Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
‘PRIDE & JOY’
Wellington residents delight in family, accomplishments
I met my husband in an Accounting class at Sam Houston University. Maybe that’s the start of it. The accounting professor said, “You two need to get together. You’re three chapters behind us.” So, we started studying together. Don said, “Do you want to come over and bowl?” That was my first date with him. That was January, and in June, he gave me a ring. In August, we got married. I wrote a thing for the kids, “How I met your dad,” and gave it to them.
From there, Don went back to work at Exxon, and that’s where we got started transferring. Well, I wanted to teach in Houston. And they said, “Pat, you would have to wait years to teach what you want,” because it was the commercial classes that I wanted to teach. So, I started working for Exxon too, in their Accounting department.
We were out in San Bernardino and we were settling down in a house and we decided we needed to adopt children because I couldn’t get pregnant. When we got Terri, she was just a month old. It was about two years later when we got our son, Gary. We were now living in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was 14 months old though. He is autistic. We didn’t know that then. He came home with Terri, and Terri was about two years old, and she would just put her arm around him and hug him.
Terri started elementary school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The school had a special class for kids with (disabilities) but it was not time for Gary to start school. Well I volunteered in the class, and then I would go home and
“My pride and joy are my two children, who are adopted. Terri has taken over the family, almost in a mother’s place. I adopted her when she was a month old in California. And then we adopted our son in Arkansas.” — Pat Arrington
work with him. We went from Tulsa to Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, and then to Des Moines, Iowa. Don eventually began working for Sunoco, and they wanted Don to come up to the corporate office, so we came up here to Berwyn. I asked at Conestoga if they could put Gary in Vanguard, a special school, and they asked to keep him in Conestoga. Later they called me and said go ahead and put him in the Vanguard school. The first day Gary came home and said, “Mom, I think I found my school.”
“My pride is my three kids and my joy is my three kids, but I’m also proud of something I accomplished.”
– Sue Broderick
I’m very proud of my kids, I don’t see two of them very often. But the third one lives close, although I don’t see him very often either. I went back to school when my kids were all grown and got a degree. I feel very proud of that. I took a nursing course and I just feel good about it, even today.
I worked in a first trimester abortion clinic for six years. That was the best because we were near the high school so it was a good spot to be in. And the woman who were there were all educated women doing a lot of counseling at the same time. So that was a good thing, it was very satisfying. Most people don’t get involved.
I worked for the VP of Centocor, a drug development company. I traveled abroad. I loved it. We went to the Netherlands and Stockholm. In Stockholm, I worked with a physician who was based there, she was Swedish, and that’s quite an experience to be in a new land. It was exciting. (When a drug was put in for approval by the FDA) they published articles about this, and my name was always attached to it.
“I think back when I was younger, I was proud of the fact that I joined the Navy.”
— Rusty Snyder
I lied about my age, I’ll tell you this now, I don’t think they’ll throw me out! I worked for the newspaper and we had a traveling recruiting group coming in. The guys all helped me, they said bring your birth certificate and we’ll fix it. Well they did and it was terrible. So, I went to the church and I got a baptismal certificate. And I even kind of fudged it to the minister, he said I didn’t know that the age was 19. And I said, “hmmm.” Anyway, when I got there, there was a couple of other girls from the office and we had gone through all the questions, the physical, I’d gone uptown and had my father sign the paper, came back and there’s a yeoman sitting over here. She said, “I haven’t seen your birth certificate yet.” And the photographer is standing
over here because we were all from the paper. I said, I have a baptismal, and she said OK, let me see it. I handed it to her and she looks at me, she looked at the photographer, she handed it back to me, she never said a word. I was 19, you were supposed to be 20, I was only one year off.
I wanted to do something different. There was no money, back in those days, there was no money for college. And I just thought this would be a good education, I would learn something else, and I wanted to see something different. I wanted to see what was on the other side of the mountain, you know what I mean. And because I was the rebel in the family and adventuresome.
I met a lot of people, I learned a lot of stuff. To tell you the truth, sometimes I almost feel guilty, we had such a good time! I went to Chicago, there was a Navy show going on in Chicago. And I had a spiel to do on the ship to shore radio stuff. We were there I guess two or three weeks. And then we got sent west, and we were in California, and I went aboard the first base, December 13th I think it was. And it was this little base, in the corner of Oakland, called Albany, California. It was a NLFED, a Naval Landing Force Equipment Depot. And I met Larry.
I was working in the office on an old copy machine, and two guys came up from the mechanics area and they needed some copies. They came into the office, and Larry was one of the two. The other one was very aggressive, and he was cute, but he was wearing a wedding ring. So, I thought, I’m not going to talk to you! This other guy doesn’t wear a wedding ring, I’ll talk to him! And then shortly thereafter, Larry called me for a date and we started dating. Then he went home in January, so I didn’t see him until he came back in February. And then we started dating a little more seriously, and we were married in October.
You know you meet interesting people, different people, different lifestyles, and like I said, I’ve always been adventuresome, and I wanted to do something different.
“I’m most proud of my family. They’re educated and family oriented. They’re good kids. They’ve always been good kids.”
— Fran Guglielmetti
My daughter was born in the Bronx, New York. Then we moved to Westchester County, in White Plains. We had a home there. The kids grew up there. Then my daughter got married, my son went off to college, and we went to Briarcliff Manor. Then from there, we went to Florida. We retired to Florida. We were there for 20 years. (Fran recently moved back to the area to be near her children.)
I stayed home with the kids until my daughter was about ten, then I went to work. I worked for an educational
publisher, Scott Foresman, it was a publishing company. I worked for them for 23 years. I started off as a file clerk and I ended up being a supervisor for a data entry department. I was working for the NYC Health and Hospital Corporation;
would you believe it? I worked in the Accounting department over there. I just worked myself up.
My kids are in Downingtown now. I have two grandchildren, one great-grandchild and another one on its way. My granddaughter
is close by, with her daughter and another one on its way. My grandson, he lives in Louisville, Kentucky. He’s a pilot for Delta airlines. He flies out of Atlanta, I believe. I’m most proud of my family. They’re educated and family oriented. They’re
good kids. They’ve always been good kids.