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Some of you may remember that I was an artist, as well as a folk singer. I performed at folk clubs around the Philadelphia Area including the Main Point and The Edge in Bryn Mawr. I got my SCUBA certification in 1963. I finished 10th Grade at HHS and then my family moved to Chevy Chase, MD, outside Washington, DC, so I did not graduate with my HHS class. I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out later that my high school, Bethesda-Chevy Chase HS, was then rated 4th out of public high schools nationally. I edited the high school art and literary magazine, did cartoons for the school newspaper and acted in Richard III. I also played guitar and performed folk music in clubs and high schools around the area with a partner, Bob Rockwell. I also performed for two weeks as a chantey woman on the Shenandoah, a topsail schooner based out of Vineyard Haven, MA.
I traveled through Europe in the summer of 1966 with my sister and our boyfriends in a VW bus. We visited most of the countries from England and Scotland to Portugal, Greece and Turkey and everywhere else in between. Highlights were the Blue Grotto of Capri, the coast of Portugal and the French Alps in Grenoble, where they were building the Olympic Village and venues, and Grenoble, where my sister was going to college.
I studied for a year at George Washington University in DC while I was figuring out what I wanted to do. I saw the new Dulles Airport under construction and decided that I wanted to become an architect. So I transferred to one of the only colleges that accepted women and that had an undergraduate architecture program – the Rhode Island School of Design. Graduated with two degrees, one a B. Arch., in ’71 and stayed on in Providence (Fabulous city!) working mostly on schools. Met my husband-to-be, Neal, when he was getting his doctorate in physics at Brown U.
A series of post-doctoral fellowships took us first to SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island, then the Institute for Advanced Study (Einstein’s institution – the “modern ivory tower”) in Princeton, NJ, where I worked for The Hillier Group, now, with RMJM, the 7th largest architectural firm (at 1200 persons) in the world (then there were only 30 persons!). The last move was to Stanford. I worked for MBT Architects and EHDD Architects, mostly on schools. We lived on Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill in San Francisco for seven years while Neal commuted to Palo Alto.
In 1988, upon the birth of my daughter, Linnea, we moved to our home in Berkeley. After the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta Quake I changed jobs to be on the same side of the Bay as my baby and have been there ever since. In 1991 my son, Ethan, was born. Linnea graduated from The Boston Conservatory in Dance and is dancing with two small companies in SF. Ethan is an art major at UC Santa Cruz.
In the early ‘80s I took up soaring (flying fiberglass sailplanes) and did some competition and distance flying in the Sierra. I ski, both cross country and downhill, and SCUBA dive when I get a chance. I am an avid sea kayaker and I row open water vintage wooden Whitehalls on the SF Bay out of the historic Dolphin Club. I am a member of the Cal Sailing Club which is based down the hill at the Berkeley Marina. I am an avid traveler and have been to Egypt, Jordan, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Belize, Canada, Europe, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Nepal and China, Hawaii, Alaska and the Caribbean. I am also an avid photographer.
I am now retired and I would welcome contact with any of you who may remember me &/or be interested in reconnecting.
I am on Facebook as Lyrinda Snyderman and have a Flickr photo site. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/46009592@N00/sets/