John Uske:  

Life Hello everybody and welcome to my Bio here at Classmates Dot Com. I have to start off by saying that I feel very lucky to have had very interesting and varied existence thus far in life. Because of the ups and downs I have experienced, I have lived and dwelt as an equal amongst both the poor and the wealthy. Because of the extreme range of the experiences of my existence I can say with confidence that I have seen and done things in life that very few other people have. I never became wealthy myself but in all of my travails I did learn first hand for a fact that money cannot buy happiness. What has made life fun and interesting for me, more than anything else, are all of the different types of people I have met and interacted with along the way in the many different situations I have encountered as I moved forward in life. To my surprise, it turns out that some of my closest friends in childhood grew up to be very high achievers in their chosen fields of endeavor and have become somewhat famous in their own right. I found this out on a lark by just typing their names at random into the Google search box and getting surprised by all the hits that come up on them. Here at Classmates I have posted hundreds of pictures in the Photo Album sections for each of the schools I have attended. These photo albums show what my classmates and myself looked like years ago when I attended that school, and there are also photo albums that show what the area where the school located is looks like today. If in the past you also attended any of the schools I have, then feel free to take a trip down memory lane and visit the photo album sections of the schools I have attended. You just might see yourself in some of the photos. These photo albums have proved to be very popular here at Classmates and many of the pictures inside of them have drawn hundreds of views. As for myself originally I grew up in Brooklyn NY and I went to NYC Public Schools for Grades K to 9. In the 9th Grade my mom moved me to Rutherford NJ to finish High School out there. I left high school the summer of 1976. I returned to Brooklyn NY to begin my adult life. I returned to my childhood home and reconnected with my best friend Richie, an electronics engineer. He had taught me his hobby of photography in my early teens and this became my hobby while in high school. At first I tried to get a job as photographer but that was too tough to do. So I got a job as a camera repairman, which evolved into becoming an electronic technician and getting jobs in that field. In the early 1980s I met a girl at my local pub. She was truly very beautiful, but also very brilliant. Back then I thought beauty, brains, this a lock! So we got married. After we got married I tried to better myself by going to College to get my degree. A while later I got a job with the Post Office where I had to travel a lot and they also sent me away to 47 technical and management schools. So I dropped out of college. My wife and I worked well together. I improved the houses we bought, and she managed the finances. We acquired and built up great wealth together. Unfortunately the marriage equation was not as simple as I envisioned. The mariage did not last and ended in a bitter divorce. I got out with not much more than the clothes on my back, and she got everthing else, but I did get back all of my freedom, which I learned is truly the most priceless gift of all. The only good thing that came out of my marriage were my 2 daughters, Ashley and Shannon. Both girls are extremely beautiful and are very high achievers. Ashley became a champion in Soccer and Track and field and Shannon Races thoroughbred racehorses. Just type their names into Google and you can see all that they have done. Today I am much more careful with my life, and I am in a great relationship with another beautiful woman and this time I am very happy. If you want to learn more type my name into Google. School I attended grammar school and Junior High in Brooklyn NYC. I then started 9th grade at Brooklyn Tech but I did not finish because the neighborhood the school was in was so bad I became too afraid to go to school. Instead I would just cut class all day and hang out in the NYC Public Libraries reading technical books. To remedy this, the following year my mom sent me to live in Rutherford NJ with my cousins so I could attend and complete high school there. At Rutherford High School (RHS) I had to start from the 9th grade again in the Junior High. Here is what happened there. When I attended RHS I was the school photographer for a time as well as a cub reporter for both the News Leader, and the South Bergenite local News Papers. I was also an elected member of the RHS student government for the 74 to 76 school years, as well as president of the Photography and Graphics Arts Clubs. I worked part time after school at the stores of local merchants in Rutherford to pay for my photography hobby, while attending RHS. I also took 2 correspondence courses after school. One course was in photography, and the other course was in camera repair. I completed both courses with a high GPA. When I went into RHS in 1973 I was a transfer student from NYC that had to start off by repeating the 9th grade. Back then I hated school, because I felt it was just a big waste of time that got in the way of what I really wanted to learn about, which were cameras and, photography. I was a rebel without a cause. I thought study hall period meant I could leave the building and walk about the town for an hour or so, and the boy's room was a place to hang out and smoke cigarettes. The Dean at the time, Mr. James Fury thought he could help me adjust. He tried to coax me in the right direction with 9 suspensions and 64 detentions in the 9th grade to help guide me along the right path. I remained quite rebellious, but I did begin to to analyze Mr. Fury's suttle gestures on my behalf. I thought to myself: "Maybe this guy is really trying to tell me something here?" I did get promoted to the next grade. In 10th grade, the student advisor Dr. Bloom came into the picture. He tried a different tack. He told me if I worked hard and got good grades I could eventually start to double up on my subjects and graduate early. Now I was interested. In the 10th grade my grades started to improve by a substantial amount. I started to get "into" school. I joined a club and the student government. I made it to the Junior year, and I was then allowed to take 11th grade subjects by day at RHS, and then at night after working at my part time job at Shop Rite, I took the courses for the 12th grade requirements at Passaic evening high school. By my Junior year I had down pat, a trigger word memorization system I invented for myself. This system enabled me to retain and recall massive amounts of information without too much effort. That year I got extremely high grades. By the 4th marking period I had a report card that was literally paved with A's because both the day and night school grades were reported on the same card. When I went to get my diploma at the end of the school year, Dr Bloom told me the bad news. Gym was a state requirement. I would have to return to RHS next year to take Jr. and Sr. gym classes only, and then I could graduate. I waved good bye with one finger and walked out. I felt as though I had been ripped off. All was not a loss. The extremely high grades I had accumulated at RHS enabled me to get into my first college without a High School Diploma, and to this date I have completed almost 100 more classroom courses with a high GPA using my trigger word memorization system. In the college bio you will find out why I went on to complete all this extra training, which still continues to this very day. College My first job when I moved back to NYC was as a camera repairman. I was grateful, and happy to have a job that was in a field that was related to my interests at the time. This was also the top repair facility in the USA at the time. (Read the Work Bio). I got this job by just walking in and asking for it. The manager was very impressed by the fact that on my own initiative I completed a correspondence course in camera repair, while attending high school, and working too. I started out fixing...Expand for more