Some True Stories About Real People
Derek Werner
Real Estate Developer to U.S. Army Enlisted Man
Derek Werner was born December 1, 1958 in South Gate, California. He currently lives in Bogota, Colombia and travels extensively through South America. He is now working half time as a consultant to the US Embassy while his wife, Jennifer, works in the Defense Attaché office of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. Derek investigates fraudulent documents.
When I go out of college, all I wanted to do was make money. But my parents had always raised my sister and me to give something back.
I grew up in Costa Mesa, California; my father was a Psychology faculty member at a local community college. I eventually earned a degree in Economics at Claremont College in Pomona where I met my wife, Jennifer, who received her degree from Scripps. I became a CPA and received my MBA from UCLA. At the time, I went into business school so I could make more money.
Both my parents have advanced degrees, my mother with a Masters in Education and my father with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. They met while attending USC and dated for seven years. Dad was born in Norway and Mom in Nebraska. My sister is four years my junior and teaches first grade in Whittier. My family traveled a great deal and taught us the value of discipline. We were easy kids to raise and had a pretty happy family.
Shortly after graduation from Claremont, I was hired by Peat-Marwick working primarily with real estate development and investment banking. After two years with them, I entered the UCLA MBA program with an emphasis in Finance and Management. Immediately after I earned my degree, Jennifer and I got married, and we toured the world for nine months, which initiated our travel interests. Returning from this tour, I worked for Trammel Core Company, which was at one time the largest real estate developer in the world. We bought land, built industrial parks, and held them for profit and gain. At that time the Japanese were buying a lot of real estate in the U.S. Jennifer, in the meantime, was working for Xerox and then did some medical sales.
Jennifer and I have been married for 16 years. I met my wife in 1979 and bought a house in Newport Beach. We’ve rented it since we’ve been in the army. We both joined the army in 1989 and we both took a $12,000 per month pay cut – it was significant to us. When I first got out of college I got a $65,000 bonus my first year working. I worked three years as a CPA, two years as an MBA, and then three years in real estate development. We’d been lucky, had made some money, and talked about how we could serve in some way. One day Jennifer announced that on Saturday she’d invited an Army recruiter to our house. Then on Wednesday they’d meet a Marine representative and after that an Air Force person. This was in 1988.
We were 30 years old when we enlisted in the Army. They had a program for married couples in the Army, and despite the fact that they were the opposite of “shoot-‘em-up-gun-type people”, we enlisted. We were able to go to Monterey in the Language Institute where we spent six hours each day learning Polish. They paid off all my graduate student loans plus an $8,000 bonus to sign. We wanted to keep our house in Newport Beach, so we couldn’t afford to join the Peace Corps. We found ourselves in Fort Jackson, South Carolina in basic training. It was really interesting. I was working guard duty with this kid from New York City. I asked, “What were you doing before?” He said, “Dealing drugs.” He asked me, “What were you doing before?” I said I was dealing in real estate and he said, ‘Oh, pretty much the same thing, huh?’”
We spent a year in Monterey, California. While in basic training, a guy was doing a report on married people in the Army. He said the article was going to go worldwide. Things snowballed and we ended up on an NBC program. These tapes were sent to Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense and General Verona, the Army Chief of Staff. They asked us if we’d be willing to do a media tour. We ended up on CBS in New York and CNN followed us around the country. My parents’ friends asked what are they doing? We had a feature piece done on us and we went to Germany for a year. We went to Warsaw and we got into an embassy program. It consists of 60 people whose assignment is to move from embassy to embassy. It’s a civilian clothes assignment. At the end of the four-year tour of duty, we decided that I would quit while Jennifer stayed on Embassy Attaché Duty. We enjoyed living around in Germany and Poland. We’ve had a great time ever since. We travel a lot. Since I ended my enlistment, I’ve been doing consulting work overseas. I’ve followed Jennifer and gotten all of her benefits plus I’ve got seventy thousand tax-free income.
Unfortunately, I had a melanoma discovered one-and-a-half years ago, so I’ve been taking it easy. When in Russia, I had to make payroll and pick up large clumps of cash. With all the organized crime in Russia, this was a rather dangerous assignment. So I’m not working full time now. I deal with fraudulent bank statements and phony visas. Seventy percent of the documents presented to the embassy are fake. We love to travel and we get both Colombian and U.S. holidays. I plan the trips while Jennifer works.
Our change was something that was built in. The military filled our bill for travel and they treated us quite well. Being as educated as we were, we were very much outside the profile of their typical recruit. As linguists we hardly ever worked overtime and we were regarded like pilots. We were supposed to stay sharp. We’re now at our fifth embassy in nine years. We like a lot of the third-world countries. We’re scheduled to go to West Africa in the near future.
The biggest adjustment was all the extra free time we suddenly had. The basic training was even OK though I wouldn’t want to do it over again. We kept journals at the time. I guess the bureaucracy was a great adjustment to us. You couldn’t just make things happen. You’d have to go through a hierarchy.
Having your finances in order can give you a great deal of freedom to make change. If someone’s going to make a big change, both spouses must take part in it. We decided not to have kids since we were going to Kazakhstan, where it’s not so easy to raise children. Both people have to agree 100%.
My ego is not caught up in my job. We have friends who make lots of money, but that’s not important to us. We’re happy we had our degrees. We’ve been all over the world. We plan to retire and move back to Newport Beach in nine years or so. We’ll both be fifty at that time. We’ll be set financially. We think we know what’s important in life. We never thought we’d stay in the Army, though. That’s been a big surprise.
