10 Fun and Sometimes Not-So-Fun Facts You Might Not Know About Me!
1. I’ve been blessed to have had 16 cats as pets in my lifetime. The last three, two inherited and one a rescue, were each previously named Princess.
2. When I was nine, I was one of four chosen from my 4th-grade class to be a kid on the Art Linkletter TV show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” I got the biggest laughs from the audience…twice within a few minutes!
3. When I was five, my friends from the neighborhood and I were lucky to take swimming lessons from two guys who had been Olympian swimmers. They chose me to be the first to jump off the diving board into the deep end. At first, terrified, I looked at my friends in the pool’s shallow end, all watching me in nervous anticipation, and thought, “Why not me first?” I looked at the teachers, and they just grinned. And I jumped right into the water with gusto. It was my first lesson in leadership.
4. My mother and Martha Stewart’s mother, Martha Kostyra, were best friends and roommates at what was then Buffalo State Teachers College, now SUNY Buffalo State College. They remained friends, corresponding and keeping in touch throughout the years. A relative gave me a plaque I have in my kitchen that says “Martha Stewart Doesn’t Live Here.”
5. In 1959, my parents and I flew a chartered DC-7 from Los Angeles to Hawaii but never made it. The flight took off, but about five minutes out, an engine near us burst into flames. The pilot dumped the engine’s fuel into the ocean and flew into the wind to extinguish the fire. We landed on the runway lined with fire trucks and foam at LAX. They determined it was a faulty spark plug, which was replaced, so we took off again. Unfortunately, the same thing occurred on the port side of the plane about ten minutes after takeoff—fire and dumping of fuel, fire trucks, and foam on the runway. We postponed our vacation for a few months, opting for a reputable airline, United.
In 1973, my friend Linda and I decided to go to Hawaii. We flew a Pan Am 747. On the way home, an engine failed just before we reached the halfway point, and we had to turn back to Honolulu. The pilot descended close enough to the ocean to see the waves crest. “Easier to ditch that way,” the man in front of us said. I subsequently discovered that it was standard procedure to reduce and conserve fuel consumption to make it back safely. Fire engines and foam on the runway greeted us in Honolulu. After spending the night in the airport, we made it home late the next day. I turned superstitious about flying to Hawaii and vowed never to go to there again. And I haven’t.
6. I have been blessed to have precognitive dreams my entire life. I experience a lot of déjà vu.
7. I’ve seen, felt the presence of, and talked to ghosts many times.
8. I had nine adult teeth extracted because my jaw was too small to hold them all. Then, I had braces for two years to straighten the crooked teeth that were left. Dentists now marvel whenever they look inside my mouth.
9. I marched in many protests in the late ’60s and ’70s, especially in college, against the Vietnam War for social justice, equal rights, and the right for women to make their own decisions about their bodies. I can’t imagine going backward in time.
10. I’ve been through four major California earthquakes. They were the 6.6 Feb.9, 1971 San Fernando/Simi Valley earthquake; the 7.3 Nov. 8, 1980, Eureka quake felt in Ft. Bragg; the Oct. 17, 1989, 6.9 Loma Prieta (aka the World Series earthquake) when I was at work in San Francisco; and the 6.7 January 17, 1994, Northridge earthquake (I was visiting my mother in Northridge, close to the epicenter). Everyone I know who went through that Northridge quake believes it was much larger than officially determined. I have many stories associated with each of these earthquakes.
And a Bonus Fun Fact!
11. When I worked in technology in the 1980s at Bank of America, my favorite job was working with three guys in a small department, beta-testing new portable computers. It was before the MS-DOS operating system came out! We called them “luggables” because they were heavy like a Kaypro II: It was 26 pounds. This portable had 64KB of RAM and dual 191KB floppy drives. I also beta-tested the Osborne 1 and a Commodore. Then, the MS-DOS portables came out, such as the IBM 5150 and the Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80, aka “Trash 80.” Our mission was to determine if they were suitable for secretaries, managers, and executives and if they would save the bank money. The answer: Only if I wrote training manuals and then trained those who would use them. Those were fun and exciting times. And yes, I was and will always be a teacher and computer geek.