Jay, Rodney

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Comments: In high school, I was a shy, skinny kid with a bad complexion, thick glasses, and few friends.   My father was suffering from alcoholism and my parents had just gone through their third divorce.   High school was not a good time of my life.   Fortunately since then, my complexion cleared up, I grew a couple of inches, put on some much-needed weight, became more gregarious, and have had a wonderful life.  
After high school, I started college at Weber State, but my education was interrupted when I was drafted into the Army.   I spent most of my two years in the army on the beautiful tropical Japanese Island of Okinawa, where I began my love of the diversity of human culture.   After my military service, I returned to America, lived in California for a couple of years and went to school at Diablo Valley College, before returning to Utah.   In Utah, I continued my education at Weber State College.   I again interrupted my education, leaving college in my senior year to serve an LDS mission in Brazil from May 1973 to May 1975.   At a missionary reunion in October of 1975, I met a beautiful returned lady missionary, Marsha Foster (Skyline High School, class of '68).   She quickly became the love of my life, and six months later, in April 1976, we married.   Over the next 19 years we had 13 children.  
In June of 1976 I graduated from Weber with a bachelor's degree in Physics.   I returned to college in the fall of 1979, attending J. Reuben Clark School of Law at B.Y.U.   During my second year of Law school, with less than a month before the birth of our fourth child (the oldest being 3   ), I was working full time, going to school full time, building a home, and trying to be a good father and husband.   I decided to make my family my greatest priority, and once again postponed my education.  
I have worked for the past 25 years at the Utah State Hospital in Provo on the forensic unit, working with mentally ill offenders, while raising my 13 children.   I find my greatest joy in my posterity, watching them grow, struggling through the teen years and then blossoming.   I have had to continue my love of diverse cultures through my children, sending them on missions to Finland, Korea, two to Russia, and one to Oakland, California, Spanish- speaking; and yes, Oakland is a foreign culture.   I still have five teenagers, an 11-year-old, and a nine-year-old, so retirement is still several years off.   In the last two years I have also learned the joy of having three wonderful grandchildren, with the promise of many, many more to come.