Janet BoylanJanet was raised in southern Oregon, where she went through school. She graduated from Southern Oregon College with a degree in teaching. After working in Oregon for six years she moved to Alaska, where she taught at Campbell Elementary and Clark Junor High School, retiring in 1996, when her youngest son finished high school. She started going to the Anchorage Senior Center in 1996 mostly to play bridge. She hadn't played tennis since high school, but found that was something she also enjoyed doing with other seniors. She gradually became interested in helping on the Board of Directors and found that it was essential to raise money for operations for the Center. She first got interested in getting family stories on paper, and then branched out to include her classes, and getting them to write their own stories. When the Center found itself very short on funds, she decided to do a book on the Alaska Earthquake of 1964, The Day the Trees Bent to the Ground, which was published in 2004 and is now in a third printing. When not compiling stories she and her husband, Don, have a cabin near Gate Creek, and they enjoy the winter sports offered in the area. ""If you are going to live in Alaska you have to get out in the winter,"" she says. Other snowbirds leave in the winter, she leaves in the summer, if at all. She hopes that people who read the books she helps put together enjoy the stories as much as she enjoys collecting them and getting them printed. She says, ""Everybody has a story to tell."" Read More Read Less