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NANCY & ROGER MOREHOUSE
Nancy and I live on the Eastern Plateau of the Appalachian Mountains in VA. We have three sons, one daughter-in-law, one grand grandchild, two grand dogs, and a fluctuating number of grand chickens all of whom live in Oakland. Everyone loves California and will never look eastward so it is apparent that if we are to spend any time with our family (as in granddaughter) we must live closer than 2500 miles. Hence, Wolf Creek Lodge is a perfect compromise—not too far and not too close. We are also looking forward to being intentional good neighbors in our new life.
We enjoy cooking, gardening, and spring wildflowers. Nancy also plays bridge and tennis. (I say I play tennis but those who have seen me do not agree!) I am an accomplished curmudgeon, and I am currently working on an advanced degree in Lollygaging.
JO WARD
Jo was born and raised in England and moved to Toronto, Canada at age 21. She just up and got on a ship in Liverpool with $100 in her pocket. It was all she had in the world. Jo stayed in Toronto for six years. Still following her love of investigating other cultures, she married a New Zealander she met in Toronto and traveled with him through the U.S. and on to New Zealand, where they lived for a year. After living in San Francisco for three years, they moved to Grass Valley where her husband got a job. She has lived there for forty years and still loves to travel. In fact, she has been around the world twice. This spring she traveled through Malaysia and Indonesia, and she tries to go home to England every year.
Jo is a nurse case manager at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital in Grass Valley. Working there, she became aware of the many patients who had not made plans for their elder years, and she realized she needed to make a plan for herself. Cohousing, with its built-in co-support, became her answer. When she learned about Wolf Creek Lodge, she felt it was a good fit.
Jo is a very active person, even when she is not traveling. She loves to hike and has a bike and kayak. She looks forward to biking and kayaking with her new friends and neighbors when she moves into Wolf Creek Lodge. Jo also loves to read; she’s an expert knitter, and she sews. Jo’s hand-knitted socks are famous at Christmas parties, and she is part of a church group that knits shawls for sick people to give them comfort.
Jo is eagerly looking forward to moving into Wolf Creek Lodge and sharing the journey of cohousing with her new neighbors.
JERRY DILLER
Video of Jerry
I feel that I have lived a rich and full life, and that it just keeps getting better and better. I am blessed with good friends and relatives, an ex-wife with whom I am very close, two wonderfully competent and loving daughters, one son-in-law and one son-in-law to be, and a three old grandson named Jake who absolutely knocks my socks off.
I am an academic and clinical psychologist by trade and teach in a psychology doctoral program in Berkeley, specialize in cross-cultural and minority psychology, ethnic identity, and am also associated with a trauma center in Cape Town, South Africa that I visit periodically. I also write and have published several books on Jewish identity and a textbook on cultural diversity. I do a lot of social justice work and am particularly interested in the interface between psychology and Judaism.
Although I am not a traditionally observant Jew, being Jewish is an important part of my life. I have for a number of years studied traditional Jewish texts, including both the Talmud and Kabbalah, and have spent many years visiting and spending time in Israel. I have in fact just returned from a two-week tour of Egypt and then six weeks living in Jerusalem. I have an over-riding passion for travel. I have spent extensive time in Israel and South Africa, have visited many places around the world, and still have a long list of destinations to tick off. I love nothing better than exploring new cultural worlds and try to do the same here at home as well as in far off places.
I feel exceedingly lucky to have found and become a part of Wolf Creek Lodge Senior Co-Housing Community. I am in many ways a hopeless optimist, a child of the 60’s who still believes that it is possible to create a more caring and healthier world. I believe in living life as an experiment and that such efforts have to begin at the community level, and that is what I see happening at Wolf Creek Lodge. We are a group of people with very different backgrounds and life experiences, yet who share similar values about what is important in life and how we want to spend our remaining years. This kind of experiment is not for everyone, but I certainly know how it has enlivened me and enriched my anticipation for the future. I can best sum it up by quoting my daughters who told me: “Dad, we haven’t seen you this excited in a long time. Go for it.”
CLAIRE MILLER
Claire grew up in rural Saskatchewan, traveled to England for a long vacation at age 17 , eventually returning to Canada five years later having completed nursing training and having met future husband, Bob.
