About
My name is Cheryl Brunette. I’ve always been a blonde and when I was born my family lived in Detroit on Auburn. Really. I’ve taught middle and high school English, edited books, edited stories for a news agency in downtown Seoul, Korea, managed a Youth Hostel in the Pacific Northwest, owned a knitting school, toured as a singer with a Big Band, raised beef cattle, lived on three continents and done a lot of other things. I’ve spent the past few years substitute teaching and studying video production. I want to make a documentary film before I die and have started gathering footage.
I’m working on a book/multimedia project with my son and I’m learning how to make a website by doing this one. I’m slowly wrapping my analog brain around the vocabulary. It’s not that I don’t want to retire. It’s just that I keep finding things that are interesting.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting, I never knew your full bio. I do remember some interesting anecdotes you told about life in Korea as a tall blonde in a sea of short black-haired people. Were you there with the military? I think it’s cool that your dad appears to have been a trucker! My dad drove trucks for Fiester Oil and the Inkster Incinerator before taking up tattooing.
Did your parents have to enter you in a beauty pageant to get the Detroit News to feature you? You’re a total Kewpie doll in the above picture.
- Roscoe
By the time I was born my dad was the shop foreman for a small trucking company, Steel Trucking, that was a subsidiary of Sharon Steel of Sharon, PA. He was “da floor boss” who wore coveralls over his shirt and tie. I think he was a benevolent one because at least a dozen of his men (mechanics, drivers and a couple machinists) came up to our teeny cottage near Tawas every fall to cut cords and cords of wood. We never used it all. I think it was a male-bonding thing. He died when I was 11 and my life changed dramatically. No more paycheck . . . just Social Security. And I’m grateful it was there.
That picture of me as a toddler is from the company magazine at the time. It’s the news from Detroit as opposed to THE DETROIT NEWS. All you had to do was be born or get married or graduate, or just exist to be featured. It was a way the corporation could keep their guys feeling a “part of the family.” In a way they were.
My first husband was an army officer stationed overseas. We lived in a tiny village in Germany for 1.5 years, then he was stationed on the Korean DMZ in 1971. I went to to Korea on a multiple-entry tourist visa and lived by myself in Seoul in one of about four “Western-style” apartment complexes in the whole country outside of the U.S. bases. I saw him once every week or two. It was an “emerging nation” then with almost no middle class and fewer tall blue-eyed blondes who shopped in the stalls of the local market. Hence, adventures happened.
Cheryl,
You were just the cutest little baby – I hope you look at her every day and feel your heart overflowing with love for her! I love the description of the tapestry of your life and want to read more!
Cheryl – it’s just so much fun to keep up with what you are doing and to hear what John is doing now. How I envy you living in the beautiful northwest in the summer!!
Good to hear from you Sandi! It was 107º in Seattle yesterday and I could hear the moaning all the way over here. Keeping mostly cool on the island though.
It was hotter there than in Kingman!! Yikes! At least, we don’t have the humidity but…….hot is hot! Somewhat like sticking your head in the oven – and I keep that to a minimum!