When I Was 24

At 24, Catherine Lanigan  was a new Mom . This was Ryan on his Baptism morning. She 
lived in La Porte, Indiana, where she lives now. She was not working, but she'd graduated from college two years earlier. There were no jobs in teaching or just about anything else back then.  She was and still is a voracious reader. A year later, she moved to New Orleans where they lived for three years. 
Catherine Lanigan, with Ryan, age 24

At 24, Anna Adams lived in Hawaii, dividing her time between playing with her best bud--her baby son, giving up sleep to do homework for an English degree, and discovering she had motion sickness when something felt horribly amiss during her first SCUBA class.

At 24 Muriel Jensen had been married to Ron for a year, living in an L.A. suburb, and working in the secretarial pool of the Los Angeles Times.  She was taking the Famous Writers School correspondence course in fiction writing!

At 24, Pamela Tracy lived in Lubbock, Texas, attended Texas Tech University majoring in journalism, and worked as a waitress at Red Lobster making just enough to pay for her one bedroom apartment and tuition.  


Pamela Tracy sitting in her friend's apartment passing the time away

At 24, Karen Rock lived in Albany, New York, had gotten laid off from her first ever grown-up job as a bank customer service agent, had been dumped by her "serious" boyfriend, and was pretty sure her life was over.

At 24, Kate James lived in Toronto, Ontario, after having spent eight of her formative years living abroad. A recent engineering graduate, her day job was project manager. In her spare time, she taught art and renovated houses for resale. Of course, she had dogs. Two Siberian Huskies at the time.

Kate James, age 24.

At 24, Cynthia Reese didn’t even own a computer . Instead, she was in the middle of gutting a house that she and her husband had moved from Augusta, GA to its current location while working as an ad sales rep ... and never getting past Chapter Three of any of her works in progress.

At 24, Melinda Curtis was in graduate school at the University of Georgia, was married to Mr. Curtis, and had a gray cat with a crooked tail.

At 24, Anna J Stewart was a full-time college student working part-time at Waldenbooks to feed her addiction to romance novels.

At 24, Rula Sinara spent 10 days living with the Kuna Indians on the San Blas Islands off the Panama coast. She also hiked up to a waterfall in the Darien Jungle while she was there. She was part of a vision screening trip led by doctors and students at her optometry school, where she'd just finished her first semester.


Rula Sinara in the jungle


Rula has a book out this month!

At 24, Amy Vastine received her Master's degree in social work and started her first job in an elementary school working with early childhood students. She celebrated her first wedding anniversary and was very "busy" trying to start a family ;)

When Shirley Hailstock was 24, She was living in DC and according to her family living the Mary Tyler Moore life. She was single, had her own apartment, a career, friends in high places (Washington Post, Government jobs), a car, her own money, no bills, no children, and loving it.


At 24, Marion Ekholm was planning her wedding, working as a lace designer on Fifth Avenue in New York City and making her wedding gown in the lace she designed.

At 24,T.R. McClure and her future husband rode from central Pennsylvania to Glacier National Park in Montana on a 1975 Triumph Trident motorcycle. They made it in five days. 

T.R. McClure says: Stiff? Yes. Fun and adventure?  You bet.


At 24, Patricia Bradley was hiking the bottomland and hills of Mississippi, looking at trees to buy for her family's lumber mill. And in her spare time she was training and showing saddle horses.

At 24, Patricia Rosemoor, half of Lynn Patrick, was a radio-television producer for the Chicago Board of Education.  Having already traveled through Europe several times on her own (no prior planning), she did the same when she took her mother to several countries in South America, the highlights of which were trips to Machu Picchu in Peru and Iguassu Falls from the Argentine and Brazilian sides.

Lynn Patrick has a book out this month!


At 24,  Liz Flaherty had three kids and a husband and a full-time job and they bought their first house. She did her writing in coil-bound notebooks with clear Bic pens. 
How sweet it is

At 24,  Leigh Riker was married and living in New York, pregnant with her first son, and planning a temporary move to Kansas. In her spare time she wrote short stories but hadn't yet sent any to market.

At 24, Syndi Powell packed up all her belongings and moved from Detroit to Los Angeles to study screenwriting at UCLA. She had many adventures but found out that Dorothy was right: there's no place like home. 

At 24, Loree Lough lived in a tiny house in Maryland farm country with her husband and daughters, and wrote short stories for confession magazines.


Typing away

Loree has a Heartwarming this month!

So, what were you doing when you were 24?

Comments

  1. This is such a terrific idea for a post. Thanks for thinking of it and letting me participate.

    I loved seeing the pictures!

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  2. I love this, too--it was a great idea. And I love your picture, Kate!

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    1. Awww...thank you, Liz. I should have taken the time to find one with me in a hard hat and construction boots, but that one was handy! I love the one with you and your kids. It looks like you had your hands full! :-)

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  3. So much fun!! I loved reading through and seeing everyone's pictures!! Happy Monday, everyone :).

