Featured Residents

Ron Romine    

The first eight months of Ron’s life were spent in an incubator in Harborview Hospital. (Lucky for him, the incubator had just been invented.) His family lived on Capitol Hill and every day, his father delivered his mother’s milk to the nursery for Ron. Ron was the middle child of his father’s second family, but the youngest boy. For several years until he went into the service, he was the only boy with four younger sisters at home.

Ron’s paternal grandparents were some of the first settlers in Illinois. When World War I started, they moved to Canada as sharecroppers and eventually owned 900 acres of wheat land. Ron heard they moved to Canada to keep their two sons out of the war. Ron’s dad was allergic to wheat so he became a teacher and a principal. After the failure of his first marriage, he was disillusioned and moved to Seattle where he met and married Ron’s mother.

Ron’s dad was in his late 50’s when Ron was born and he remembers being ashamed at his dad’s age at the Father/Son events and at his dad’s lack of physical prowess. After he grew up, he realized who his dad really was, a very intelligent man who could do many things and taught Ron many things, i.e., to dance, to play cards and he always pounded in his head to be athletic. Ron attended Concord Grade School and Cleveland Junior High and High School. When he was in high school, he won many dance contests, turned out for baseball in the 9th grade and made second team as a pitcher, and often accompanied his father downtown to play cards and he became an excellent card player himself. His first job was selling the Seattle P-I and Seattle Star at the Boeing plant while he was in high school. He quit school in the 10th grade and joined the Air Force where he was stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas.

After his discharge, he lived awhile in Portland and then returned to Seattle. He met a girl from Holy Names who was pretty, wealthy and smart. As soon as she turned 18 and he was 21 they were married. He says he definitely was not ready and left after 6 months. He worked for a carnival, dealing cards and he was considered very good at it. In the off season, the owner of the carnival got him jobs with a shipping company and he traveled. Las Vegas was next stop for him, working on the original Strip. He remembers seeing Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and he would often make $300/night in tips. When the P.R. person for the company decided to pool the tips and divide them evenly, he was out of there. He remarried and he and his wife traveled all over the U.S., again with a carnival. Their new son slept in the back of the car and they lived in motels. Finally, they bought a trailer when their daughter was born. Now that he had a family, they decided to settle in Lewiston, Idaho where he became a car salesman and won a trip to the Bahamas for being top salesman. After a move back to Seattle, he worked as a roofer, an apartment house manager and built trailers. He decided he wanted to work for Metro as a bus driver. They told him they were not hiring 41-year olds, so he went back every single day for six months until they finally gave him a job. He drove bus for 15 years until he was hit by a man who ran a stop sign and the bus turned over. He escaped with a broken leg, but in a month, he and his daughter were hit on the freeway and his daughter was airlifted to Harborview in a coma. She survived. Again, two months later, he was hit by another person running a stop sign and he froze and was scared to drive. His boss said if he didn’t come back next week he would be terminated. So, he lost his job at Metro.

All the time he was working at Metro, he drove from 4:00 a.m. to noon, slept a few hours and dealt cards at the Nugget from 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. There, he ran a couple of games and oversaw three more. He has interesting stories about a man leaving the table and going next door to rob a bank and coming back and resuming the game until the police figured out where he was. He said that gambling is a serious addiction and only 1% of people with that addiction ever recover.

He and his wife were divorced after 22 years of marriage. He contracted Leukemia and yes, started working another job at age 67. He started working at Safeway in the south end. His boss said the he had never seen an older person work so hard. Although he really liked the job and got to work at nights in the meat department, he was forced to quit because of his illness. It was about this time that he moved to Hilltop House.

Ron has a granddaughter who is his pride and joy and for the first 16 years of her life, he spoke to her on the phone every morning. Teenage activities now preclude that, and he finds that hard to deal with, he says. About his life, he says he prides himself that he can always get along with people and his mother taught him that no matter how bad off you are, there is always someone worse off and that you should never be rude to people because it may be the last time you see them and then you would feel bad. All of these are good rules for a good life and we are glad that Ron is living his life here at Hilltop House.

Lynda Moss

Lynda started painting at 10 and hasn’t looked back since. She studied the fine arts at Valley Jr. College, UCLA and Cal State, often going back for years at a time because there was a new instructor.

Lynda’s family was involved in the theater. Her mother an actress and brother a model, Lynda opted to make the scene beautiful by working behind it. Set design and construction were part of her early career.

Having encountered some emotional stresses in recent years, Lynda has turned to her painting for therapy and escape. She says that her art has helped her recover from loss.

Matthew Fields

Matthew was a professional boxer. He had a debilitating stroke several years ago and his doctor told him that he owes his life and the progress he has made in recovery to the fact that he is in very good physical shape.

He trains every day as he did during his boxing career, doing sit-ups, squats, bike riding and walking backwards. His tenacity and determination are admirable!