Karl Birky

Mathematics major
Class of 1971

(1/17/2014) I got your email related to the journey I have traveled since graduating from Goshen College in 1971. It has been a fun, enjoyable trip and Goshen was very helpful in equipping me for it.

Let’s see where do I begin? After graduation, we wanted to live in another country and applied to teach high school in the West Indies. I remember skipping class at Goshen soon after the Kent State killings. Jamaica hired us and we taught at Clarendon College for two years. I taught math and Ginny taught Cookery. It was a great start. We returned to the US in 1973 and decided to work two years and then begin graduate school. We chose Ohio State University.

At Ohio State Ginny got her Master’s in Education and I got my Master’s in Healthcare Administration, graduating in 1977. The Math Education degree from Goshen was a very good basis for my graduate work. We moved to Columbiana, OH where Ginny taught Junior High Home Economics for 5 years. I was the assistant administrator at Northside Hospital in Youngstown for 3 years until my boss moved to a position in a hospital in West Virginia. I assumed his position as Vice President for 3 more years. It was a period of transition for the Youngstown Hospital Association and 1400 employees is too many for me with 3 years of experience. I accepted the position of Assistant Administrator at the county hospital and nursing home in Cortez, CO for 3 years beginning in 1984. Managed by HCA, it was a good place to learn, travel and grow. It was also 8 hrs from Denver, Salt Lake City and Phoenix. It was a 3 hour drive to the nearest freeway in Gallup, NM. It was remote, but very beautiful. Ginny taught high school in Cortez.

In 1987, my father retired from the Mennonite Home and Village in Albany, OR. The board was looking for an administrator and my father suggested that they should get one with formal training. He suggested (in 1985) they ask me what a trained administrator wanted in terms of compensation and board assistance. They stayed in touch with me over the following two years and we decided to accept the CEO position in 1987. There were some major changes that were needed and I made them. Things went very well, but after a couple upset residents and I suppose age, I decided to leave the Mennonite Home. (My grandfather was the founding secretary 40 years before I got there and two other grandparents had died there). I wasn’t sure what to do. We liked the west, I was a fellow in the College of Health Executives and out of the hospital loop, I was tired and Ginny was teaching in the high school. I wanted and needed a vacation and resigned in 1989 after nearly 3 years. Ginny told me I had to do something and so I told her I would go to school and study. She asked what I would study and I didn’t know, but told her “engineering”.

Oregon State University refused to admit me the first time I met with them because of my career, my age and my experience, but I really wanted to study engineering. I was admitted into the Industrial Engineering program, but realized it was an MBA with an engineering bent. I didn’t want that. But I had courses in Statics and Dynamics and knew I am an engineer at heart. I finished the Civil Engineering curriculum in 1993 and began working at designing subdivisions. It was like someone took a rope and jump started my brain. It was great fun. I was a rookie and needed to begin at the bottom on the drafting table. But of course, life has twists and a friend of Ginny’s at Oregon State University, who was going on a Fulbright, asked Ginny if she could take a leave of absence for 1 year and teach her college courses. And she could begin work on her PhD… Two years later she only had her dissertation and defense left and began looking for a faculty position in Education. George Fox University hired her and she is now tenured and teaching at the Master’s and Doctoral levels. We moved to Newberg about 12 years ago from Albany.

I got my PE in 1997 but by then I was 40 and using my management, people and negotiating skills more than my engineering computational skills. It was interesting how I could be very excited about my new job and career and most of my friends were tired, frustrated and feeling trapped. I began working for Multi Tech Engineering in Salem, OR in 1999 designing subdivisions. In 2003 or so I sat another exam and became licensed as a traffic engineer in Oregon. It gave me a very fun specialty and I worked at that until I saw the recession coming and thought I should change firms in 2008. I did but was laid off in 2010. I did the consulting thing for a year and it was fun. I was really retiring and ready to slow down. Ginny was still teaching.

In the summer of 2010, she did a 3 week consultation in Kenya at the schools run by the Friends Churches there. She took me along and it was an interesting trip for me. Of course we did the safari thing and saw the country. We visited a hospital about 4 hours from Nairobi and it reminded us very much of Jamaica, where Ginny and I had taught in the early 1970’s. We visited schools and I was struck by the way they teach to rote. I was especially sad to see the erosion that is occurring. They have lost several feet of topsoil and I’m not sure they realize it yet. One of the schools we visited was so proud of their new 18 toilet bathroom for the 600 female students, but were wondering what they should do to fix the system since it was plugged. (It is a stretch to serve 600 people with one very large drain field). Kenya has or will have a significant sewage problem as they grow. When we got home, I got a job with a wastewater treatment facility, so I could learn about sewage treatment. We think we’ll go to a third world country for a couple of years when we retire. A friend wanted me to come to his office and practice traffic engineering there for a couple years and I am doing that for a while.

In January, 2012 I finished 5 years as chair of the board for Friendsview Retirement Community here in Newberg. It was good to be teamed with a very good executive through this downturn. The community is doing well, but I have less hair. Let me summarize with some thoughts. No, we weren’t able to have children, but decided we would rather “want to have kids and not be able to have them than not want kids and have some”. I think there are more of the later. Changing careers and disciplines was very, very wise. It let me start over again and that was worthwhile. I don’t think it would have mattered if I was in healthcare first and engineering second or vise versa. We visited Puerto Rico (where I was born), Jamaica (where we taught for 2 years) and Kenya in the last 3 years. I think we in the US have so much to give, but we prefer to watch a football game or argue about politics or the environment. There is great need in the world. God is very good, expects us to pass His goodness on and not be lazy, oppressive or provincial. Someone told me Moses was 80 when he began his career and had 1 day of retirement.

I turned 66 in December and Ginny turned 66 in January. I suspect we’ll work for a couple more years and then see if there’s a 3rd world country that would let us teach. I think I can teach elementary management, math or civil engineering for a couple of years. I think it could be fun to teach in Indonesia, Africa, Jamaica or somewhere else. We’ll see. I keep writing stuff on the side. I had a few articles published in Chip Chats, a wood carving magazine, in the past and this year had an article in the American Management Association “Shift” online journal and two others in a wastewater trade magazine. They help me keep thinking and changing.