Moscow High School... Class of 1965, Dan Green

		Dan Green Mailing Address: 1155 Nearing Road Moscocw, ID 83843 Phone: 208 882-6650 208 596-1121 (cell)
Dan Green Allenpeak1111@gmail.com

Email updated: March 31, 2015

The important stuff—my kids and grandkids:

Jeff, age 35, lives with us. He has mild cerebral palsy and will be with us for the duration. He has great skills in computer science and can fix about any electrical or mechanical devise.

Lolly (Elizabeth), age 31, lives in Ft. Collins Colorado and manages a medical center. She has a one year old son Aiden and is married to JJ a fire investigator with the City of Ft. Collins. They are a thousand miles from Moscow so we only see them twice a year.

Elly, age 29, is a full-time mom with four year old son that we dearly love. Elly and her husband Garrett live with us while they are going back to grad school. It has been really great to be a full-time grandpa—William (my grandson) calls me Papa and we are best buds.

The work stuff:
I have retired several times, but it just doesn’t stick. I am working more than ever now in a consulting partnership with my wife MaryAnn. She is a sociologist who specializes in environmental justice and demography and my specialty is spatially disaggregated input-output modeling. We are partners with another retired academic who specializes in micro-economics. MaryAnn loves all the travel (about twelve weeks this past year -- on the road doing survey work), but I have about had my fill of motels and restaurants. I would take an outdoor barbecue at the ranch over any restaurant meal.

The medical front:
We are both still healthy except for a variety of injuries from my smoke jumping days and from construction projects that I keep getting into. I have broken, sprained, cut, or otherwise damaged all four limbs, but I am still at it. Thank God for aspirin and I hope I don’t have to take stronger pain killers.

The fun stuff:
We spend lots of time at the ranch for six months of the year and, when I am not involved in some fool construction project, we do lots of woodsy recreation. We picked a lot of huckleberries this year (60 gallons), pick lots of wild mushrooms, hunt and fish, and take a lot of bike and ATV rides with the kids.

The Future:
We both intend to work as long as it is interesting and lucrative. Given the economic condition of the Country, I think that is a sound policy for most boomers. We hope to get more projects in interesting places and combine work and travel. My brother John (class of 1964) has medical clinics in Hawaii, Italy and Eastern Europe and gets to travel there for business and pleasure. That’s for me! I don’t want to just retire and be a drag on the economy. Our kids have inherited a real mess from us and we need to help get things back on track.

Spouse: MaryAnn

Elly, Lolly, Jeff, MaryAnn and Me

Kids:
     Jeff age 28
     Lolly (Elizabeth) age 24
     Elly (Eleanor) age 22

It's been interesting working on the reunion committee. Searching for "lost classmates" has given me a renewed appreciation for the common experiences that we shared growing up in Moscow. It has always been my "hometown"; the place that holds many memories of the passage from childhood to becoming an adult. I recall memories of my first prom (thanks again Susie); my first car (a fun VW Beatle); and a few other firsts that I probably shouldn't mention. Moscow was where I learned all of the leisure activities that make life interesting; where I decided what I wanted from life; where I found my wife; where I got most of my education; and its been where I have spent most of my career.

Life since all those "firsts" has gotten a little more complicated. Most of the complications have been good. MaryAnn, my wife and best friend these past 37 years, and I have raised three children in Moscow. Two of our kids, Jeff and Elly are still in Moscow attending the University of Idaho and our oldest girl, Lolly just graduated and may move to Ft Collins this summer with her guy. Elly is getting married this summer and will stay in Moscow while she and her fiancée go to graduate school. My mother, who is 83, moved in with us this fall so things are pretty busy around home.

MaryAnn and Me

All three of my kids love hunting and fishing which has allowed me to spend lots of time with them and to get to know their boyfriends. I have several llamas that we pack into the mountains for fishing and hunting trips with the kids. MaryAnn and I are slowing down a good deal, but having young kids who out-hike, out-fish and out-hunt you keeps the pressure on, to keep in share and spend more time in the out-of-doors.

We live on Moscow Mountain in a log home that I designed and built myself (with much help from family and friends). We have lots of critters in our life with the llamas; dogs that we breed (currently there are seven adult and seven puppies around and about; and an assortment of fowl that have the run of the place. My favorite pets are the fish that I have planted in my pond. The only care they require it fishing to thin them out.

We spend the summers in Montana on a ranch that we share with family members and with Don Harmsworth (who is also family). The ranch is very isolated and lacks phone or power, so we enjoy a pretty old fashioned life there. As we move into retirement, we plan to spend about six months of the year there. Winters are too severe there, as Don can tell you from experience, for year round residence.

Elly, MaryAnn and Lolly

When I am not spending time with the family, I work as an economist. The work is varied and interesting and I am pretty much the master of my own work schedule and priorities. I work as a consultant, working mostly as a subcontractor for other consulting firms, or directly for state and federal agencies. While that gives me freedom, it also means that I have to hustle work by selling my services. I work out of my home, but spend about half the time on the road. My wife travels with me, and works as my colleague---she is a sociologist. I am trying to keep the work to about half time now, but lately it's been more than full-time with all the travel. I enjoy what I am doing now and plan to continue with into as long as I've got my marbles.

Looking at retirement options, I recognize that I will have to pay the price of a varied and interesting work life. I have had four careers so far. My first career was as a firefighter in the summers and public school teacher the rest of the year. I used the two jobs to get through college and graduate school. I even managed to teach three years in Moscow High School, but in retrospect I enjoyed the summer firefighting a lot more than the teaching.

In my second career I worked as a Landscape Architect, planner and public administrator. I finished off that career working twelve years as the Director of a regional council of governments, and got thoroughly fed up with local politics and government. I quit that whole career in my early forties and went back to school to get a PhD. While I working on my dissertation, I got hired by WSU and that started my third career as an academic. I worked as an economist and as a campus planner for WSU, long enough to get a good taste of campus politics, which are even more deadly than local politics. A life threatening chain saw accident helped end that career and made me realize that you only go around once, so you have got to do the important things with your time while you still have a life to live.