My first job

My first job, at the ambitious age of 10, was delivering the weekly newspaper in a small winter resort town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I did it to buy a blue racing bike and pay for lift tickets. From there, I realized my innate talent as a babysitter but retired in high school when my social life interfered with my astonishing 35 to 50-cents per hour earning capacity. I remained in retirement until chosen to represent my high school on a local department store Teen Board where I sold clothes to my friends and wrote scintillating copy for a monthly column in Seventeen Magazine. Occasionally, my newsy fashion news from our local Teen Board would actually appear in the magazine. Later, I used this experience in my brief career as a legal secretary. What I lacked in legal skills I compensated for in buying office supplies and ordering lunch for the lawyers.

Eventually, I found my way into the airline and travel industry and, with two partners, opened a retail travel agency. With that collective experience, which I now consider good preparation for social work, I became a consultant to major corporations setting up in-house travel departments and negotiating airline contracts. As the travel industry became more regulated and less fun, I made the decision to seek meaning in my work and, on a dare, applied to and was accepted into the prestigious School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the University of Kansas.

After two years of hospital internships and part-time work for my research professor in his private practice – while working on my MSW - I became the Clinical Coordinator of a hospital adolescent addiction recovery program. In my spare time, I worked with court mandated sex offenders and did contract Family Preservation Social Work for the State of Kansas. After moving to Arizona the mid-1990’s, I began teaching at the university level. When invited, I speak at national and international professional conferences about ethics, grief and loss, and other social issues. I also do ethics training for social workers who need to maintain their licensure and I have served as board president of several non-profit organizations. I am currently working with a new autism support organization in Phoenix. Just before entering graduate school, I set up a Teens Teaching AIDS Prevention Hotline and recruited and trained my then-teenage son and his friends to work the phone lines.

In 2006, a series of curious events took me from teaching at Arizona State University School of Social Work to St. Martin's University as an associate professor in the Community Services Department. In addition to teaching, I am the Director of First Year Seminar and member of the Diversity Committee.

In May of 2007, I attended the premier of a documentary film based on my doctoral research about father-loss in war. I worked for five years with Der Speigel Television based in Hamburg, Germany, on the research, development, and filming of this project which is expected to be released in the U.S. market in 2008. With an illustrator, I am co-creating a children’s book for adults about losing someone you love in war.

The story is based on lived experience and is inspired by my parents’ World War II correspondence.

I believe life isn’t long but it is wide and ideally should be lived backward.