Bio, 2014: John Warren
Since I sent you the first version of my “bio” there have been some changes. First, in 2011, we decided to sell out in Oklahoma and Texas, and move to a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. It is a beautiful area, closer to our 14 grandchildren, and easier access for international travel. We have 53 acres of rolling mixed forest and hay meadow, with a creek and my fishing pond, and my office is in the part of the house that is a restored 1840 log cabin. Joyce (OSU ’69) was never a “farm girl,” but absolutely loves the country life and has become a master gardener. I’m still a bit of a car “nut,” still write articles, and we travel at the drop of a hat. Very easily bored, I have continued to do consulting assignments in the Caribbean and Southern Africa – more and more environmental, wildlife reserve, resource management, and bio-diversity economics and policy. Recently, that has taken me into a “new” career in climate change adaptation, which is especially critical to smaller island nations. Monitoring coastal communities, coral reefs, fishery stocks, and beach erosion in the Caribbean – and designing/implementing ways to adapt - is tough work, but as they say, somebody has to do it. In fact, I am up to my neck in work in the Dominican Republic this summer, a fact that will likely make my appearance at the big reunion next to impossible. I just got back, and it looks as if I am going back down during June and July. I also still donate my time and resources to a non-profit that helps poor schools in Haiti, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic to join the computer age in education. THANK YOU to Ann, Scrib, and everyone who has worked so hard for our class!!! I am sure EVERYONE will have a wonderful time back in Stillwater. I am SO SORRY if I miss our reunion again, but I will try to stay in touch, and I want to hear and see all about it! If I can make it, it will be a last-minute thing. SALUDOS, ABRAZOS, John.
Bio, 2009: John Warren
Greetings, classmates! 1964 was a very good year for me, with our graduation and my family’s departure on a two-year assignment in East Africa that was not only a grand adventure, but also a huge influence on my life and career. While my father was director of a school in Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, I spent a lot of time “on safari” and learned first hand a fascinating culture very different from my own. Returning to Stillwater I found my classmates scattered, and those that attended OSU were well ahead of me. My future wife Joyce and I met at OSU on a blind date in late 1967, and married in January of 1969, the year I graduated in business, and she in psychology. After a short tour in the U.S. Army (I ran into classmate Bob Leigh at Fort Polk) we headed for South America, where we were in business for three years.
Our next stop was an M.S. at Texas A&M; then an appointment to the U.S. Foreign Service. After security clearances and three-months of training at Secretary Kissinger’s Department of State, we took an assignment at US Embassy, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. We enjoyed the Spanish Caribbean culture, the great coral reefs, fine food, outstanding baseball, an exciting professional assignment, and a stimulating lifestyle. In late 1975 we survived our first hurricane and two days later experienced the birth of our first child, Elizabeth (now living in Canada, with husband Kevin and TEN children – two adopted Chinese, four adopted Ethiopian brothers, and four “biological”).
We took “time out” for my Ph.D. at Texas A&M, where Leigh Anne was born. (She lives in Dublin, Ireland with husband Kalle, expecting their first child in July). Next, we spent two years on a visiting professorship at OSU before returning abroad, spending the next 16 years in Central America and the Middle East. Our girls attended Cairo American College in Egypt and graduated from Academia Los Pinares in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. During our years in Central America, Joyce volunteered at a clinic and did medical missions, including work with a US Army medical team traveling by Blackhawk helicopter to isolated areas giving inoculations to children. In 1990 I was decorated by Honduran President Rafael Leonardo Callejas with the country’s highest civil award, the Order of Jose Cecilio del Valle. Both daughters became fluent in Spanish, and served as translators for medical missions. Fortunately, Joyce shared my “travel bug,” which made our overseas adventures possible. My work involved trade; management of local programs; supervision of US contractors; and frequent negotiations with host-country officials, other governments, or voluntary groups. The most gratifying things about it were the lives changed for the better by US and host-country partnerships that worked, by better performance in public policy and private economic sectors, by colleagues that returned to their home countries and effectively applied what they had learned in US universities, and by good, capable people of different nations working together to solve problems and find common ground. Our daughters (a teacher and an RN) graduated from Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, sent there while we were abroad.
Since “retirement” in ‘98 we have been busy. Like many of you, we cared for aging parents. I write (on mostly boring subjects), speak, and do international consulting in Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean. I drafted a grant proposal in 2003 for OU, OSU, and Langston jointly to do a higher education strengthening project in Iraq, and we received $5 million over two years to carry it out. I fish when I can. We garden, read, and travel a lot. In 2007-2008 we visited Europe and Africa, and unexpectedly spent 13 months back in the Caribbean when I was asked to manage an environmental policy project there by a firm for which I had done previous short consultancies.
We spend about three months a year in Namibia, a nation spectacularly endowed with scenic beauty and wildlife. We serve as voluntary interim managers on private game reserves. This entails a lot of time in the “bush,” working with local guides, mingling with international guests, supervising game counts, and when necessary the control or culling of certain wildlife due to overpopulation, disease, or public nuisance. In 2007 while culling, three local workers and I were exposed to a rabid kudu bull and had to take the rabies series at a small rural hospital. Last year, we had a serious “run-in” with an old bull elephant that left Etosha Pan National Park and did a lot of damage in our area.
All in all, the past 45 YEARS (!) brought fascinating experiences for us: caught in street demonstrations in South America; almost trapped by rioting students in the Caribbean; exploring Egyptian, Ptolemaic, Roman, and Mayan ruins; diving at Sharm el Sheikh; wandering Arab East Jerusalem; climbing dunes in the Namib desert; driving from Oklahoma to Honduras, via Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador; capturing a car thief in Cali, Colombia; visiting our children in China and Ireland; getting lost overnight with a local “guide” in the Amazon Basin; working out of my car after rioters burned my office (and the US Consulate) in Central America; briefing and guiding US Congressional Delegations abroad (often referred to as “junkets”); going to Church in an equipment shed in Africa; and so on. For us, as for everyone, there have been many blessings, many great people met, many fine meals, many good books read, and our share of tragedies, triumphs, defeats, and successes.
We have committed to being in the Namibian Kalahari to do a game count and subsequent management this fall, unfortunately missing the reunion. We enjoyed the 1999 event very much, and had anticipated this year’s, had it been in the summer. I really appreciate all the work that Ann and Scrib have done, and that everyone else does for our class. It has been great fun to visit with Ann, to see Betty and Wiley, and to correspond with Gordie and others this year. I hope that being back in the area for most of the time, we can keep this up, and that I can see more of our classmates. I can’t believe I wrote so much! If you stayed with me, THANK YOU and VERY BEST WISHES for the 2009 reunion! I’d love to hear more from you. SALUDOS to all! John (& Joyce) Warren (04-20-09)
John on the Okavango River, Nov 2008
©2009 Stillwater High School Class of 1964