øøøøøøøøøøøøø
George Rothman
Dentist to Computer Programmer to Playwright
Born in 1933 in Strasbourg, France, George lives in Irvine with his wife. He has two adult children, a son and daughter. He has written 7 plays, is at work on an 8th, and his first play entitled, “Where Were You on Your Ninth Birthday?” was shown this year at Orange Coast College. The play reflects his Jewish heritage as a son who escapes imprisonment by the Nazis while his parents were taken away to their deaths. He later lived with his great-uncle in Hollywood whom he refers to as his father.
During the war, I lived in an orphanage. A couple who took it upon themselves to support me oversaw my welfare. It was too dangerous for them to allow me to live with them because of my Jewish heritage, so I lived in the orphanage, but they watched over me. I was nine at the time my parents were arrested by the Nazis. I was ill and in the hospital with a kidney ailment or we would not be having this conversation today. That was my window. I was not taken away. To this day, I don’t know why they hid me
After the war I moved to live with my great-uncle who supplied cloth for the Hollywood movie industry. I now refer to him as my “father”. My “father” had no formal education beyond high school but he was aggressive and successful in his profession. We lived quite well. I was thirteen when I came into his life and there were no ifs, ands, or buts about going to college - - you went. Also, I was expected to enter a profession – doctor, lawyer, or dentist. I chose dentistry, attended UCLA as an undergraduate and Case Western in Cleveland, Ohio for my dental training. I completed my studies in 1960. Then I joined the Navy. I had been drafted, but the Navy let me defer my enlistment until I finished my education. I was in the Navy and got married while enlisted.
In 1963, I was released and set up a dental practice in Manhattan Beach, California. At first the business was interesting, but after a few years I became disillusioned with the work of a dentist. I didn’t like the stress, the work didn’t fulfill my interests, and I didn’t like dealing with pain. By the time I felt this way about my work, I had my family. Since I considered the family THE most important thing in my life, I continued dentistry despite my dissatisfaction with this career. And after twenty years practicing I avoided the most common pitfalls of dentistry – drug addiction and affairs. Dentists also have a very high percentage of suicide. Since I disliked it so much, I distracted myself with activities that were interesting. I realized my family was what people strove for, and I had that, so I stayed with dentistry for twenty years.
I wasn’t an entrepreneur-type of dentist. For me it was just a job. My wife substituted as a teacher because the children were growing up and she wanted to get out of the house. I would get the children ready for school. Manhattan Beach was a very nice little community at the time. I could walk to my office. We could pick up shoes for the kids and pay the shopkeeper later. In the mid-70’s, my wife went to USC to get a degree in Library Science. She worked for a small Catholic girl’s school in Inglewood.
At this time I’m about forty-years-old and my discontent with dentistry got real strong. I thought about leaving every day so I tried to distract myself. I got very involved in writing, attending workshops and classes at UCLA. I was writing novels mainly for the distraction and to keep the creative side of me active and happy. It also put me in touch with interesting people I had more fun with. I started feeling the need to write after I’d been married for a couple years. I would send my stories out to magazines. I was also interested in music. I earned a degree in music from Cal State Dominguez Hills to formalize my knowledge of music. I learned the piano and guitar. I love opera and I always come home to Pucini and the Romantics. Verdi I like, but he’s not Pucini.
In 1976, I decided I couldn’t continue running my practice so I sold it and began working for other dentists. Simultaneously, my wife wanted to work as a librarian in the public school system. She began applying. Soon after she was offered two jobs: one with Beverly Hills and another with the Irvine School District. She commuted from Manhattan Beach an hour each way to Irvine for two years. She really hated the commute, so that’s when I decided to buy another practice in Los Alamitos and moved to Irvine. The new practice was a disaster. I hated it. I had absolutely no interest in running the practice. My daughter was in high school and my son moved to UC San Diego. This is the time I felt I had to make a life decision.
I don’t call the Los Alamitos practice a mistake. My interpretation of mistake is when you do something wrong. If I spell a word incorrectly, that’s a mistake. But when you make a decision that turns out to be the wrong decision, it’s not a mistake. Based on what you had going for you at the time, it was the best thing you could do. So I’m not going to call that [my Los Alamitos dental practice] a mistake; I’m going to call it a decision that didn’t work out. Things were going from bad to worse and my whole emotional being was in complete turmoil. The lucky thing is that my wife understood, and though finances became tight, she supported me in my moves.
Now I’m 47. What do I do? My wife was very nervous about my personal agitation. She was my emotional support at this time. I went to a company that specialized in career counseling, that helped me break down my interests into possible saleable skills. They take you apart into small pieces than put you together again into a new puzzle. What kept showing up in these inventories and discussions was the computer field. I thought, “Computers! That’s passed me by. How can I find work in the computer field?” To make a long story short, I learned to become a programmer from a vocational school in Anaheim. I began working part-time as a dentist. My wife was now the main income earner.
The fact that my wife became the principle wage earner didn’t bother me. I think that, as a man, that’s important. I had to let that part of my ego go. Some men would consider this situation too demeaning to them. I think I have a very strong ego outside of the work I do. So those were the two foundation blocks that made this first change possible: my wife’s support and my not caring about her financial support. I began working two days a week working for a friend, a dentist, while I was attending the computer school for a couple years.
Now I really had to have a strong ego because now I was a 49 years old man looking for an entry-level position in computer programming. Interviewing in the corporate world was an entirely new experience. I got a job after four interviews at Rockwell. I had never worked with fellow employees before as a peer. The relationships among dentists were different. I had been my own boss up until then. Many of my new co-workers asked me where I worked before. When I told them I had been a dentist, they (I imagined) became suspicious about why I would ever give up a lucrative career like dentistry. Was there a malpractice problem? I had a great adjustment to make in this corporate community I knew very little about. It was a microcosm of society – you had janitors, executives, rank-and-file workers, everybody. I managed to successfully integrate myself, however, and was successful.