User:Rriley/My bio for my reunion

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This is my bio for my 50-year class reunion

My Class Reunion Bio

Wow, where did 50 years go? I guess the answer to that question varies a great deal for each of us.

For me, after leaving Madelia I attended and graduated from Hamline University in 1961 with a physics major and a math minor and a secondary teaching license in hand. I taught physics and chemistry in Belgrade, MN for a couple of years and then moved to St. Cloud where I taught jr high science, interrupted by a few years of working in staff development and program development for the St. Cloud District. During the first 10 years of my teaching career I managed to find time to travel and spend a few summers bumming around parts of Europe as well as Alaska and a good bit of the United States as well as pick up a Masters Degree from the University of the South. Those are some highlights of the early years; I also carry a vivid unhappy memory from that time when in May of 1963 I picked up the morning edition of the Minneapolis Star and read of the tragic and untimely death of our classmate, Tom Smith, the result of a car accident.

In December of 1971 I married Patricia Flaig of Sanborn, MN, whom I had met as a teaching colleague a couple of years earlier. (Pat continues to teach language arts at Technical High School in St. Cloud.) We have three children; Meghan, born in 1973 who is an attorney and is married Omar Syed, also an attorney, and are now living in Austin, Texas, recently moving there from Minneapolis; Patrick, born in 1976 who is an exercise physiologist and athletic trainer in Duluth and is married to Erin Holmes, a marketing consultant also working in Duluth; Caitlin, born in 1985, just graduated from college, and looking for a career (she plans to attend the National Outdoor Leadership training school in New Zealand this spring). We have three grandchildren; Sofia Riley Syed (4 yrs) and Gabriel Riley Syed (1 yr), and Jack william Holmes Riley (2 yrs).

In 1996, after 35 years, I retired from teaching and planned to settle into some serious woodworking (a hobby for a number of years) as well as attend to my antique car collection (which at this time includes a 1917 Ford Touring car, a 1930 Ford sedan, a 1939 Ford sedan and a 1976 MGB roadster). However, that was not meant to be. I was very active in the teachers’ union/association activities throughout my career in education and this led to me taking a part-time job with what was then the Minnesota Education Association (MEA) in the fall of 1996. This developed into full time work and I currently am a regional field representative for Education Minnesota (the merged organization formed from the MEA and the MFT) out of the Bemidji Office and, among other things, am responsible for approximately 17 locals in school districts across North central Minnesota.

With all of that, Pat and I manage to keep up our home in St. Cloud as well as a lake home near Bemidji and continue to find some time to camp and travel as we did extensively as our family was growing up, including a recent camping trip to Alaska.

Retirement, maybe soon! We plan to attend the reunion in September.

This is a link back to my Homepage.

There is a PBWiki website set up for details about our class reunion activities at Madelia Reunion.

This is our class picture,

To read the bios of your other classmates, click on one of the links in the table below:

George Arduser Harold Baker Harvey Blume Lucille Borchert Jim Breiter Don Cady Larry Davis Connie DeVoll
Engel Engelson Anita Evenson Rich Gladen Sharon Guyer Charles Helling Carol Hoeft Pat Hoeft Allen Ihrke
Ellen Jensen Beverly Kannemann Carole Kelsey Maynard Kelsey John Knutson Mary Lou Kolbe Dominic Kunz Ethel Laingen
Larry McCabe Sandra Miller Lee Mitchell Garry Mussmann Ed Mutsch Vivian Nesterud Karen Osborne Darrell Pace
Waldemar Peterson Rachel Pygman Don Quass Don Rice John Rusten Glenda Scharbach Barb Strom Elaine Tarrant
Sharon Thormodson Lee Tiedeken . . . . . .