Gerd Naydock:  

My mother and I arrived in the United States in 1965 from the industrial city of Essen, Germany. We settled in Catonsville, Maryland and shortly thereafter, my mother returned to Germany without me and I became a ward of the state of Maryland and lived at the Augsburg Lutheran Home near Randallstown. In 1970, Augsburg Home became a nursing home and I became the foster son of Kenneth and Judith Munski who resided in Edgemere. Most of my SPHS classmates are well known to me from Edgemere Elementary School and General John Stricker Junior High School from grades 5 through 8. I spent my Freshman and Sophomore years of high school as a boarding student at McDonogh School in Owings Mills. I finished my Junior and Senior years at SPHS in a very insignificant manner after being told by the assistant principal, Mr. Sanders, that I would most likely end up "flipping burgers at McDonald's". After high school, I briefly worked at the Farboil Paint factory amidst all kinds of toxic crap and ended up in a severe state of melancholic thinking that this was all there was to life. I made the fateful decision that the Marine Corps was my way out of an otherwise unhappy situation. I still have no regrets about having made this decision. In addition to learning about the various methods to kill another human being, I was also instructed in the Russian language and thereafter had a lot of very interesting experiences throughout the world. Having been a precocious child with a flair for helping others solve their problems, I knew at the age of 9 or 10 that I was destined to ...Expand for more