In the summer of 1967, after graduating from Hunter, I went on a “teen tour” of the United States. It included my first visit to California. In San Francisco it was the Summer of Love, and I fell in love with the city. I broke off from the tour and went on my own to explore Haight Ashbury. I returned to San Francisco several times over the years, and then in 1994 I found my perfect job in the San Francisco area. My husband Jim and I moved to California, where we still live in Emerald Hills, a suburb on the peninsula south of San Francisco.

I graduated from Queens College after a short stint at Vassar (which I almost never talk about). After graduating with a major in psychology, I enrolled in the Ph.D. Psycholinguistics program at the University of Michigan. I quickly realized that I was not meant to be a scholar, and I transferred to the School of Information and got a Master's degree in Library Science. Michigan is important to me because it was there that I met Jim Hamilton, who is now my husband of 43 years.

After our wedding in 1974, Jim, who had spent the previous 7 years pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science and working on the University of Michigan computer system, decided it was time to stop being a student. He finished his dissertation, got his Ph.D. and got a job in the Boston area, where we lived for 18 years.

I was always restless in my career, moving from one job to another, always looking for more interesting work. I worked in some academic libraries (Wayne State University in Detroit, M.I.T. in Cambridge), and then in several library automation and database organizations. I became a teacher of librarians in computer work, and then a specialist in building library databases. The job that brought us to California was at the Research Libraries Group, a non-profit library database organization. I actually worked there twice, the first time for two years and the second time for five. When RLG was merged into another library organization, I decided it was time for me to retire. Jim followed me into retirement a few years later.

A major event of my recent life was solving the mystery of what happened to my biological father, and discovering a half-brother who was born to my father and his next wife in Germany. (My father had died in Germany in 1958.) My brother Leslie I and have been meeting at least once a year, either in Europe or the U.S., and have established a good relationship. This picture is of our first in-person meeting, at the Hamburg airport in 2011.

In retirement I have pursued my two major hobbies: knitting, which I've done for many years, and beadwork, which I took up after retiring. I travel a lot with friends, to take classes and go to shows. I also work on my family tree and DNA matches, looking for more family information.

In the past ten years or so I've realized how much I missed New York, where I haven't lived full time since graduating from college in 1971. Four years ago Jim and I bought a studio apartment in the West Village. I now travel to New York at least two or three times a year, staying for lengths of time varying from one week to two months. Jim, who is not a city person and doesn't like to travel, joins me for any important family events but mostly stays home with our cat, Nougat. (We are childless by choice.) I love being in the city, the Village location, walking or taking public transportation everywhere. The small apartment is the perfect size for me to stay alone, or occasionally invite a friend to join me.

Now that San Francisco is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, and our HCHS Class of '67 is celebrating our 50th reunion, I feel that I have the best of all possible worlds: retired, bicoastal, in relatively good health, doing the things that I love to do with the people I love. Unfortunately, I have kept up with only a few of our '67 classmates, but I hope to renew friendships and make new ones at the reunion.