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Today's Featured Biography
Victoria Bennett Murray
1961-1962 Attended freshman year at Stephens College, up to my chin in snow!
1962-1965 Transferred back west to USC, pledged Kappa Alpha Theta, and
graduated USC: BS psycholgy / education
June 1965 Married Carl Murray, pilot; graduate of the United States NavalAcademy, Annapolis
1965-1968 Lived in Westwood while Carl worked full time and earned his M.B.A.
degree on a Hughes fellowship @ the Anderson School of Business @ UCLA. He worked for many years heading up mergers and acquisitions for a multi-national corporation. I worked for awhile as a decorator, which I enjoyed much more than teaching.
1968-1996 Moved to Bel-Air (40 years later, you'll still find us here).
After 8 years of marriage, our first daughter was born. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts and is now an artist living in Los Angeles. In 1979 our 2nd daughter was born. She became a metal sculptress (you know, those huge 30 ft. high things in front of bank buildings that you wonder what they are), but is now in architecture school and living in Los Angeles. Love having them nearby (still in nagging and hugging range).
I had the privilege of becoming a full time homemaker and spent those years raising children and 2 retrievers, cooking, gardening and, whenever I could steal the time, retreating to my studio to paint. Raising 2 future artist daughters was interesting. Let's just say that we saw more than our share of pink and green hair and out of work artist and musician gentlemen callers. I often marvel that we made it out of their high school and college years with our sanity, more or less, intact.
Travel has always been our abiding passion and through those busy years we always managed to somehow fit it in, either just the two of us, or dragging our kids along with us to faraway places with strange sounding names. Over the years, we have walked on glaciers, sailed the Lower Sunda Islands, hunted for Komodo dragons, driven around all (and been lost in many) of the capitals of Europe, tented on the Masai Mara, climbed the Great Wall of China, and circumnavigated South America, rounding the Horn one Christmas Eve. We rode on horseback into Petra, spotted real pirates on the Java Sea, visited the ruins of the Aztec, Maya and Inca, shopped the bazaar in Istanbul, tucked prayers into the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and walked in the footsteps of Christ. We heard music drifting out of an upstairs window and danced the tango down the middle of the street one sleepy afternoon in Buenos Aires, wined and dined on the Orient Express, bobbed and floated in the super salty Dead Sea, hiked to remote villages in the hills of northern Thailand, and watched the sun rise over Machu Picchu. Covered up from head to toe, I was enchanted, but scared, while traveling through Yemen, gathered seashells on deserted Indonesian beaches, and we held our children close while counting stars from the bow of a dhow one very dark night on the Indian Ocean. We were robbed once in Budapest, sailed up the Nile and down the Amazon, drank vodka in Russia, reveled in the spices of Casablanca and said we'll always have Paris(at least I hope that's what we said. It was, I admit, after a very long lunch and probably several glasses of wine at La Mamounia.
1996 It had been 31 really wonderful years and then I got zapped, but good, by the Cancer Fairy. What a journey THAT was! After 3 surgeries, and a year of radiation and high dose chemotherapy, I dodged a really big bullet and beat stage IV cancer. It wasn't easy. For better, or for worse, it gave a new direction to my life. Funny how nightmares can sometimes turn into odd blessings.
1998-2007 I became a cancer resource counselor, a patient advocate, and served on the Campaign Council to rebuild St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica (home of the John Wayne Cancer Institute).
Current: I'm happy to say that my beloved husband is now retired, often home for lunch, still involved in angel venture capital, and playing lots of golf. I recently took off 2 years to take care of my mother before she passed away. Now I hope to start painting again and I'm looking forward to returning to my work with newly diagnosed cancer patients. I am also planning to become more involved in working as a survivorship advocate with a special interest in the late and long term after effects of cancer therapy. Carl and I still enjoy traveling and sharing interests in history, archeology, anthropology, cooking, wine, and fly fishing. We have now discovered the joy and ease of cruising (just having fun and letting others do most of the work!) and look forward to doing more of it. I still have never learned to play golf, still haven't mastered Spanish, nor edited 44 years of home movies, and lots of other things not yet completed on the list. Maybe I'll do these in old age (that's after the "golden years" arrive). I do try to remember to get on the tread mill (hate it), do crossword puzzles, and floss. But, it does seem as though there are fewer and fewer hours in the day with still so much interesting work to do, and so many wonders yet to see. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing everyone at our (gasp) 50th. It should be great fun! It would be a special blast from my past to see any of the old 'Cajons and Vogues(you know who you are!). Until then, "Namaste" and hugs all around.
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