Ralph's Work

     "Going to talk a little bit about Ralph’s work  over the years.    When we got married he had already been working in the Bay area for six or seven years. He finished his Bachelor’s and his Master’s Degrees at Brigham Young University in geology and then he got a job with Chevron out here when there was lots of work in oil and he really enjoyed that. 

     "But then the bottom dropped out of the oil market and they were laying off a bunch of their geologist and so he got laid off.  Ralph was very good about looking for work, worked really hard at it, and was able to find a job at an environmental company in the Concord area.  Before we got married he got a job working for E & E, Ecology and Environment,  working for them for about a year when we got married.  He was an onsite geologist. What he would do was he would go to these different sites and work on them, drilling wells, there would be some contamination in the soil.  He would drill wells that would pull up oil and water samples so that they would be able to find out how bad the contamination was then plot it on a map and figure out where the extent of the contamination was and the recommendations for cleaning it up. 

     "He did this for many years. He’s been with them for almost 20 years, I think 19 of that was during our married time.  When we got married he was working down on site near Hinkley in  California that was near Barstow, and he would be down there working on the site for ten days then home for four days, he did that for quite awhile. A lot of  people would say, “Wow how do you stand that?”   I was seeing more of him that than I did before we got married. It was a long distance so it was just a reality, it was just something that we had to work around, it wasn’t our favorite thing but a good job, he had employment.  

      "I’m glad he had work in his field and so we were fine.  He lived very frugally, so just after 11 months of marriage we were looking for a house.  We bought our first home there on 3379 Moretti Drive in Concord just down the street from Holbrook Elementary School there near Pixie Playland and we lived there for nine years. And all that time he would hop on BART and go into the City when he was working there.  We did a lot of trips out to the airport  to drop him off and to pick him up.

   "I remember Amy, Kristy and Eric really enjoyed going to the airport, we would get there a little bit early to watch the airplanes land and take off, Dad would come out, we would give him hugs and kisses then we would take him home. Then it would be time to go drop him off.   Sometimes it got to the point where it was hard to haul all the kids around.   He found it was easier sometimes to take BART in or he would drive and he would go to the park-n-fly and then fly on out.     

    "He’s worked in Barstow, and Bakersfield they’ve got a lot of sites there and up north in Eureka, he did a job up in Kenai, Alaska. He’s done some work up in the Sierra’s, he’s done some work down in New Mexico, He’s done some work in Kuwait, and in Guam. We’d been married about six months when he was sent to Guam for a month.  Fortunately I was very busy, my sister was getting married so I was sewing her wedding dress and my mom had got the basic form of the dress together so I was doing all the beads and the lace on it --- working for a temp agency  working for Bank of America and so that kept me busy working on that wedding dress while Ralph was out of town.  

     "He also worked right after the 9/11 bombing he was actually in Spokane, Washington and he had to rent a car and drive himself out because he couldn’t get a way home.  He worked in Hawaii one time, I wanted to go out with him so badly on that trip!  He was in Hawaii for a week in Oahu and thought that would be so perfect, but unfortunately it was the first week of school and I had three kids to get into school and I thought, “I just can’t do that to the kids”, to have mom gone for the first week of school.  If it had been any other week, I would have been there. 

     "Also right after 9/11 he went to Washington, DC for anthrax sampling.  It was probably in October or November that time. So he was in Washington DC for about a week to 10 days, yet again another place I would have loved to gone with but that was not the time with anthrax sampling- it just wasn’t the time. 

     "So the only time I’ve ever traveled with him for anything work related was when I was pregnant with Kristy,  when I went with him to Buffalo, New York for his award for being with the company for 5 years, also when he was with the company for 10 years they had stopped doing the big meetings where they brought everybody in, too much financially.  

     "He moved offices several times in San Francisco and they were downsizing each time. And Ralph finally decided he was wanting to look for something that was a little more out of the consulting industry and more into something that was a little more stable. So he did a lot of looking around, looking around the state.  I’d already had my first bout with cancer, so we knew that we needed to be extremely cautious of where he went to work where it would not leave us in a situation where we were not insured, or that we would have lots of insurance."

That is when he got a position with the Regional Water Quality Control Board, with the State.