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  4. Such a fun post! It's so interesting to see where everyone has come from and the different paths life leads you down. I turned 24 3 days after giving birth to my 3rd child. I was a stay at home mom trying to make ends meet. I was desperately trying to be the perfect housewife (I wasn't), create cute arts and crafts projects to decorate our tiny home (I couldn't) and put fabulous meals on the table (I didn't). But my house was clean-ish, my kids were clean, happy and well fed, despite the fact that I'm not a gourmet cook, and I had a wonderful used book store down the road that I haunted every week to find books to disappear in whenever I found time to myself.

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    1. Sounds like great fun. I'm not a cook either and at best my house is cleanish/clutterish LOL. I love book stores.

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    2. Someone told me once that people who could stand clutter were well adjusted and that I was very well adjusted. :-)

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  5. Pam, what a brilliant idea. And aren't we a fascinating bunch? Sounds like most of us were headed down the writing path or inadvertently collecting research for future books! I love the photos, too.

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  6. Wonderful post, Pam. You come up with some great ideas. My name did change when I was 25 and got married, but it went to EKHOLM not the concoction in this blog.

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  7. This is great! At 24, I was a stay at home mom with a precious two year old and I loved every minute of it.

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    1. Melanie, I won't ask how old that precious two year old is now.

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  8. This is so great. I can't remember what I was doing at 24 which was why I didn't send anything in. Love that everyone knows so clearly where they were and what they were doing.

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  9. What fun it was, getting a glimpse of the women we were before we became the women we are!

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    1. I agree, and I'm pretty sure I had your typewriter

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  10. What a great post! Like Roz, I don't remember exactly what I was doing, but it was similar to Shirley's life...except I was in the D.C. suburbs. I loved the pictures!

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    1. Cool, Jill, and what were you doing in DC?

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    2. I grew up in the DC area. At the time, I worked as an account manager for a domestic relations law firm...talk about fodder! :)

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  11. At 24 I had just started in the mortgage banking field and met my future hubby.... though at the time he was just the boss with his feet on his desk :)

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    1. Robin, and now his feet are on the easy chair watching telly, eh?

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    2. More like feet on the desk, playing Solitaire on the computer LOL

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  12. I love seeing what everyone was doing at 24!

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  13. I loved this post. It allowed me to go back in time and revisit those best of times days. Of course, all the past days are the best of times.

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  14. How fun to see where everyone was at 24. Pamela, I'm a Red Raider, too. At 24 I was married, working in a bank in Wyoming, and spending weekends camping and exploring the state. We had two Siberian Huskies and a terrier mix with Houdini tendencies.

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    1. Wow! Those three pups must have been a handful! Huskies are known to be independent minded, and my two certainly were. They were terrific and were fast!

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    2. I graduated in 86. My favorite restaurant was Garski's Loft.

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    3. Kate, fortunately we lived a little out of town, because mine loved to sing together. They were fast, and when they got loose the wouldn't let us catch them. Fortunately, they always fell for the open car door "Let's go for a ride" trick.

      Pamela, 82 for me. I likes Garski's, too, but Mesquite's was my favorite. Lived in Bromley Hall, which was a dive but I understand has now been converted to luxury condos. Changing times.

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    4. the signing comment made me smile. My Huskies didn't do it that much, but I had a Malamute after them, and I could get him to howl!

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  15. I must have had a boring year at 24. Hmm...I dont remember it. The year was 1997...I was working at a local credit union in a call center. I was single.

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  16. What a fun post Pamela. I love your photo. At twenty four, my hubby and I were exploring the Canadian west in the summer and living in the giant redwoods during the rest of the year.

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    1. I've told Don that I want to RV the U.S. and Canada when we retire.

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  17. Let's see I was a newly wed and I had my first baby son Joshua on Christmas Eve 1998! It was fun and challenging. Fitting in reading was interesting. Jenny

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    1. Joshua is the number one baby name. My son is Michael. It's number 2.
      And, cool beans, a newlywed.

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  18. Thank you! It was a fun time!!!!

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  19. Gosh, thirty years ago. I was pregnant with my third child, not working.

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  20. Oh how I enjoyed reading this!! Such a wonderful array of interesting lives. At 24 I was raising my daughter and working in Manhattan as a Coordinator for MasterCard International. I learned so many great things there.

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  21. What a great post! So much fun to hear of everyone's past adventures! At 24 I finally graduated college, got my heart broken, and ran off to work on a farm. It was a difficult time but, many years later, it became the inspiration for my latest book, Wild Horses. Thanks for sharing your history, and I love all the photos!

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  22. At age 24 I was in the USA and stationed at Shemya, Alaska (the next to the last island on the Aleutian Chain.

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  23. At age 24 I was in the USA and stationed at Shemya, Alaska (the next to the last island on the Aleutian Chain.

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