The Sharon Poppen Interview

Sharon Poppen grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She was raised by a loving grandmother in a house consisting of her mother, a younger brother, a grandfather, three teenage uncles and an aunt only nine years her senior. They were a wild and crazy, in a nice way, bunch that thrived in an atmosphere of caring and protective love. Sharon was a quiet child who loved playing paper dolls. The neighborhood girls said they couldn't play if Sharon wasn't around, because she made up the best stories. They'd play for hours in their own little version of soap opera sagas. Even then, character development was what drove Sharon's creativity. By age fifteen, her mother had remarried and given birth to a sickly child forcing the family out of the cold Midwest winters into the sunny and bright Southern California coast where she graduated from high school. Since then, she's been an avid student of the University of Real Life, URL. And while it may not have been filled with wise professors and thick textbooks, it brought her into the world of decision-making, coping without a safety net and a look at the good, the bad, the beauty and the ugliness of human nature. Her journey through the years has had her living for periods of time in Albuquerque, NM; Simi Valley, CA; Livermore, CA and finally to the wonderful Southwest desert of Lake Havasu City, AZ. To pay her way she worked for a time at the University of New Mexico in the early days of the computer and campus unrest. However, most of her working career was spent with the Pacific Bell Telephone Company from which she retired. Retirement brought her the opportunity to travel and there are few states that she has not visited, including Alaska and Hawaii. The URL also brought her a couple of husbands, two wonderful children, three delightful stepchildren and five darling grandchildren. During the years sh