After graduating high school, I had no interest in going to college, so I obtained a job as a secretary at Reliance Electric Company in Manor Oak Two on Cochran Road while waiting for my fiancé’ to complete college. I stayed there a little over a year when I married my high school sweetheart, Tony. A year later, we had our first son, Brian. Many years went by before having any other children due to fertility problems. I had no problem with the first pregnancy, but after that one, I couldn’t conceive. The doctors call that secondary infertility. Well, that started many years of surgeries and fertility drugs before I said “to hell with it,” and we resigned ourselves to our son being an only child.

In 1976, I became an office manager at a transportation engineering company in Crafton. I worked there for 18 years until September, 1994. I really loved that job. It was very interesting. A lot of the time I got to go “out in the field” to do traffic counts and other fun things. That broke the constant monotony of doing the same office work daily. I worked for the president of the company and about a half dozen civil engineers. I also did the billing for the company in addition to running the office. The company designed a parking garage for UPMC, and I got to know the underground tunnel that connects all of the Oakland Hospitals, except Magee, very well. We used it as a shortcut to go between hospitals while doing traffic studies. This was in the day before computers and I remember typing a 250 page report, with many revisions, to submit our findings to UPMC. Ultimately, the parking garage was built, and it was a godsend to ease part of the parking problems in Oakland.

In 1983, much to my surprise, I became pregnant with twins, but miscarried them early on in the pregnancy. In 1984, I conceived again and gave birth in February, 1985, to another son, Brendan. Then in 1987, I gave birth to a daughter, the first girl born into my husband’s family in 52 years. Her name is Erin. My husband and I were extremely happy and blessed to be given these two “miracles.” All three of our children are extremely close even though the first two are 11 years apart. My husband and I did not want to put our kids into daycare (our eldest son was cared for by his grandmother when I started my traffic job in 1976 when he was 2-1/2) so my husband worked Midnight-8 and I worked 9-5. My mom would come to my house after her job was done at 3:30 PM every day (she worked at South Hills Catholic High School close to our house) and relieve my husband so he could go to bed and he would get up at 10:00 PM to get ready and be in to work at Midnight. We did that for 8 long years!

When the last two children were ready for school, I knew I needed to change jobs so I could be there for them. After the trouble we had conceiving these last two children, I wanted to be like other moms who took their kids to school, took them home for lunch, and was there when they came home in the afternoon. We lived quite a walk from Howe Elementary in Mt. Lebanon, so I would drive them to school and pick them up every day after school. I quit the traffic job and worked as a lunch mom in the lunchroom at Howe for a few months until I was offered a library job in the high school and junior high school libraries for a half day five days a week. I worked 7:30-11:45 AM which was perfect. After the kids were in elementary school all day (by this time, our oldest son was in college), I got a full-time, 10-month (school year) job working in the high school library. I was off all summer, again, to be there for my school-age kids. I worked there for 14 years. I retired in 2009. By then, all of my kids were out of college and on their own.

The saddest part of my life came when, after being the sole caregiver to both of my parents in their final days, along with my husband who was wonderful to them, I lost both of them. My dad died in 1997 and my mom in 2002. I would do it all over again just to have them here for a few minutes. My dad had a stroke in 1994, just after I started my high school library job, and the stroke affected his esophagus and the flap which opens and closes when you swallow would not close, so he had to have a feeding tube. He suffered with that thing coming out all the time and, long story short, he ended up in a nursing home, bedridden, but his mind was always sharp, until January 7, 1997, the saddest day of my life. Then my mother, who was fit all of her life and had beaten two forms of cancer (breast and uterine) had shortness of breath. It turns out that when she was a child she had undiagnosed strep throat which turned into rheumatic fever and it damaged her heart valves. She ended up having a triple bypass along with an aortic valve replacement and a mitral valve repair all in one surgery. Well, she started recovering when she fell into a severe depression and she, too, went into a personal care home. She just gave up on life and she died of heart failure on July 7, 2002, 10 years to the day that I’m writing this bio. She was at one time a heavy smoker but had quit about 30 years prior to the heart problem.

Our oldest son, Brian, is married and works for Root Sports (formerly known as Fox Sports Net Pittsburgh) as an audio man/editor and producer. He obtained his degree from Point Park University in Journalism and Communications. He has been with Root for 15 years. He has produced and created many of the shows you may have seen on the old show called “Sportsbeat” with Stan and Guy, and some of his work from other shows he has created has been up for many Emmy awards. Our second son, Brendan, is married and has a son, our five-year-old grandson, Cameron, and he is the Director of Revenue for Fairmont Hotel, Heritage Place, Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco, California. He obtained his degree from Virginia Tech in Hospitality and Tourism Management. Our daughter who was just married in October, 2010, works for PNC in Pittsburgh in their Operations Department. She obtained her degree in Communications Studies from California University of Pennsylvania. My, how the years fly by! First I had a houseful; now I’m alone.

My husband worked for Verizon as a Systems Administrator for 30 years. He was laid off with 21,000 others nationwide in 2003. He searched for a job and it took him about four years to obtain a suitable job in Baltimore, working for UPS.com in their Maryland Internet Group (MIG) as a Senior Web Administrator. It is a very good job except for one thing. It is in Baltimore. All of this occurred when the real estate market tanked and we had our home on the market three different times over the course of three years and was still unable to sell it. It is a very nice home in Mt. Lebanon. Anyhow, he works in Baltimore and I live here, and we made the decision that we are going to keep our home here in Mt. Lebanon since it is “home” to both of us. We were both born and raised in Mt. Lebanon and never want to leave. I was very unimpressed by Baltimore. I would never live in the city and the suburbs are not as nice as it is here. The cost of homes is four times as much as they are here, and, even if we sold our home here, we could never afford a home there. The prices are outrageous. He rents an apartment in Towson, MD, about 10 miles north of the Inner Harbor. Eventually, he will retire and come back to Pittsburgh and we will live here in our own home and not have to worry about renting.

Well, my life has not been as exciting as some other I have read in the bios, but I have been generally very happy with the choices I have made. I am very proud of my children. None of them have given us a minute’s trouble, and they all turned out to be decent human beings. I can’t ask for much more than that.