Tag Archives: John Watters

John Watters writes:

You are right that I was Student Body President. The way the system worked back in our high school days was the following. We elected a Student Body President and a Senior Class President at the end of 11th grade. Those elected served in those roles the first semester of the Senior year. Then at the end of the first semester we elected a new Student Body President and a new Senior Class President. So I served as Student Body President the first semester and as Senior Class President the second semester. Being Senior Class President the second semester meant I had to speak at our graduation. The other class speaker was our valedictorian, who I believe was Susan Tamura. During that second semester when I was Senior Class President, Nick Sanden as Senior Class Vice-President and Kathie (Swanson) Watters was Senior Class Secretary.

I suppose most of our class is still in California although many no doubt are living elsewhere. We have been living in Duncanville, Texas, next to Dallas, for the past 15 years. However, we travel 40-50% of the time out of the country. We lived in Africa for 26 years (Cameroon, Kenya and now visits to Nigeria) plus a year in France before moving to the Dallas area. We have been working in the areas of Bible translation, linguistic/language analysis, and development of educational materials, all in African languages. Kathie got her B.S. in Nursing from University of California San Francisco (with two years at UCLA) before we got married in 1970 and then she got a Masters in African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, in the early 1990s. I got a B.A. at UC Berkeley in History (1969), had two years at Fuller Theological Seminary, and then a Masters and Ph.D. in Linguistics at UCLA around 1980. We have been involved in a variety of roles and responsibilities and living situations over the years in Africa, and that continues more recently out of Texas involving language, linguistic analysis, training Africans to do the same in their own languages, developing educational materials, and the translation and use of the Christian Scriptures in African languages by Protestants and Catholics alike.

P.S. We have two daughters, 41 and 39, who have given us two sons-in-law and three grandchildren each. That makes three  granddaughters and three grandsons. We also have a son, 35, who produces apps for iPads and iPhones for Bottle Rocket Studios, but no daughter- in-law and no grandchildren, at least not yet.

John Watters

see more:  https://www.sahsreunion.org/?page_id=79