YMCA Consultant

In 1960, I had the opportunity to live and work in South America with the Asociación Cristiana de Jovenes, la YMCA, first in Lima, Perú, and then in Maracaibo and Caracas, Venezuela. In el Perú, on a YMCA of the USA World Service Fellowship, I had the privilege of being the Secretario Fundador de la YMCA de San Isidro y Miraflores, a branch of the YMCA of Lima. As a result, I was asked by Claire Johnson, the founder of the YMCA of Venezuela, to join a group of Peace Corps Volunteers in a newly arranged program of cooperation between the two entities.

In Puerto Rico, during Peace Corps training for the Venezuela YMCA group, Tyke Marshall, Joe Jaycox (Hicoax), and I spent three days of jungle survival training together and decided we could survive working together in Maracaibo. Joe started working in Caracas but after Tyke and I finished the hard work of initiating the YMCA program in Maracaibo, he decided to join us. Actually, it was because Hernan Romero had taught the three of us how to speak Maracucho and they didn’t understand Joe in Caracas. His Chicago English wasn’t too easy for Tyke and I to understand either. The YMCA did get off to a good start, particularly after we found a permanent headquarters (Centro Toddy Denia). Although our biggest accomplishment was to play basketball for Luis Aparicio’s Bar.

After a year in Maracaibo, I married the cousin of our board chairman, who was also the niece of a Caracas YMCA board member. Not knowing what to do with us, they shipped us off to Caracas so I could become the eyes and ears of the national director of the YMCA, relating primarily with the new YMCA programs in the interior. I was given the job of traveling throughout Venezuela so I couldn’t get into too much trouble in one place.

My wife and I had two sons after we moved to Whittier, California, USA, and both were registered at the Venezuelan Consulate. They are officially Venezolano Americano. In Whittier, I was the founding director of the East Whittier YMCA branch.

Following post graduate work in San Diego, California, I worked with Neighborhood House Association where, as deputy director, I wrote grants and was planning director. These grants now are valued at over $100 million and include the San Diego Food Bank and San Diego County Head Start. Head Start alone serves over 10,000 children each year.

In 1980, after two years as Associate Managing Director and Executive Director of the Human Development Center (now Youth and Family Services) of the YMCA of San Diego County, I began a career of more than twenty years as a business communication consultant and psychotherapist, in order to cure myself. It didn’t work but I am still young. Well, younger than my neighbors in the senior community in which I live.

Half of that time was spent in Columbus, Ohio, due to family needs. There I met my present wife, Joy. She has a son in Chicago who is married to a Dominicana. We spent some time in Santo Domingo in 1998, getting to know the family, and again in 1999 for the wedding and a vacation.

Joy and I now live in San Marcos, San Diego County, California, near the boys, their families, and their mother. We are one big family, celebrating holidays and special family events together with our five grandchildren. Joy and my former esposa are good friends and I feel blessed. Family is very important to us all.

Presently, I am privileged to volunteer with Early Head Start Services to Pregnant Families as an in-service trainer, after over twenty years as a general mental health counselor with a specialty in Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology. I also teach Psychology and Human Behavior courses at National University in San Diego. I belong to the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), California Mental Health Counselors Association, the San Diego Peace Corps Association, the George Marston Chapter of the North American Fellowship of YMCA Retirees, and am a former member of a number of professional societies that I no longer can afford to support.