Richard Brear:  

Life Born near TAMU. Thanks to my mother's vigilance, my ears were not gnawed by rats as other babies living in the on-campus building suffered. Moved to Pasadena at age 2. My lyrics to my elementary school's song were adopted after a contest open to all 6th graders at Bailey Elem. School when I was a 6th grader there. I was in the Boy Scouts for years, earning Eagle Scout rank while in high school and getting to go on the trip of a lifetime: wilderness hiking and camping at Philmont Scout Ranch in the mountains of upstate NM. As an older teenager, I worked part-time at the main Weingartens bakery on Lockwood at Navigation and briefly at the grocery chain's main display department, too, also at the main Lockwood site. I made numerous Hispanic and Afro-American friends as a Weingartens employee. About that time, I adopted (more or less) counter-cultural values and pastimes. After graduation, I attended colleges for a few years (eventually majoring in English Teacher Education). I married in '72 and sired children in '74 and '77. My marriage ended in the early '80s. My occupations during my first marriage included jobs for North American Rockwell (an oil tool-making shop on Mangum Rd. in Houston),Dresser Industries (Tool Group on Pinemont in NW Houston--inside sales in the branch sales office/repair shop), Champion Paper (union jobs in the Pasadena Mill's digesters, bleach plant and inspection department), and USI (a Deer Park petrochemical plant, in the Linear Synthesis, AB1,2 &3 Synthesis areas, and in Utilities, as an operator). I remarried in 1987 on a Friday the 13th to Jan, the wonderful woman to whom I'm still happily married. We now live near the "bottoms" of Clear Creek in Harris County. After doing the decades-old young-male-from-Pasadena thing (working at a local refinery or paper mill), I turned to a perennially attractive occupation for me: public school teaching. I taught at Rayburn's crosstown rival, Pasadena HS, for eleven years. Then I taught for a single year at Pearland HS and Friendswood JHS. I taught on an adjunct basis for San Jacinto College for five years and then taught at Texas City High School for six years, through 2005 when my employment there had to be cut short due to a death threat from a TCHS student. I traded that job for a second stint with Pasadena ISD: at Pasadena Memorial HS. After two years there, I decided to foresake secondary e...Expand for more