50 years?   How did THAT happen?   I guess looking back that it must be 50 years because too much has happened for the time to be any shorter!  After Borah I was heading to U of I that fall, only to find out that my grandfather had cancer and my dad couldn’t afford to help him AND send me to collage so we agreed I would start winter quarter.  Well, that didn’t happen and I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had gone to Moscow! 

Met my first husband, Ronald Randolph, that winter and married him at 19 and we had our son Rex in 1968!  Ronnie died in a car crash about one week short of our 5th anniversary.  I was working at the Idaho Fish & Game Dept then, so decided to go to Boise State for a year, which sent me to the UW.   I packed up my son and moved to Seattle, thinking I would one day return to Boise.  WRONG AGAIN!   Met the LOML, Rick Slagle, at the UW.  He was this little cutie pie Grad student in Environmental Health (I was EH undergrad), and we were married in 1976.  He went to law school at UW and I went to work for Seattle Public Health as a restaurant inspector for the next 20 years. We had two children, Katye (l980) and John (1984).  ( I always thought I should get some huge medal or reward for having a 13-year-old and a 2-year old at the same time!!  But that didn’t happen, either.)

Rick worked for a large law firm, which was killing him, so I quit my job to help him start his own law firm in 1997.  It was super scary, but the firm thrived, Rick loved his job again, and I ran the office until we closed it in 2012.  Through those fast and furious years we loved our family life, especially camping and hiking, river rafting and some traveling both in the states and Europe.  Our favorite trip of all time was 2 weeks rafting the Grand Canyon.  It was a very spiritual adventure.  Katye gave us 2 lovely grandkids, Lincoln (16) and Venice (7 ½) and a wonderful son-in-law, Nat Franco.  John has been with his sweetie, Kate Patton, for 12 years.  They live in sin, but promise to get married and have babies in the near future!  They gave us 2 lovely grand-cats.

As often in life, we had some bumps.  Rick found out he had lymphoma in 1985, we lost Rex to an aneurism in 2004 (he left behind our beautiful grand-daughter Jessica, now 25), I was treated for breast cancer in 2007 but am now an 8-year survivor!  Unfortunately, my dear Ricky got pretty sick, had a bone marrow transplant in 2012 but donor/graft disease took him from me 2 days after our 36th anniversary.  So now here I am – going to my 50th high school graduation.  Again:  HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!!