Biography
by Sue Rautine

		I’m an Erie breed of gal—Erie, Pennsylvania. That’s the city everyone drives through in novels, but doesn’t stop at, and maybe for good reason. Diversified industry has left the city and along with that, a diversified culture. I left, first to go to Bowling Green University in Ohio for four years, and then after moving back home, to go live in Cleveland with my son and daughter and my then-husband for a few years. We moved back to Erie for a while. After Bowling Green, I was offered an interview for an editor job in California, 1960. Never made it out to California, that is until 1993 when I visited son Benton in San Francisco. By the end of the that year, I was off to California to live and work as an editor for an educational test publisher. Lucky me, my liberal arts education and ultimate graduate focus on English (and art history) opened for me jobs at a weekly newspaper, in the Erie Court House marriage license bureau, at Erie Hamot Hospital social service department, and Lake Erie Institute of Rehabilitation (brain injury hospital). I taught English and American History in a rural Erie junior high/high school and English at Penn State University Erie branch, Behrend College. Retired now, but way back when, in high school, I worked in a restaurant as a salad girl and was trained there as a waitress; in industry I typed and edited engineering design reports of submarine valves; in a safehouse, I was counselor for battered women and their children; and at a library software company wrote documentation. To have had the privilege (a few times it felt like bad luck) to work in all these professions has given me lots of reasons to carry on and know there’s always another choice beyond what I was doing. Comforting. I’m now an ombudsman (ombudswoman?) volunteer advocate for the elderly in nursing and residential care facilities. I like to continue getting understanding of what’s going on out there in the world.