Bio, 2009: Bob Williams
Some of you may remember that my family moved between our junior and senior year, and I actually graduated from Monterey High School in Lubbock. Texas. A tough year, but it worked out all right, though I still thought of myself as a Stillwater Pioneer. After spending a year at Texas Tech, where I tried "acting-out" by involving myself various kinds of foolishness, my exasperated father sent me to Brigham Young University. He said he wouldn't pay my tuition elsewhere, and since I was without other funds, it was either BYU or lose my deferment and face the draft. So the choice was BYU or Viet Nam, and I ended up graduating from BYU with a B.S. in psychology.
I got married the day after graduation ceremonies, and we moved on to Northwestern University, where I completed a Master's and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. While at Northwestern, I "won" the draft lottery. Do you remember the lottery, where they pulled birthdates out of a goldfish bowl to determine your draft priority? Well, my birthday, April 24, was the second one pulled out of the bowl--so it looked like I was headed to Viet Nam anyway!
Fortunately I managed to wangle a deal with the US Air Force. They paid for my last year of graduate school, and in return, I served an internship at the USAF teaching hospital and took a two year assisgnment as an Air Force psychologist. I was stationed at Travis Air Force Base when the Viet Nam POW's were repatriated. All of the Air Force POW's were first sent to Travis AFB for mental and physical evaluation at our hospital there.
Well, anyway, the Air Force wasn't so bad, and when I finished my military obligation, I completed a two year postdoctoral program in child psychology, and I worked thereafter in a community mental health center as a child psychologist. Then the opportunity came for a civil service position in Germany, where I provided mental health services for military and embassy families. This was a great cross-cultural experience for our kids--by then we had four--and for my wife, who had been a German major in college.
We served nearly five years in Germany and had two more kids there. The first died a few days after birth, which was hard, as some of you may know from your own experience. From Germany I took a job in New Mexico and ended up as the Executive Director of the small community mental health center there. Things seemed to be going along just swimmingly until my wife, after 22 years of marriage and six children, suddenly announced that she wanted a divorce. And I thought I was such a great husband! But there was no talking her out of it, and she cheerfully divorced me.
But let me tell you, brothers and sisters, God is good, and within a year I married an angel. Some of you met Marleen at the last reunion. She is a wonderful person, and it turns out that she is a much nicer person than I am, which is lucky for me. We have been married for 19 years, and we have nine children and 25 grandchildren between us. (Can anybody in the class top that?). We relocated to Provo, Utah, where I am a psychologist in private practice, and Marleen is a full professor at, you guessed it, BYU! My practice has expanded from just kids and families, and I have developed a subspecialty in forensic psychology in which I perform competency evaluations and insanity plea evaluations--ask me some time about some of the strange and interesting folks I've interviewed!
Our children are like your children--some are doing well and some are struggling. One of our kids went to medical school and is a locally-admired surgeon, and one of our kids is currently in the county jail. The rest are somewhere in between those extremes. The oldest boy just turned 40 (are we really so old that we can have childen who are 40 years old?). The youngest, now 24, has just been accepted into medical school and says she wants to be a child psychiatrist! So life goes on in one eternal round. Thanks for listening.
©2009 Stillwater High School Class of 1964