11/20/2015

Natalie Ellis Avery passed of congestive heart failure.

2011

I am now a House Director (House Mom) for Sigma Delta Tau Sorority at USC. It is located in downtown Los Angeles so life is never dull! There are 52 ladies in my house keeping me young. I love being at USC but I'm still a Boilermaker at heart!

Fun things to do:

I saw the final American Idol show live! It was amazing. The Nokia Theater is huge and beautiful.

I've seen several other shows taped for TV Dancing with the Stars, America's Got Talent, X Factor, Jay Leno and Ellen DeGeneres.

USC is located in a ghetto area so there are lots of police and sirens blasting.

Museums are plentiful. We have dinasaurs at the Exposition Park walking distance from my house. The space shuttle will be coming soon to make its final home here in LA. They say we can walk through it when it gets here.

Yes traffic is insane!
 

2007

After having time to read the bios of my fellow grads from 1961, I decided that I should update my information a wee bit. I really have not had such an uneventful life and I'm grateful for all the fun things I did get to do.

After a terrible 29 year marriage I packed a van and took off like Thelma and Louise. A girlfriend and I sailed out of town and out of my abusive husband's life forever.  I haven't looked back, amen.

I returned to Purdue in 1993 and finished the degree I started in 1961. What a terrific experience that was!  College is so much easier when you are an adult with experiences to relate the work to.  I was a very average student in 1961.  By 1993 I had learned my lessons and became a straight A student. What a lift to my spirit after nearly 30 years of put-downs.

But the good things were just beginning.  My daughter Deborah graduated from Eastman School of Music the same year I graduated from Purdue. She headed for California to get her masters from USC and I headed there to work.  She got her masters and is now a professional musician in Los Angeles living the OC life of Orange County.  It is everything the television shows say it is.

I started and ran several consulting businesses doing Customer Service Research with the partnership of a man I took classes from at Purdue.  It was fun for a few years.  Then I managed a call center for Aileen's Tacky Glue, then Corporate Express, and then the most fantastic experience....I got to join a small dot com startup company called Ideaforest.  We eventually became joann.com the online store for the JoAnn Fabric company. We had 22 million dollars to get the company started and blew through that in less than a year.  Boy were we riding the wave!  Whoops!  We didn't have a good business model.  There went my dream job, but it was lots of fun while it lasted. I moved on to become the National Director of Consumer Affairs at Travelocity.com.  They really needed my expertise but when they found out how much.....they were not so enthusiastic.  Then the tragic 9/11.  My bubble burst. It was a great ride while it lasted.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the classmates who come for the reunion. Hope I see you there.