Dell Harney:  

I graduated in 79 and a few weeks later hopped a plane for Fort Dix, NJ and Army basic training where I had a crash course in pushups, hand grenades, sand in my shorts & humidity (Yuk)! I came back to the tri Cities about six months later, a certified vehicle repairman with a six year obligation to the WA army national guard and a man with a whole new vocabulary. As I recall, my mom was not at all impressed with the bawdy jargon I had picked up in the Barracks and after about a month back in civilization that bad habit left me. I worked for about a year at Boise Cascade in Wallula saving money for school and then went to CBC. I worked at Mid Columbia Library in Kennewick while going to school and attended National Guard drill one weekend per month and two weeks every summer. After graduating with an Associates degree I went to work for Acme Concrete in Richland as a dispatcher. I was there for 4 years before coming to my senses and deciding I needed a career with more challenge than that (yes, once in a while common sense does enter into my story). In college I had discovered two things. First, that I seemed to have some talent for writing and was encouraged to go to a writers school in Iowa. Second, when I had taken some electronics classes as electives something about it seemed to stir my gravy. This fuzzy notion about the second discovery and the advice of some good friends from the National Guard who worked at Hanford led me to Perry Technical Institute in Yakima where I enrolled in the Instrumentation and Industrial electronics program. I had to apply and then wait for a year to get into the program because there was a waiting list. I was initially told that the waiting list was two years old but that was OK because the school was expensive and I would need that time to save the money to pay for it. Somebody dropped from the list and I was asked if I wanted to start a year early in 1986. Thanks to a good friend of our family, Beulah Nickerson who believed in me and loaned me money, I was able to start at that time. I knew right away that I had found my calling. I loved the material and excelled. It was a two year course but demand for instrument techs was so high that three of my classmates and I were allowed to graduate two months early and take jobs at an oil refinery in the Bay area near Oakland, CA. I lived and worked in California for three years, loving the field I had chosen and making good money. During that time I experienced the Loma Prieta earthquake where I lived with some room mates in the East Bay (That was the one that happened just as the world series between Oakland and San Francisco was about to begin and collapsed the MacArthur freeway on all those people in their cars). I was surprised at how that event affected me. It was not so much the big quake but all the little aftershocks that kept happening for months afterward that were making me antsy. So when a new job opportunity came up near Sacramento I took it. Up until that time since high school I had several girlfriends but nothing that became very serious or lasted over a year or so. That changed when I met Lisa in Meadow Vista, CA. She was the daughter of a man, Jim Finn, who I worked with. I did not even know that he had a daughter until I accepted his invitation for a fourth of July party at his house. What was weird about the whole situation is that I was supposed to meet a nurse there who worked with Jim's wife on a kind of blind date. The nurse never showed up but I met Jims daughter who was going through a divorce. We were married in June of 1991 and moved to the Tri Cities where I had landed a job with WPPSS at the #2 nuclear power plant as an instrument technician. Within a year I had legally adopted my daughter Leslee and we bought a home in Kennewick on W. 4th Ave. In 1992 our daughter Kellee Elizabeth was born. She was beautiful ...Expand for more