Later, after a couple of transatlantic trips, they married and set up home in Sunbury-on-Thames near London, where son Sam was born. A work relocation took them to Liverpool where Jennifer was born.
In 1978, the family set out on a new adventure, moving to Stow, MA. After being a stay at home Mom, while their children became independent, Claire did a complete career change – first working in a specialized custom woodworking and cabinet shop and then progressing to opening her own custom kitchen design and remodeling showroom in Concord, MA.
In 2004, when the opportunity to sell the business came up, Claire & Bob retired to Truckee, Ca.
Claire enjoys everything outdoors – gardens, growing things, flowers (wild and cultivated), hiking, skiing, swimming and boats, biking, and hanging out in the hammock down by the stream. She also enjoys singing and is hopeful of finding three like-minded souls at Wolf Creek Lodge to help form a new barbershop quartet.
BOB MILLER
Bob Miller is currently a ski bum, both downhill and cross country, in Truckee, California
He was born in England of an English mother and a Scottish father. At the age of eleven he moved, with his English accent, to Scotland. So far he is the only member of Wolf Creek Lodge to captain his High School cricket team.
He graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in Physics and returned to England. It was there that he met his Canadian wife, Claire. They had a son and a daughter and moved with them to the greater Boston area in 1978, still with Bob’s English accent. There they joined the local Unitarian Universalist congregation. They have continued to be active Unitarian Universalists.
Bob worked in the computer industry in a variety of roles and for companies large and small. His major contributions were as a manager of software engineers for both large companies and two startups.
On retiring he moved with Claire to Truckee. Besides skiing he rides his road bike and hikes in the Sierras.
He works a little for his son’s engineering firm and gets volunteered as a computer person whenever he gets involved with local clubs and non-profits.
He is excited about exploring the concept of cohousing and enjoying the Grass Valley environment even if he has to migrate from the black runs to the blue with the passing of the years.
KRISTA ERICSON & MIKE CONTINO
Krista: I was born in southern California and grew up enjoying the beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu. My family moved to the SF Peninsula where I went to high school before returning to Claremont to attend Pitzer College. I did a lot of singing including some with Guy Carawan, a preeminent folk singer of the day, and earned my B.A. in Folklife Studies. Along the way I spent a semester in Appalachia and got very involved in health care and women’s rights issues.
Mike: I was born and raised in inner-city Philadelphia, got a B.A in Philosophy and concomitantly earned my M.A. in Mathematics at Villanova U. I ran some student community involvement programs and talked about the possibility of co-housing with college friends (although the term didn’t yet exist). I then moved to Claremont Graduate School for work on a Math Ph.D. and to experience the 60s in So Cal. Since it was already the early 70s this merely confirmed my life-long membership in the American Procrastinator’s Society. I became one of the original “Faculty in Residence” at Pitzer (translation: I was a dorm mother, but that’s a story for another time), where I met and fell in love with Krista.
We moved to the SF Bay area; got married; stayed close with family in Orinda, Berkeley, Grass Valley and Nevada City; started our own family; became owner-operators of Kimberwicke, a large equestrian facility; and learned some barnyard Spanish. Krista’s love of horses was a big help (not so much Mike’s years on the concrete streets of Philly playing buck-buck, wire ball, and half-ball). In our spare time, Mike taught middle school and community college math, and Krista got her second B.S. in Nutritional Science from UC Davis.
K: As a young parent I got interested in Montessori education, earned my credential, and started Myrtle Farm Montessori, a highly popular, well-respected, and successful pre-school in Concord, CA. A career in Montessori education proved to be a perfect fit for my interests in music, science, anthropology, gardening, and animal husbandry. A decade later, at the behest of parents at my school, I founded Eagle Peak Montessori, the first charter school in the Mount Diablo District, serving elementary-aged children. I was its director and administrator for 6 years before returning to teach at Myrtle Farm.
M: I moved to teaching math at what is now CSU East Bay, mostly to prospective teachers, and did a lot of volunteer work for the California Mathematics Council (CMC), the state professional organization of math teachers. That led to work for the State Department of Education through a program at UC Berkeley. Later I became the one and only full-time employee of CMC.
