Jeff Keith:  

Life I grew up in the Seattle area, attended Seattle Public Schools and attended Shoreline CC, Western Washington State (now called "WWU") and then back to Shoreline CC for awhile, and then to the UW from which I was graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in English. I went back to Shoreline CC again and took some classes and received my AAS degree because I had gone there so much and already had a Bachelor's. Now I work at Shoreline CC, after many years in the grocery and automobile businesses. I used to consider myself mainly a music teacher, and a writer. I taught woodwind instruments (clarinet, saxes, oboe, and flute) to young people for twenty-nine years. Now I work in the Shoreline CC Auxiliary Services division as a delivery person (I do almost all of the deliveries of books and mail to different parts of campus.). It's fun, and the pay has gotten better since it is full-time. I used to have an early morning, part time job working for United Parcel Service as an airplane loader/unloader at their Boeing Field operation. I was there for four years. Both of my parents are deceased. My Dad passed away in May of 1995 after a long struggle with cancer. My Mom died more recently (October 3rd, 2005) and unexpectedly at age 85. It was probably a heart attack. I still have my younger brother Alan (RHS, '74) and his family. (He has his wife Rebecca, and their three sons who are getting bigger every day.) I also have a large extended family of cousins and close friends. I live in the city of Shoreline, WA with my landlord (a Chinese man who is very quiet), my two cats, and my girlfriend Selama, who has her own room, but spends a lot of time in mine. She is an East African from Asmara, Eritrea, north of Ethiopia. She is quite a bit younger than I am, and works as a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA or NAC) at a nursing home in North Seattle. She speaks several languages beyond English and her native Tigrinya. Her other 'best' language is Italian, as she attended Italian schools in Eritrea and was taught by Roman Catholic nuns. She wants to be an actress and/or a pop singer someday, but she'll need to improve her English vocabulary and grammar, and lose a lot of her accent! School I began at Perkins Preschool in the Ravenna neighborhood, then went to Fairview Elementary, John Marshall Junior High and Roosevelt Senior High. From there I entered Shoreline CC, then transferred to Western Washington State College (now 'Western Washington University') and left there without a degree. I studied English lit. and music education there. I returned to Shoreline CC for a few more quarters, then enrolled at the U of W and stayed there until graduating with a B.A. in English lit.. I went back to Shoreline CC for a couple of years, then went back to the UW as a fifth-year student in Teaching ESL. But I didn't finish. That all went down between 1971 and 1985. Fourteen years in college! I did snag two degrees: an AAS from Shoreline CC and the B.A. from the UW. When I finished high school I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew music would probably play a role.,If you can believe it, I went back to Shoreline CC from there and finally got my A.A.S. degree, as it was an automatic thing due to the credits and B.A. I already had. I tried my hand at "Secretarial Science" as I thought word processing might be a job possibility. (It wasn't!)Then I returned to the UW and studied linguistics and ESL education, as that was a bourgeoning field then. But I was working for my Dad (and hating it!), and not a great student, so I gave it up as a fifth-year student. But the English degree may prove useful yet if I can keep motivated to write! Workplace I've held a lot of different jobs in the years since high school. Some standouts are the eighte...Expand for more