’77 Hawk Profile
Virginia “Ginny”
Barrett LaMoyne
sweetvirginia59@aol.com
Hi, I’m Virginia Pierson – LeMoyne,
better known to all of you as Ginny Barrett. The band geek with the big coke
bottle glasses (I kept those things way longer than I should have-lol).
After graduation I attended the University of Florida for a
couple of years and then took a little vacation. I spent the summer of ‘79 in
Daytona and then moved to Charleston, SC with a
couple of my girlfriends. I took a year off but soon got tired of waiting tables
for a living and went back to school, earning an A.S. in Chemical Engineering
Technology from Trident Technical College. While
in Charleston I met my
first husband, Bill. We married in March of 1982 and moved to Scotland where he
served out his four years.
Bill got out of the Navy in December of 82 and we
left Scotland for Clearwater where my
grandparents were living. We moved into a little crackerbox
apartment and started saving our money to move to California, which
was Bill’s home state. In August 1984 we packed up our belongings (what would
fit into the back of a Toyota 4x4) and
took a 2-month cross-country trip to California. We must
have hit just about every major state park between here and there –Smoky
Mountain National Park, Mammoth Caves, Grand Tetons,
Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone, Sequoia, Big Sur
and numerous small ones in between. It was a great trip.
We settled in Moorpark, a small town on the
outskirts of Los
Angeles where we stayed for 7 ½
years. I started school again as soon as I became a resident and earned a B.S.
in Chemistry from the University of California
Northridge. In 1987
my daughter Kaitlyn was born after a couple of years
we began to talk about moving back to Daytona because we didn’t want her gong
to public school in LA. So in the spring of 1991 we packed up our gear again
and took a 3-week trip back to Florida, this
time following the southern route to see the Lake Havasu, the Grand
Canyon, and spending time with some of
my family in Louisiana where we
visited New Orleans.
Once we arrived back in Daytona. Bill began a job
welding for a company that makes wellpoint pumps and
I went to work at NASA were I worked for a company that was responsible for
testing all of the chemicals, water, fuel and oxidizer that go onto and come
off of the space shuttles. We bought our first house and my son William
Mackenzie, or Mickey to us, was born in 1992. Soon the two and a half-hour trip
to NASA and back every day began to wear on me. I quit my job there when Mick
was about 18 months old and went to work at an environmental testing firm in
Ormond. After 4 years there I worked for five years at the City of Holly
Hill running the city
wastewater laboratory.
In 2000 Bill and I divorced and I began dreaming
about a new career. My mother had always suggested I go to nursing school so I
decided to give it a try. I started school at DBCC in January of 2002 (about 2
½ months after my mother died) and graduated with my ADN in Dec 2004. I worked
for Florida Hospital in
Ormond while I went to school and started in ICU as a RN after graduation. The
January after I graduated from DBCC I started the master’s program at UCF. I
hope to graduate in December of 2008 with a Master’s in nursing and in January
2009 I will sit for the boards for my license as a family practice nurse
practitioner.
In 2000 I met my soulmate,
Wes LeMoyne and fell in love. He is from Miami
originally but moved here at 13 and graduated from Mainland in 1984. After
seven years together we married on April 28th of this year. We had planned to
honeymoon in France but gave
that up to move into our new home, which we did on June 1st
(France will
wait until after I graduate). In the mean time we are having lots of fun fixing
up our little old house. Kaitlyn is now a beautiful
20-year-old. She just finished her first year at DBCC and wants to transfer to
UF after next year. Mick will be 15 in November
and will be starting high school at Seabreeze (where I spent my first year of
high school and where his sister graduated in 2006). So that brings me to where
I am - a dog, a cat, two kids, a husband, and a house. Pretty
damn perfect, if only I could finish school again.
See you all soon,
Ginny
(Posted 07-01-2007)
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