After high school graduation, I worked that summer at Crown Zellerbach Paper Mill and then went off to Oregon State. Kind of scary for an 18 year old kid with average grades. I majored in fish and wildlife management. I must have really grown into the college life okay as I was there for six years. I worked during some time off and the summers for the Forest Service in Oregon and Washington. Graduated from OSU in the spring of 66 with a BS degree in wildlife management and enough credit for another degree. Those years were a great time as well as meeting many of my life-long friends there.
The best and most significant thing that happened during that time was being set up for a blind date on my 23rd birthday. That is the day I met Susie, and education student in her 3rd year. We married 6 months later and graduated together in 66. After graduation, we moved back to West Linn and Susie started teaching at West Linn, where she lived with my folks on River Street as I had a military obligation to fulfill. So off I went and got that out of the way.
The next step was realizing that I had learned a lot of stuff at OSU but I didn’t know how to do anything. I decided to learn how to build homes and built over 100 homes in the West Linn-Lake Oswego area. Susie’s continued to teach in West Linn, finishing her master’s degree along the way. She loved teaching there.
After building homes for some time, I made another change in my working career. I went to work for the City of West Linn and working mostly in the water department where I enforced the Safe Water Drinking Act mandated by the federal government. I had a great time and met lots of great folks in West Linn that I never knew before. Between us, Susie and I knew and met many, many of the citizens of West Linn over the years. During all those years, we maintained our residence in West Linn.
Sometime before we retired, we decided not to remain in the West Linn area or even in Oregon. We spent several years visiting different areas of the Northwest to decide where we wanted to retire. Noticing that there was one state in the U.S. that had only 490 thousand people in it, was the 9th largest state, had the Rocky Mountains, lots of lakes and rivers, more antelope than people, great elk, deer and moose hunting, 40-50 lb. lake trout, 4-6 lb. kokanee and on-and-on. So we decided that Wyoming would be our number one choice and then visited almost every town in the state to find the one we would like the best – ending up in Green River, Wyoming. After moving here in late 96, we have both had a number of job offers but we are here for other reasons than work. A 90 some mile lake known as Flaming Gorge Reservoir is ½ hour from our home.
If you think back, all will probably remember that I was always into hunting and fishing and the outdoors. So having that size of lake nearby is great. Our largest lake trout so far is 34 pounds and I had the state kokanee record for about 15 minutes a few years ago. They say that Wyoming is what America was and they may be right.
We love Wyoming and have been here now for 14 years. We did not have children but have found out hunting dogs were easier and ultimately less expensive to raise! After watching our friend raising their children, we seriously believe you with children should have a kind of citizen’s form of the military Medal of Honor. We had one of our god children live with us this part school year while he went to Western Wyoming College and had a small taste of what it is like to have teenagers and se what parents have to go through.
We won’t be able to make it to the reunion this year – maybe at the 50th! Picking a date for a big event like this is not an easy thing to accomplish and to get everything together is a monumental task. But the date pushes us too close to our hunting season. We have Wyoming antelope, deer, and elk tags and Susie has a bull Shiras moose tag as well as a trip to Texas for white tail deer.
It has been bun reading all the bios on the blog. We were kids in a great time. Below you will find our address and phone number and email. If you come through this way, we would love to have you stop for a visit. Take care out there. Have a great reunion.
Curt and Susie Funk
425 Upland Way
Green River, Wyoming 82935
307-875-3474
wyosusie@yahoo.com
(More pictures will be on the class slide show)
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