When the children were young we lived in a great neighborhood with lots of friends for us and our kids. We moved to start Myrtle Farm on semi-isolated/rural land in Concord. This proved to be a great location for the school, but we lost our neighborhood and any sense of community. Our daughter now lives in Colorado (as an equine veterinary resident) and our son lives in West Sac (as a Ph.D. student in Evolutionary Biology at UC Davis). We miss them and we greatly miss living in a neighborhood of friends. We have investigated co-housing developments in various parts of the country, but never quite clicked with any of them. Then we discovered senior co-housing and knew that Wolf Creek Lodge was where we wanted to spend our active, senior years (Krista fulfills Active; Mike Senior). Aging in place speaks loudly to us and Grass Valley is the ideal location.
CLAIRE MANHART
I was born, raised, and formally educated in Omaha, Nebraska. After teaching 6th graders for one year, I came out to Los Angeles to babysit my sister’s kids while she was in the hospital having her third child. A friend had told me that since I was in California, I should visit beautiful San Francisco before returning to Omaha. As luck would have it, my brother was in San Francisco after getting out of the Marine Corps. I called him up; he met me at the airport, took me out to dinner, and took me on several cable car rides. As luck would have it again, it was a gorgeous, sunny, warm, fog-free day. And the marine air. Ah, the marine air! I was in love. Decided on the spot to stay in San Francisco. Called Mom to send out my stuff, and my real education began in SF in the 60s.
Now, I didn’t run down to the Haight to join a hippie commune, but I was definitely changed by the openness and acceptance of many around me and the music and the concerts in Golden Gate Park and Avalon Ballroom. But all was not love and brotherhood. There was the divisive Vietnam War. As a Department of Army Civilian working in the high school completion program at the Army Education Center at the Presidio, I saw many soldiers change their lives as a result of advancing their education. I also saw many being spat on if they left the Presidio wearing their uniforms. After serving in Vietnam, many returned to the US in a body bag. I worked for the government for 27 years, 3 years in Germany and 1 year in Korea. I was offered an early retirement and became a tour guide-leading many cruise trips: to Alaska, up and down both coasts, through the Panama Canal and train trips across Canada. Always I was happy to return to San Francisco until I realized most of my close friends had moved out of the area, and my closest family members were in Fresno and Folsom. I was in need of finding a community, so I came up to Grass Valley to checkout Wolf Creek Lodge. I was impressed with the friendly spirit of its members, so I moved from my beloved San Francisco to Grass Valley, which is fast becoming my new beloved city!
BILL JONES
I arrived in the Bay Area in 1971. In the early years I taught 10 and 11 year olds at Presidio Hill School in San Francisco. It was a small progressive private school that was started in 1918. This is where I first learned what community was all about. The parents, teachers and kids were an extended family.
In the later years I worked for the Golden Gate National Recreational Area, which is a part of the National Park Service. My job title was “Interpretative Ranger” which meant, generally, I told people about the Park. My favorite part was working with teachers to develop programs to get kids involved with the natural world and Golden Gate National Recreational Area. I was lucky enough to have a duplex in the Marin Headlands, which was inside Golden Gate National Recreational Area. There I lived for the last 14 years of my 19 years at the Park.
As retirement was approaching I was looking for a place to live as well as a way to retire. Since I had Park housing, when I left my job I had to leave my home. I had been looking at cohousing possibilities for some time. I took cohousing tours in Santa Rosa, Cotati, and Sebastopol. Also, some places in Portland and Tucson were appealing. I was on the Wolf Creek Lodge newsletter email list for a year before I visited in February, March, and April. I joined in May 2011.
I retired on June 30, 2011 and moved to Grass Valley on July 31, 2011. I volunteer at the local elementary school in an anti-bullying program called Steps to Respect. I’m in a training program at Empire Mine State Park. I joined the South Yuba Club Fitness Center and take Qi Gong with several Wolf Creek Lodge members. I’ve also joined the local ACBL Bridge club and play with Wayne Vasey, another Wolf Creek Lodge member. I love it here, and the Wolf Creek Lodge community is ideal for me.