Karen Lemaster:  

Immediately after high school, I moved to Kansas City and got a surprisingly good job with a civil engineering firm doing secretarial work. Later I worked for the Bendix Corporation for a few years. I married a few months after high school, and divorced shortly after that marriage. I elected not to attend college in the fall of 1959 and kept my job. Then when I was in my mid-20s I went through college and eventually completed my MA in Psychology and then doctoral work in Child Development. In 1965 I remarried and we adopted 2 daughters, Kim and Kristen. Their father and I divorced, and I was a single parent for the next 16 years. I worked doing clinical psychology for years before going into hospital administration. In 1986 I remarried and moved from Kansas City to Kirksville where my husband had gone to medical school and was finishing his psychiatry residency. Grant grew up in Lexington, Missouri. We lived in Kirksville for 2 years. in Vienna, Austria for a year, and then he accepted a job in New York in the Bronx of all places. We moved to Westchester County New York and have been in New York since. We have been here 20 years as of 2009. New York was the last place on the planet that I ever imagined living, but we like it and so have stayed. We both had job opportunities at Minningers in 1997, but decided we preferred to stay in the east. During the second year we were in New York circumstances arose which gave us the opportunity to adopt 6 Vietnamese kids. So we accepted that challenge. Now 19 years later we are privileged to have those 6 children and their children in our lives. They were all early teenagers when they came to live with us, so we had some interesting years. But happily they all passed their citizenship tests (Grant and I learned more citizenship facts during their years of study than either of us ever learn...Expand for more