Evelyn Jones:  

Life After high school, I thought I'd apply for the College of Medicine, so enrolled in pre-med at the U of S. After two years of fully enjoying university life without really doing much academically, I realized that medical school was nowhere in the picture, so picked up the classes I needed to complete a 3-year degree in Biology. On convocation day I married Lyle Jones, who had graduated from Engineering as I was completing first year, and was working with Algoma Steel in Toronto. My degree hadn't prepared me for a job of any sort, so I worked in a gift shop until Lyle changed jobs, moving to Hamilton with Greening Donald Wire Rope. There I worked in the auditing department of a Robinsons department store (yuck) and then with a landscaping company, and quickly decided to go back to school. I did a year of advanced sciences at McMaster University in the hopes of bringing my marks up enough to be considered for medical school, but still didn't get in. I hated living in Ontario, so Lyle and I agreed to come home after he completed the project he was working on. I looked around for something productive to do for that year and decided on the Ontario Teacher Education College, which at that time offered a one-year after-degree B.Ed program. In 1976 we moved back to Saskatoon, where Lyle was accepted into law school, and I started looking for teaching jobs, landing a grade five/six class in, of all places, Radisson. Being the only person on staff qualified to teach chemistry, I had time out from my home room to teach grade ten science and grades eleven and twelve chemistry. When the K/1 class became available the following year, I asked for that instead and thoroughly enjoyed being in the little schoolhouse across the street from the rest of the school. When Lyle finished law school, we moved to North Battleford, where I taught at McKitrick Elementary School until we started our own family. Jennifer was born Dec. 16, 1980 and David June 20, 1982. When we bought a house a couple of years later, I started a private nursery school at home and operated that for three years until Sarah was born May 7, 1987. When she started nursery school, I started substitute teaching and looking for something more permanent. I ended up at North West Regional College for nine years, first as Student Counselor, then Basic Education Instructor, and finally Registrar. After almost twenty years of marriage, Lyle and I divorced in 1993. In 2007 I married Randy Wallace, CEO of the Battlefords Tribal Council. He too has three kids: Sam, a Cathay Pacific Airlines pilot flying out of Hong Kong; Anna, working in the justice system in Edmonton after having completed a degree in Human Justice at the U of R; and Joe, who provides sound and lighting set-ups for productions of all sizes while his wife, Jessie, is a hairdresser. My eldest, Jennifer, did a BA in French at the U of S, taking time out to work in Quebec for a year and travel in South America for a semester. She's now co-managing "The Yellow Mondkey" in Paris and is engaged to Mathieu Warner who grew up in Paris with a French mother and an American father. My son David has been working toward a degree in biomolecular structure studies but is currently looking for work. My youngest, Sarah, did a year at the University of Alberta followed by six months of waitressing in Paris, a diploma course in makeup artistry in Vancouver followed by a year of university at the U of S. She's now bartending in Toronto. I'm currently helping to manage Randy's businesses, working out of offices in Saskatoon and North Battleford. We were very involved in designing and building the Gold Eagle Lodge (112 rooms) in North Battleford and renovating four apartment buildings (89 units) that one of the Tribal Council companies bought through a Sask Housing program to increase the availability of low-income housing. We're currently preparing to do some property development in Dalmeny and near Highway 16 close to Saskatoon. Randy and I are separated and I've moved to Saskatoon, where I'm just getting started doing some real estate investing. I look for tired houses that I can turn into terrific homes, so if you know someone who wants to sell a house rather than put time and money into it, I'd love to have a look. (306) 260-2581 School Grades one to four were spent at Hopewell, a one-room country school a mile from our farm. I started school with Greg Nutting and Barry Mikituk, so we had one of the larger classes that year. When I was in grade four, there were 13 students left, in grades one to eight, and it was time to start busing us to town. Hubert Clair drove the bus to Radisson, where there were 36 of us in Mrs. Glynn's grade five class in the old two-storey brick school. Soccer was the big sport for me during those two years, despite the fact that not many girls played regularly. Grade six was a particularly harsh winter, so we did a lot of "curling" with wooden checkers on brown paper sheets in the upstairs hallway. In grade seven we moved to the new wing of the high school. At some point during those years, Andy Hamilton replaced Hubert Clair as our bus d...Expand for more