), where our children make friends and take part in such things as choir, skate days, and several other activities on a regular basis. We also seek out other activities for them and so they take piano, ski, and participate in a swim team every year. Oh, yes, and we LOVE to travel! Road trips!! We've moteled, hoteled, time-shared, tented, trailered, RVed, and a combination thereof, several times as we have blazed trails snaking back and forth, up and down, across and around this country. We are, I believe, nine states shy of having seen them all! We even drove the Al-Can highway, to Alaska and back, camped out at the end of 'Homer Spit' and brought home the yummiest halibut in the world! Our last big road trip, the longest we have ever undertaken, was most of September and all of October, 2004. Our oldest daughter had just completed her High School work and we wanted to make sure we took in one more big vacation before her life moved on in it's own direction... so we traveled as far as Rhode Island and back, catching many sites along the way, including seeing The Phantom of the Opera 'on broadway', eating an authentic (and DE-licious) Philly Cheesesteak sandwich, walking the Mall in D.C., and discovering that the hills of West Virginia would be perfect for building hobbit homes! My kids and I are great lovers of music and movies, and together could probably win a stiff round of 'Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon' against the best of ya'! ;) I'm out of space!
School
I think someone who knows me pretty well wrote that first question! lol... who was my biggest crush? Well, anybody who knows me at all knows that, next to the phrase 'like a school girl', in any dictionary, is a picture of me! hehe... I was the queen of crushes, never went without at least one, and made sure (fool that I was) that every boy I ever liked KNEW full well who was after him! Heck yeah it's embarrasing, but why pretend when we all know? Maybe it's because seeing that he had pictures posted here got me to come here in the first place, I don't know, but the first name that comes to mind is Gary Hanson! I blame him for me not knowing how to speak a lick o' spanish, and now my daughter is in love with a guy from Peru! Thanks, Gary, you just HAD to sit there, in front of me, lookin' so cute and bein' one of those guys who just can't be ignored, didn't ya? ;) I'll never forget you, babe! :) With just over 3000 characters remaining for this bio, I think I should forego making a list of the rest of them. Besides, my yearbooks are packed away and, other than Gary, I have 'senior moments' when it comes to their names! There was that one hot, soccer-loving guy (Tony?) who had already graduated (I was a freshman at the time), but came back and hung around during Coach Bear's P.E. class. Speaking of Bear... good lead-in for that next question... y'all remember Bear? What a great guy! His death was my first experience with losing someone I really cared about... I was pretty messed up for a while, there, screwed up my grades for that second semester... my parents didn't know him, didn't understand what was wrong with me. I cried for days. Few other teachers I remember, or at least their classes... BSCS, Mass Media (who can forget the pictures in that 'subliminal advertising' book?) On that subject, how DID my mom just 'happen' to open Flowers for Algernon to, like, the ONLY part of the book where there was something that would freak her out and make her ask me where in the world I got it? Ummm... required reading, Mom, sorry. :P Hey, and how about the most USEFUL things I remember from HS classes? a(squared)+b(squared)=c(squared) has come in handy a few times... and I remember wondering if Costco REALLY saves you money or not, so I repeated the cost-comparison exercise from Mr. Marchant's Economics class and spent all day collecting prices from three different stores. Of course, I didn't have any groceries when I came home that night, but I found out that I did, indeed, want to renew my membership, if for toilet paper alone! SPEAKING of TP!! Uh-huh... so, is anyone EVER going to confess to the mess in my front yard and the shaving cream on the driveway that read 'I Love You, Dede'? Or do I have to die wondering if Gary really did like me, after all? ;) If I could do it all over again, would I? Hmmm... well, I do clearly remember, over the course of about 10 years after graduating, having these recurring nightmares that I hadn't actually finished High School and that I had to go back and do it all over again... very much like those dreams about going to school naked... terrifying!!! I guess I do have some fond memories, and can laugh about some of this stuff now, but being that age really sucks when your not perfectly pretty or the homecoming queen... anyone seen the movie 'Mean Girls'... that about sums it up for me. I didn't really start believing in myself until a couple years later, when I was able to start meeting older guys who 'had a clue', and even now I meet women, my age, who haven't figure...Expand for more
d out how to stop acting like we're in HS! It's pathetic the games people play. IF I could go back, being the person I am now, and change some things I did, choices I made, guys I drooled over and guys I ignored, things I didn't do after school because I was afraid of getting involved and looking stupid... yeah, I would love to do THAT. But if going back means being that same insecure dork I was? No thank you! BTW, Gary, yer still cute!
