Today's Featured Biography

 
Patti Myers Kilbourne

I enjoy: writing; photography; golfing at Angel Fire, New Mexico; swimming at our local university wellness Center; genealogy; reading; studying Theology; time with family; walking my yellow Lab, Daisy; and topical conversations with my husband and best friend - Randy.

My husband is retired from Northwestern Oklahoma State University where he taught from 1966 until 2005. He also coached men's and women's golf his last two years at NWOSU.

Just a word about my WHS days:I moved to Wenatchee from the coast (Mill Creek area) during the summer of 1964. My junior year at WHS I read a magazine article in the school library about the Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco. I started looking for drugs. I found some "users", and experimented a bit. During Spring Break of our senior year, Carol Pennington and I headed to the U-District in Seattle...hoping to catch a ride to Haight Ashbury. Only problem was she was 18 and I was still 17 and so I got busted in Portland (her brother Tony turned us in). Then there were two "wonderful" weeks in a cell in the Chelan County Juvie...waiting for court. I was made a ward of the court and had all of my rights stripped away. They made me cut my hair, change the way I dressed, others decided who I hung out with and I had a mandatory curfew…even after reaching 18. I started to Wenatchee Valley College that fall and an amazing thing happened in a Philosophy class. It was a 3 hour long night class and the guy stood up front spouting, from memory, all the various philosophers of the world. There happened to be a non-traditional student in the class...and I like to call her my "banana peel" (as in "slip on it and fall on your butt!"). She probably wasn't that old - just seemed old to me at the time. Anyway...the teacher would spout a philosophy as if it were absolute truth - and this lady would speak up and counter his statements with her Christian beliefs. I listened for a while and then it dawned on me that for the first time in ages I had to make a defining choice. Did I want to side with this guy? Or, did I really believe the things I had first chosen, as a child, to believe about God and the Bible, as this non-traditional student was laying the arguments out. Well, within weeks I was sitting in a Christian university south of Los Angeles, still a mess, but struggling to come back to the faith that I had chosen as a child. That was a long time ago…my faith is stronger than ever. It's the center of my life. (Ephesians 2: 1-10)
Back in the spring of 1974, when the old WHS building was still standing, I wrote the following and it was printed in the Wenatchee Daily World...sometime after our move to Dallas in 1977.

My Alma Mater

There's a building in our town
Standing lonely and asleep
Windows broken, boarded, locked
Silent lawns that do not reap.

Once alive with vibrant laughter
And the questions of the young
Now to lie at rest forever
Still the echo of the last fight song.

I passed by that old building
My tiny son's hand in mine
And reflected how my life had been
And how a new light on my path now shines.

I walked those halls with heavy foot
My thoughts were miles away
Not involved in the learning machine
Or the questions of the day.

My life so full and rich of late
Does not reflect my past
Of days spent drunk, or stoned or lost
And wondering if this would last.

That building symbolizes for me
A past with doors padlocked
Never more to be wide opened
Lighted up, or daily walked.

My life turned now to Jesus
And resting in His Love
Each days a fresh new blessing
And memories - guideposts from above.

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