Profiles - About Alumni for December 2008

Featured Alum: Valerie Rettman, Data Processing, 1969-71

“After graduating with an A.A. degree at YC, I transferred to NAU, and received a B.S. in Biology & Business Education in 1973, then a MA in Business Education in 1977.

After finishing school, I taught at a private school in Flagstaff, then an elementary school in Magdalena, NM, then an elementary school in Bridgeport, CA, then an elementary school in Hailey, ID, and finally at HS Special Ed in Glennallen, AK.

Presently I teach in Mat-Su School Dist in Wasilla, AK.

I plan to retire after the school year 2011-12. I am happily married to Gary Powell, a surveyor, whom I met in Alaska nine years ago. We split our time between a home in Wasilla and a remote cabin near the base of Mount McKinley just outside Denali National Park.

I sure had a lot of fun as a YC cheerleader with Deena Ingerson, Julie Fuson, Wendy Smith, Colleen Hamilton, and Candi Tucker. As a data processing student at YC, we did not have our own computer at the time. We typed up our punch cards in Prescott and drove to Phoenix to run the cards through a computer, which took up a whole room! We've certainly come a long way with laptops, Blackberries, etc.

My biology teacher, Mr. Duran, who came from a high school in Tucson, influenced me to continue on with my higher education beyond YC. I was originally majoring in data processing and was planning to return to Kingman, where I graduated from high school, to work in the Mohave County offices computerizing their records. Instead, I transferred to NAU and majored in Biology and became a teacher.

I was so proud to be in the charter graduating class of Yavapai College. You've come a long way from dorm rooms in the Hassayampa Hotel and classrooms all over town – Whipple, Yavapai County offices, etc. It was an adventure I'll never forget!”

My email address: rettval@yahoo.com.

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Keith Haynes, Associate of Arts , 1983‐1985

I completed all my schooling here in Prescott. After I graduated high school, I got an A.A. degree from Yavapai in 1985. So, I was a student here in 1983, 1984, and 1985.

I would say in the late 60’s/early 70’s it was very dicey here as far as [my father’s] employment situation here. There were really no protections whatsoever for faculty in their careers and employment with the College. The administration was extremely authoritarian. Male faculty was prohibited from having beards. I’ve heard one story that any faculty caught on Whiskey Row would be terminated. I’m sure that was kind of a reaction against a lot of the social turmoil of the 1960’s & “we’re not going to let those long-hairs come to Prescott and ruin our town…”

One of my best memories of Yavapai [as a student] during my last semester here was the College Honors Program trip. We went over to California and went to the Scripps Aquarium, went out on boats to Catalina Island across the Santa Barbara Channel. It was kind of an oceanographic-themed trip to Southern California. Dr. Jim Pence was the Honors Program coordinator at that time. He was an English instructor. He moved on from Yavapai within a couple years after that and I think he’s actually a college President or pretty high up in Administration at a college in the north Midwest. Beth Boyd who teaches Geology right now and is currently a faculty member also went on that trip.

I have really good memories of how those people kind of bonded on that trip and did things that college students typically do—staying up late, having fun, bending the rules. That was definitely my best memory as far as the social life. I remember that trip being more exhausting than I had ever experienced in my life. When we got back from that trip I slept for 3 days after being up for 5 days. That Honors Program really offered something nice to bring the extracurricular and social activities closer with the academic. I was always thankful for the Honors Program.

I got on a Humanities/English track. A big part of getting in that Humanities/English direction was a fabulous class I had with a man named David Hochstetler, who’s one of the Yavapai icons. He retired about my first year that I taught here at YC in ’92-’93. He ended up retiring sometime about then. First Dave was in the faculty at the College in the ‘70’s, then he was in Administration, kind of an Academic Vice-President/Campus Dean, then he went back to faculty. His Humanities class that I attended, I think was called “Arts and Ideas”, was really influential [to me].

Transcribed excerpt from an oral history interview of Keith Haynes with Kali Park, a College Honors Student, 2007/08

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Brian Stauffer, 1984-1986, Graphic Design

From Bonnie Stauffer, Dean Visual & Performing Arts, Yavapai College

November 10th Issue of The New Yorker Magazine

“Okay I get to brag on my son again. He proposed a cover illustration for the election edition of The New Yorker Magazine and they went for it. Both he and Barak Obama are going to sign several press sheets of the cover for distribution among very important people—like me! By the way, Brian attended YC for two years and majored in Graphic Design. Got his design degree from U of A. No matter what your political persuasion, gotta be proud of a local boy!”

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Elaine Stahlheber, 1986, Nursing

Those of you who know Elaine might be interested to respond to her blog. She writes:

“My poor little blog.... I have been thinking about it continuously and thinking of all the things I could write about and of topics I can't write about... http://elaineastahlheber.blogspot.com/

I studied nursing in Arizona at a junior college located in what was then a relatively small but well-known town in Arizona on Indian Reservation Land. The name of the college is Yavapai College named after the tribe whose land it is on. Here is the URL of the tribe: http://www.ypit.com/.

My time at YC was a great education in so many ways. For example, I had science teachers who were PhDs rather than grad students which was great fun and enormously helpful. These guys really wanted to teach and they did a great job. Taking geology, chemistry, astronomy, math, biology and anatomy more or less at the same time from this small group of instructors in a land focused on the local natural history and geology really made these subjects come alive for me both intellectually and metaphorically.

The understandings that I developed then continue to inform me and help me make sense of the enormous global shifts, which are so very obvious in our lives currently.

One of the reasons I left Arizona was due to future issues (now current and future) regarding water resources. I just wasn't comfortable being part of a system that for sure taxes the water table more than is sustainable.

Secondly this boat on the water pretty much sums up how I feel about my life... My little boat on the sea of life....

One of the metaphors that made so much sense for me is that of "Brownian Motion" defined by Wikipedia as follows:

"Brownian motion (named after the botanist Robert Brown) is the random movement of particles suspended in a liquid or gas or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, often called a particle theory.

The mathematical model of Brownian motion has several real-world applications. An often quoted example is stock market fluctuations."

I first saw Brownian motion at work in a microbiology class. We observed the movement of a particle of dust suspended in a drop of water. You would think that because it's a particle of dust that it would not move at all but there were what I call "universal forces" attendant upon the dust that made it move in several directions. While we are not as helpless as the particle of dust, nonetheless I think that there are some relevant correlations of sorts.

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