Christmas 2004

Gene Armstrong               Shannon Day                 Ann & Calvin(3)       Matt(30)     David(35) & Addison b. 12/21/04
After graduating from UW, Gene and I were married in 1964 and headed for California where Gene attended law school and I earned a Masters degree in speech and language pathology at Stanford. I worked for a year setting up a speech therapy program for the Menlo Park school district and acting as an itinerant speech therapist for the district’s five schools, which had never had a speech program before.

After law school, Gene accepted a job with a large law firm in Chicago and I went to work at the University of Illinois – Chicago where I worked in the speech clinic and did occasional teaching for the Speech Department. When David was born in 1970, I took an 18 month leave of absence, and after Matt was born in 1974, I had to fish or cut bait because the political situation had changed radically and extended leaves (legally I got 6 weeks) were not in the cards. So I cut bait. I hated doing it because I loved my job and was not particularly good at being at home.

We had moved to Oak Park in December 1969, the first suburb west of Chicago, and one which shares a boarder with the city. Oak Park had passed an open housing ordinance in 1968 (prior to enactment of the federal law) and was then struggling to achieve racial diversity throughout the community and avoid resegregating into white and black sections of town. This included a fight to overcome historical trends and to maintain the community’s attractiveness to businesses and residents as a racially diverse community that offers high quality schools and municipal services. These were the bad old days of red lining, block busting, racial steering and white flight. Oak Park is full of activist citizens (sometimes a royal pain in the arse), and there was much to be done. I got active in these and other efforts, including local government, and the schools. Gene did, too, serving as the appointed attorney for the Park District for about 15 years, chairing the citizen committee that brought liquor back to heretofore dry Oak Park, and heading up the 4th of July fire works – a volunteer effort – for 25 years.

We do the usual reading, theater/music/movies, skiing (mostly Gene), camping (mostly when the kids were young), etc, but our civic commitment in Oak Park has been a central focus, something to which both Gene and I have devoted a lot of time and energy. Through a lot of hard work and creative ideas by a lot of people, the community has achieved a high degree of stability; the schools have remained excellent and home values have soared (contrary to dire predictions); and we are, after several lean years, very attractive to developers – so much so that people now complain about growth and density!!

Meanwhile, in my volunteer community and political work, I had done quite a bit of fund raising and was hired (when Matt was 6) as the fund raiser to bring Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” (a huge sculpture honoring real and fictional women in history) to Chicago. From that, I got a job as the Development Director for a not-for-profit organization – the Metropolitan Planning Council – a public policy advocacy organization working on quality of life issues such as housing, transportation, development, education funding and tax policy.

I am currently in my 23rd and – if all goes well – last year at MPC. I had actually expected to be “retired” by now, but…. I will likely get some other job, but perhaps part time.

As for Gene, I am betting that he will never retire officially… probably just let his work life get less and less hectic. But that, as my grandmother used to say, is on the next page.

We get to Madison regularly (though my father and mother have been gone now for 10 and 8 years, respectively) – for UW football games and to visit David and his family.

We would like to travel more ….have had some great trips to France, Ireland, Egypt, New Zealand, hiking into (and then out of!) the Grand Canyon over the Y2K New Year, etc. My hope is to go on safari.

I have a bad back (lumbago!!– I thought this was something old people got… but it turns out to be a real medical diagnosis, meaning deterioration of the lumbar spine…in my case, arthritis) and Gene has a stent in his heart, but life has been good and we are up to most tasks!