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Hi, I'm jerry and I do the webs for both the CoCo Center and PL.

I live in Minooka, IL, about 55 miles Southwest of the Chicago Loop.  I  retired a few years ago and reside with my wife, Mary, who is my best friend, in a house I designed myself.  We have no children.  I'm always busy; my primary activities are keeping the house and our yard going, traveling, keeping fit (I have a minor heart condition), reading and working on the web.  

My two sisters and I were born and raised, until I was 11, in Idaho in a series of logging camps.  My father was a logger.  My mother was trained as a teacher and social worker, but spent most of her working years cooking and doing other work in the camps.   If you are interested, I added more below about my early formative years in the camps and events since.

I believe in and support fairness and social justice.  I am very interested in classism and its effects on people.

I'm in a 12 step program for alkies and have been sober since 1962.

You can contact me by email at webmaster@peerlisteners.com.

jerry

Me and co counseling

I was active in movements which (primarily) focused on personal healing and change for a number of years.  I belonged to Marriage Encounter, Beginning Experience and Cursillo and attended spiritual 'inner healing' workshops.

A psychotherapist, who treated me and was an RC teacher (and used their co counseling method), informed me of RC.   In 1980, after 4 years with him, I decided to move on and looked up RC.   I took fundamentals training, co counseled and taught 3 or 4 years.  

I became disillusioned with RC (click here to see details in a LiberateRC web article), resigned in 1997  and decided to work toward a non-autocratic co counseling organization.  After a couple of years, I ended up doing the Peerlisteners and the Co Counseling Center webs.

I still believe the co counseling method is very effective (it certainly improved my life) and co counsel with ex RCers a couple times most weeks.

Me and the logging camps and my life since

During the depression, conditions in the logging camps were harsh.  We lived in isolated company towns, called camps, and moved frequently.  The loggers were in virtual peonage; they didn't work in the winter due to weather, ran up bills at the company store to survive and spent the rest of the year paying off the debts.  Several lumberjacks were killed every year in logging accidents and more were injured, and when they were hurt or became too old to do the strenuous work, they were let go without any compensation.  Few could keep up after age 50.

My mother and father clashed often; she had a college degree and ambition to be 'better,' he was a working class man who was proud of his accomplishments on the job.  

He was very intelligent and capable and, at 19,  became an engineer on a Shay locomotive with responsibility for a train crew, which was unheard of at that age.  He later became one of the best, if not the best, bulldozer operators in the countryside.  He was stubborn, very self centered, arbitrary and hard to work with, but was able to get a job anywhere because he produced so much.  He was a bully with a short fuse; I rejected him at a very early age and just tried to keep out of his way - which wasn't too hard, since he didn't pay any attention to me unless I did something to displease him or mom demanded he discipline me.  (He spent some time later in a mental institute and when he threatened violence toward my mother, she would no longer live with him and he spent his last years in shelter homes, half way houses and nursing homes).  I missed a lot from my early alienation from my father.  He had little pretense, was interesting and often fun and was his own person.  

My mother gave me a lot of very good attention as a small child and loved me all my life.  She was much more complex than my father; where he used brute force to get his way, she depended on manipulation, passive aggression and martyrdom.  She was very confused from her own childhood - her mother was a martinet who owned a small general store and her father a dirt farmer (she was born in a sod house) and a zealous part time preacher.  After my grandfather died, my grandmother  inherited several small sums and became an owner of rental houses - ending up with small fortune of her own and a self centered, autocratic, capitalistic point of view. She used everyone, including me and my sisters.  My mother was subservient to her.  Mother was religious and we were dragged to a series of evangelical country churches, all of which taught we were going to hell if we didn't straighten out.  My distress from the mistreatment by my mother, her mother and the churches were much more internalized and harder to deal with than that from my father.

At first, my twin sister and I had a very special closeness to each other - our older sister was used by my mother for baby sitting and to be the informer and cop for us.  She was the outcast, largely rejected by us and both parents.  

Both parents were strong willed and strived mightily, by their own methods, to have their own way and dominate each other.  They tried to get us to take sides in their arguments, and the family ended up split into 2 camps - my twin and my father on one side, my mother and me on the other and my older sister in limbo. I was bright and capable; my mother held me up to my sisters (who were equally capable and intelligent in their own ways) and being the paragon tended to isolate me from them. 

I've worked on these relationships many years in counseling.  When my parents died a few years ago, I had healed enough so I felt I had done what I could and had no 'unfinished' business.  I supported them both in their later years.  I am doing well with both my sisters now.  I visit them for an extended period every summer and we have a great time.  My older sister worked on her childhood and is my strong ally.  My twin, who is well off, is still largely in denial.  She romanticizes the years on the logging camps and our family life.

In some ways, I think my twin sees clearly.  Most of the camp folks were down to earth, unsophisticated and unpretentious.  They were provincial and distrusted strangers, who often tried to cheat them and treated them as inferiors.  But they were wonderfully supportive and generous with each other.  I was hardly aware of the tiny, dilapidated shacks we lived in and the rags we wore; my father worked enough so we were not hungry or without shelter.  All the other folks, except the bosses and their families, endured the same conditions.  Besides, we were in the center of beautiful tall trees, mountains, animals and streams; with lots of fascinating events and things around.  Most of the children in the camp gathered and played kick the can and hide and seek in the evening until dark.  My mother, through wisdom or neglect (who knows?) let us wander freely as long as we came in at dark, got to meals and did our chores.  That was marvelous, although we did some dangerous things and got into trouble once in a while.

I  worked from the time I was 8 or 9 - at first as a paper boy, firewood cutter and gofer.   We moved out of the camps and I went to Boise high school, where I had  difficulty catching up in schoolwork and making friends.  During summers, I cleaned bunkhouses, did forest maintenance, clerked in a country store and fought brush fires.   I earned most of my way through college logging (hooking logs for skidding, limbing and setting chokers) in the summers; was drafted and spent 2 years in the army (stateside) during the Korean war.   When discharged, I didn't return to the mountains, but worked as a riveter and mechanic in an aircraft factory in Pennsylvania.  I was laid off there and got a job as a chemist and spent almost all the rest of my working life developing lubricants and other products for 4 different companies in Philadelphia, the Detroit area, and the Chicago suburbs.