Age: 63
Occupation: Retired registered nurse and English as a foreign language teacher. Currently -- itinerant.
Hobbies: Reading, bicycling, walking, photography and world travel.
Bee reader since: 1969.
How many letters: 123 since 1986.
Favorite topics: I don't pick them, they pick me. I get this itch, then a bell goes off in my head and there's the latest one of them plastered on my brain pan.
Why do you write? How can you not write in times like these? Just today we are witnessing the theft of billions of dollars of the people's money. Unless you are a lobotomized turnip, who could be silent? Besides, it's an art to get a complex idea into 200 words with some spunk still in it. I sit back and admire them like a haiku.
Excerpt from recent letter: "I just got a nice e-mail from my teacher friends back in Siberia. In my time working there, I was always pleased that I could show them that Americans are not a bunch of drunken, cursing pit bulls. These days, I wonder if that was really fair to them."
Reaction to letters: It's been several decades since the drunk threatened to blow me away with a shotgun.
Topic that doesn't get enough attention: The propensity of Americans to believe they live in fairyland and Santa Claus is driving the No. 30 bus.
Education: U.S. Army Special Warfare school correspondence courses; U.S. Army Medical Field Service School -- operating room tech course; bachelor's in chemistry from Stanislaus State; bachelor's in nursing from Fresno State; almost all of a master's in health services administration from Fresno State; Test of English as a Foreign Language certificate from Cambridge School, Barcelona, Spain.
Family: Grandparents buried in Madera, brother married in Sonora, daughter and three grandchildren in Fresno. Son and grandson around here, somewhere.
Political philosophy: I used to be an anarcho-syndicalist back in the day, but now I am a staunch Kilgorist. If the Republican Party wasn't a pack of racist, lying hounds who dragged our flag through slime and then sold us down the river to Wall Street, I could be one of them. Go figure.
-- Compiled by Pam Rowse
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