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Today's Featured Biography

Ruth Walker Palmer

Life has been very good. I retired from a wonderful career at M&M/Mars where I worked most all of my career in sales and marketing. What a "sweet job" it was dealing with Snickers, M&M's, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers and the other confection products on a daily basis. My work frequently took me to all points of the United States and I worked in 15 European Countries. My career was literally like a fantastic hobby, I could not wait to get up and go to work each day. What a world it would be if everyone had such a job that they could be so passionate about. I was both lucky and blessed!

All that ended much ealier than I would have liked, due to being diagnosed with 3 different cancers within a 7 day period in December 1999, not exactly what I had on my Christmas wish list. I often say my job is now at MD Anderson as I spend so much of my time there. One of the cancers is Multiple Myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow that while it is incurable, it is somewhat manageable but requires ongoing care. I had a Stem Cell Transplant in 2000. While it was not a cure, it has prolonged my life long enought to see the Houston Astros play in a World Series and my prayer is that I will live to see a grandchild.

I married Robert Palmer, PHS Class of '61. We have been blessed with two children. Our first, Charles, was born with a type of MD and lived only one year. We then adopted our second son, Wesley, who is now 35, still single and back in college, a "late bloomer" to say the least. Robert retired from the Petro Chemical business after 34 years at the Pasadena "Ethyl" plant, which like most of those plants these days ended up with several names like Albemarle, and then MEMC.

We moved from Deer Park in 1995 to a beautiful ranch with 389 acres in Limestone County (Groesbeck-Mexia). Beautiful place, away from all the traffic and congestion in the Houston area, the clean air was a trade off for cedar allergies galore. But the commute to MD Anderson simply got rougher each year. Robert had a heart attack with an emergency lifesaving 4x bypass in 2005. With that, we threw up our hands and said it was time to go back home, to be closer to the fantastic Houston Medical Center. Too bad that you work all those years, save the nest egg to enjoy retirement on something like that beutiful country ranch and then you have to make a difficult decision to leave it because of the the need to be closer to good medical facilities. Something to think about when you retire. No place like home!

We now live in Taylor Lake Village. For those of you who moved away, this is in the NASA area, we are one mile off of Clear Lake and can I can look out my back door and see Taylor Lake. This area is growing like crazy and becoming more beautiful year. There is now a 30 story high rise, the Endeavour, on NASA 1 with several more breaking ground on Clear Lake. We enjoy some of the local spots to eat on Clear Lake, just to sit and watch the thousands of sail boats head out the Galveston Bay!

I spend time being the good volunteer with preference to youth programs. I am on the Executive Committee of the State Board of Directors for the Texas 4H Youth Development Foundation. I was elected to the Board of Directors for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in June, 2008, where I have spent over 20 years on the Calf Scramble Committee among others. These organizations are fantastic and support over a million youth in Texas each year.

I worked on 3 of the previous class reunions and look forward to this 45th one....if I can just hang on for the next 2 years. Meanwhile it will give me some fun to do to fill some of my time. Looking forward to our reunion! Email: sarahruthpalmer@aol.com

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