Joanne Elliott Storlie, Johnston

Profile Updated: April 12, 2010
Residing In: Flagstaff, AZ USA
Occupation: MassageTherapist, retired teacher/wilderness guide
Children: Kristin Storlie, 38, my only kid, will be getting married for the first time October 10, 2009. She's More…worked in Las Vegas as a costumer for Cirque d'Soliel for the last three years. Before that, she worked for 10 years as a costumer for the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. She went all over the world for Jim Hensen's Muppet Shows, showing people in other countries how to manage the costumes for their Muppet Shows. She's also been a river rafting guide in California, Oregon, and Idaho.
Yes! Attending Reunion
Comments:

After graduating from Oakland Tech, I lived in San Francisco for seven years while I got my BA in Creative Arts during the school year. During the summers I rafted rivers all over the west, which is what I did every summer starting in junior high.

In '67 I moved to Minnesota to marry Duncan Storlie, a river guide I met in Idaho. There we worked for Outward Bound in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, then started a business called Lynx Track Winter Travel, where we taught people winter camping skills, how to cross-country ski and drive dog sleds for a week or so at a time in the BWCA. We also took people on canoe trips during the summers.

Our daughter was born during this time and accompanied us on many of our wilderness trips.

I also worked for 20 years at Minnetonka (near the Twin Cities) High School in their alternative program, which took kids on bicycling, camping, and hiking trips for a week or two at a time.

I got an MA degree in Family Counseling, which helped me work with these "alternative" kids and their families individually and in groups.

My first marriage ended amicably after 25 years. A year later I met one of my former students, Brad Johnston, and married again.

We bought three acres with a cabin that was built in 1880, near Lake Minnetonka (which is a suburb of Minneapolis). I went to massage school for two years, then started Log Cabin Massage, which people called the Granola Spa since it was so rustic. They could hot-tub, walk a 70-foot labyrinth, which I mowed into the field on the highest point in the county, wander in the gardens, hike the wooded trails. That all ended after 15 years when Brad and I divorced, we had to sell the land, and I moved to Flagstaff to be near my family ~ my brother, his kids, my grand-nieces, and my daughter four hours away in Vegas. That big change was in May 2008.

Like so many baby boomers, I'm still working at 67 and loving it, doing massage at the local country club, driving school bus, and during the summer driving for a couple of river companies who run the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

School Story:

When people ask me about high school, I say that I got a lousy academic education, but I got a great education about people and other cultures. Coming from the lily-white Oakland hills, I'm glad I learned how to be friends with other white kids, Asians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, and others.

Since I worked summers with my family's rafting business all over the west, I didn't have much of a social life at Tech. I dated a guy from San Francisco my whole time in high school, so I wasn't real tight with kids at school. I had only one or two friends at Tech.

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