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Today's Featured Biography

 
Timothy Butz

I went from marching in the picket line at our graduation ceremony to marching in formation at basic training in August ’65. While both activities were volitional, one was certainly more fun than the other. Drill Sergeants have no sense of humor whatsoever. I trained as an aircraft mechanic and was sent to Vietnam in Nov. 66 as an F-4C crew chief in a recon squadron. I came home on June 28, 1968, a day that I celebrate each year.

Following my discharge in 1969, I enrolled at Kent State. I left in the fall of 1970 to work for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I have been involved in political activity ever since. In 1978, I moved to Omaha from Washington D.C., planning to stay for a year before moving to Seattle. Instead, I married my boss and stayed in NE. We have built a great life here, with two daughters who are now making lives of their own in Washington D.C. and New York City. Our older daughter Allison Jessing operates the film program for the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery. Kaitlin Jessing Butz is majoring in both journalism and English literature, and will graduate in June 2007 from New York University.

I have held a strange mixture of jobs over the years, everything from a pizza delivery guy in college (poor pay, but lots of tips that looked like funny little cigarettes) to private investigator. I have done a lot of writing on political issues over the years; my last article was published in Issues in Christian Education, a Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) journal, and was about the issue of state involvement in religion.

After 20 years of doing civil rights investigations, I was offered a job as Director of the ACLU in Nebraska. I did this for six years and recently changed jobs. I am now the director of a mediation center that operates in 24 counties north of Omaha.

I had a stroke in 1992 that has left me with some residual weakness on my right side, otherwise I am fully recovered. I don't advise anyone to have a stroke - waking up and finding half your body paralyzed isn't much fun. However, in keeping with the lemons/lemonade theory of life, let me tell you that I now have a permanent pass on memory lapses, which my friends assign to the residual effects of the stroke.

Barb and I are now "empty nesters" unless you count the dog and the cats. With the kids gone, they do get an undeserved amount of attention. Barb is a marriage and family therapist and the Clinical Director for her agency. She is an accomplished writer and artist. I, on the other hand, am totally inept when it comes to the arts. To compensate, I watch a lot of cable TV [we didn't get it until the kids blackmailed us with a threat not to visit unless we had it]. I have quit watching TV news other than the "fake news" on The Daily Show, and feel all the better for it.

We spend a lot of time seeing live music, hanging out with friends and arguing about movies, books and local politics. We usually go to California once a year to see Barb's family in the Bay area. I rarely get back to Ohio, but I did return to Kent for the 35th memorial of the killing of four students. One of them was a friend, and our older daughter is named for her.

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