Highnam,+David


 * David Highnam** (deceased)

 **1969:** After two years at Skagit Valley College and two at WWSC, I received my B.A. degree in French in 1963. During the following summer I traveled in Europe and attended a 4 week course in southern France. I returned to marry Marji Burdine, whom I had met at WWSC, in Sept. ’63 and we resided in Minneapolis throughout the following four years. We both attended the University of Minnesota where I taught half-time and earned the MA and PhD thesis with the aid of a Fulbright Fellowship. During the summer of 1967 we traveled and camped extensively in Europe and briefly in Morocco. After one more year at the U of Minn. (and the birth of my son, Kent Michael, now 1 year old), I accepted a Professorship at the University of Wisconsin. We are currently residing in Madison, Wisc.

At Western, I met one of those “Seattle girls,” as my mother used to say, and the simplest solution to my going away to graduate school seemed to be to get married, so we packed our wedding gifts into our Dodge Dart (bought with the proceeds of my previous summer’s fishing trip to Kodiak, Alaska) and headed for Mpls., with the headlights just skimming the tree-tops By November I realized what we were in for—I simply couldn’t believe that a city of 1,000,000 people could actually function normally for weeks at a time at 30 degrees below zero. Those were good years, though—we lived snugly and cheaply in a house trailer which I went into debt to buy for the first time in myh life (borrowed $1,000 and never thought I’d recover from it). Five years later, I was clutching my brand-new degree in 18th century French lit and trying to decide which of a dozen teaching positions I would accept (that year, 1968, was the last year of unbridled prosperity in the academic field). I chose the University of Wisconsin, and spent two years in a state of military seige, being tear-gassed, boycotted, and National Guarded among other things, and giving more classes in students’ apartments than on campus before deciding to come home to the good old Pacific Northwest if a position became available. The next thing I knew, the University of British Columbia was dying to have me come. I flew out in February to have a look, and by chance chose the one day all winter when it hadn’t rained—thinking one could see the mountains every day like that, I took the job. Canada was going to be fore me a stop along the way toward bigger and better things. Nine years later, I’m still here, I love it and I’m getting bigger and better every day. Teaching French lit is like sharing life with people, and I feel like I’ve done a fair amount of living in the past 20 years. My most painful time was my divorce of a few years ago; now I’m living in a “blended” family with my own adopted daughter and my wife’s daughter. My eleven year old son, Kent, lives three blocks away, and the dust never settles in this house. Gone are the days of stable security—my mortgage is pushing $85,000, I drive a 1965 Land Rover, and I can hardly wait for summer to come so my son and I can begin work on our log cabin in the Canadian Okanogan. I work hard, I pronounce been like bean, I dream of starting a sheep ranch, and I’m just beginning to feel less like a callow youth and more like a mellow sage.  Of all the class pictures I must have accumulated through twelve years of schooling in Mount Vernon and ten years thereafter, the only two I can now find are my grade two picture from Cleveland School and the ’69 reunion picture. There, smiling at me across 31 years of history, are people like Clark Moore, Larry Whalen, Norma Sundquist, and many others that I’m hoping to see again this summer.
 * 1979: **Twenty years ago, upon graduation from Mount Vernon Union High, I had decided to become a diplomat (I had no choice, you see, because the spaces between my teeth and my adolescent acne banished me forever from Hollywood). Two years at Skagit Valley College soon gave me to understand, however, that career diplomacy demanded courses in political science, history, hypocrisy and so forth, but foreign languages, which was the part I really loved, was simply a handy accessory. So, moving on to Western Washington State for my undergraduate degree, I decided to major in French, because my father had an old Order of the Garter drinking cup with “honni Soit qui mal y pense” on it, and I used to dream about that story and its exotic slogan for hours on end.