College
My college 'career' was fairly short and very fragmented... no four year degree to show for the time I spent. That first semester, after graduating from MHS and spending all summer working on my 'California Girl' tan, I flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma and went to live on the campus of Oral Roberts University. That was a crazy four months... they had over-enrolled the number of girls living in the dorms and had to, at the last minute, convert one of the guys' dorms. They closed off half of the bottom floor for the few guys' rooms that they needed, and devoted the other 2 1/2 floors to us girls... almost all freshman! lol... I learned all about the stupidity of scheduling early morning classes to try and 'make the most' of my days, only to discover that sleep was not to be had, on 'Third-Upper Shakarian', until 1, sometimes 2 AM. One morning I actually slept right through the obnoxious 'beep beep beep' of my alarm clock, for almost an hour, until someone finally had it and came banging on my door to wake me up so I could turn it off and they could get some sleep. And, truth be told, I found out that while HS was fairly easy and I was just smart enough to get by and make decent grades without studying much... university life revealed my lack of discipline and good study habits and I went home, at Christmas break, with almost no college credits to my name and no desire to go back. It was a fun, frat-style four months, and I spent quite some time paying back the student loan for that fine party! I didn't give up, though, and that second semester I took classes in Child Development and Computers at both Chaffey College and Mt. SAC. By the beginning of summer I knew that I had the logic for, and the desire to learn more about, computers, but I didn't want to pussyfoot around with GE classes and years of school, so I started my six-month training in Computer Operations at Computer Learning Center in Anaheim, California. In retrospect, I should have, and wish I would have, taken the course in programming instead. Our operations course did require one programming class and I enjoyed that a great deal. I always thought that, some day, I would go back to school and take classes to become a programmer, but that never happened as I met and fell in love with my husband-to-be while working my first operations job. It was actually a temp job that lasted one year. By that time I was engaged to be married. One year and 4 days after saying 'I do', my oldest daughter was born. No school and no 'paying' jobs since then. :) I have 10 more years of being mommy and teacher, maybe then it will be my turn again, who knows? I'm still interested in programming, but now writing, history, and music are also very appealing to me, as well.
Workplace
Ah... first jobs! I feel like those are the only jobs I've ever had... and I guess, in a way, that's pretty true. I'm sure that, if you looked at my Social Security records, I appear to have only existed from around the end of 1980 to the middle of 1984. Since then, it's all been 'under the table'... shhh... don't tell anybody! ;) My first job was working the snack bar at the skating rink in Montclair... anybody remember Friday and Saturday night skates? At one point I think I spent all of my break time and most of my earnings playing PacMan! I also enjoyed Tempest and Centipede. I remember working with Janie Berry and Jon Dixon. Oh, and the crushes... there were a few of those, too! There was the one guy who had a brother who won a contest that landed him, pictures and all, in Playgirl magazine. Interesting, my mom never said a word about finding it... it just kinda up and disappeared! :P When we graduated, I moved on but not UP the ladder... I found a skating rink near the campus in Tulsa and went to work at the snack bar there! Different Nacho Cheese sauce and cute guys with Okie accents. When I returned to California, once the holidays had ended, I went to work at my dad's church school, near Montclair High School, with my older sister as my boss. I did several things for the pre-school, there, when I wasn't attending my own classes at the local JC's. I 'opened' in the early morning hours when no one else wanted to be there. I can still remember the names of the two 'early birds' that I took care of... David & Elizabeth. I was the 'buyer' for the school, anything from snack food and drink to educational supplies. And I was the bookkeeper, doing payroll and tuition. I did not hold a job while doing my computer training, but once I completed it, I got what I always felt was my first 'real job'. I worked for a technical services agency by the name of Mainstream Engineering, and was contracted out to work for Southern California Edison at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), near San Clemente. It was interesting how they hired five of us trained computer operators, teamed us up with five Edison employees who knew nothing about computer operations, kept us paired off like that for a year, and then got rid of the operators once their own employees were up to speed on what they were doing. Tip, though... if you are about to start a job at a nuclear power plant... don't watch 'China Syndrome', just because it's on TV, the night before you report to work! This proved to be not only my first 'real' job, but my last, as well. While working swings or graves one night, my partner introduced me to a friend of hers by the name of Dave, an at-the-time Instruments & Controls Technician working, as an Edison employee, there at San Onofre. Another night shortly after that, in the control room of Units 2&3, in front of several other guys, he made a pretty bold point of asking me to go see 'War Games' with him, but I didn't 'get' that was what he was doing until he snuck up behind me, coming into work one morning a few days later, and asked a bit more obviously and directly 'So when ARE we going to go see that movie together?' 'Oh, were you asking ME to go with you the other night?' ~ duh!!! ~ And the rest is history. Once we were engaged, almost a year later, and my contract ran out, I never went back to work as a computer operator, or snack-bar girlie, again. My job, for the past almost 21 years, now, has been taking care of, raising, and teaching my six beautiful babies, my gifts from God... and, whatever anybody else may say, that job is, in my opinion, the most important and most fulfilling job ever carried out by anyone in history. I can only hope and pray that, one day, I will hear the words 'Well done, thy good and faithful servant' and know that the Lord is pleased with how I cared for these souls that He has temporarily placed in my hands for His purpose! That will be the best Christmas bonus anyone could ask for! Amen?
Military
Nope! Not me, not now, not ever, hopefully never!!! :) Kudos to all of those who have served, though, I am grateful to you! Just in case you are interested, my husband is ex-Navy, was in the Navy Nuc program and served from the end of '72 to the end of '78, I believe. Yeah, yeah, and I didn't even graduate high school until '81... just a baby! :P
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