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Today's Featured Biography

 
Colleen Wagner Parkhill

Greetings from the Buckeye State of Ohio! Mack and I have lived in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus, the State Capital, and home to The Ohio State University for 42 years. Central Ohio is a wonderful place to live, but we do enjoy our visits "home" to Washington to get back to our roots.
When I was born, my parents were living in a log home they had built south of what is now Sea Tac, near Salt Water State Park. The Seattle area was my home until my junior year of high school, when my Dad was transferred to Wenatchee in the summer of 1951. That would normally be a very tough time to be uprooted. However, we moved to a neighborhood where several helpful and friendly WHS students lived, and I immediately met many in the Class of '53. What a blessing! Some of them introduced me to Bob Yetter, the WHS Band Director, so I quickly became involved with the majorettes and the Wenatchee High School Marching Band. By the end of my first week, I would not have moved back to Seattle for anything. I was loving school, marching with the band, picking apples in the Fall with my girlfriends in George Sisler's orchard, going steady with Mack, and feeling like I was on top of the world. That began my love affair with the Wenatchee Valley.
After graduation, I worked as a secretary at the Alcoa Plant for a year, then enrolled at W.S.C. Mack was already there, and we ultimately decided to marry between semesters of his senior year in February of 1956. We began our life together in a small apartment in Pullman. September of '56 found us in San Antonio, TX, where Mack began his pilot training in the USAF. From San Antonio, we moved to McAllen and Lubbock, TX , then to Panama City, FL, and Colville WA, where he finished his AF tour. Our son was born in Texas and our daughter in Colville.
Mack's first job in corporate sales took us to the Chicago area. A subsequent change of jobs brought us to Central Ohio in 1961. We have loved this state, raised our family, and made a wonderful life here. We might have moved back to Washington when Mack retired in 1995, except for the fact that our son and daughter are settled here and raising their families. We won't leave them or our three fabulous grandsons, even for mountains and an ocean.
In 2004, I retired after working as a legal assistant for 26 years. In 2018, we celebrated our 62nd wedding anniversary. We have always been active in our church and community, including singing in church choirs everywhere we have lived. We sang in the Chancel Choir at Worthington Presbyterian Church for 45 years, where I also served as a Ruling Elder. I am a P.E.O., and for 16 years we provided Bed & Breadkfast lodging for traveling P.E.O.'s and their husbands as a fundraising activitity for my chapter.
Our grandson Sean came to live with us in 2009 when he was 13 following the death of his mother. He is now 22 and recently graduated from Otterbein University. He is taking a "gap" year working in a lab prior to entering med school in 2019.
We have been fortunate to have traveled several times to Europe, have enjoyed some fabulous cruises, and visited most of the U.S. We have about completed our Travel Wish List.
That about sums it up for now. We love Ohio and our family and friends here and are enjoying life. But part of my heart will always remain in Wenatchee. To have attended high school in the Fifties in the Valley was a special gift. My Dad's transfer turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, because the "kids" of Wenatchee High welcomed me and made me feel an immediate part of the community. We arrived in Wenatchee in 1951, so 67 years later, THANK YOU SO MUCH!

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