Steuard Jensen's Family

Me and my family on the steps behind our garage.

My wife Kim is of course the core of my little family now, but here I'll talk about my family growing up. My immediate family consists of my father Walt Jensen, my mother Karen Amen, and my sister Charlotte Jensen. I won't even try to talk about the many wonderful people farther removed on both sides; I just don't have time. (But I should at least mention my grandparents: Florence and Paul Amen on my mother's side and Walt Jensen and Aileen Jensen on my father's.)

Great Falls was my father's home growing up; his family had lived in Montana for generations. He went to college at the University of Montana on a basketball scholarship and went on to become an intelligence officer in the Air Force. My mother's family home was Lincoln, Nebraska, but she was born in West Point, New York, and her family moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina while she was still in school (they didn't move back to Lincoln until she'd left home). She went to Duke University (she majored in English, but claims her "real" major was bridge), and then worked in banking in New York City for a little while.

The two of them met in Texas, of all places (San Antonio, I think): my father was stationed there for a while, and when my mother came to town for a cousin's debutante ball he was asked to be her escort. They fell in love at once, and their romance managed to survive a period when he was stationed in the Philippines. Before long, they were married, and my father soon left the Air Force to get his MBA at the University of Virginia (while there, my mother taught at a disadvantaged public school). After he graduated, they moved to Denver, Colorado, and my mother worked toward her Masters in geology (at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I think; my father worked in advertising). My mother had actually written her Master's thesis, but she ended up leaving the program before graduating, for two reasons: one, her advisor kept suggesting that as a woman she ought to be in the teacher's college, and two, she got pregnant with me. I don't have too much of a lingering sense of guilt about that. They moved to Great Falls to be near my father's family when they had me.

We lived in Great Falls for a couple of years, and my father's advertising job took him to Bellevue, Nebraska, on the outskirts of Omaha. (I think it was the same company this whole time; meanwhile, I seem to recall that my mother had started working a Lamaze instructor.) My earliest memory is sitting in the child seat on the back of my mother's bike as she rode up and (frighteningly quickly!) down the steep streets around our apartment in the Fontinelle Hills area.

When I was about four years old, we moved down the road to Lincoln, where my father went to work at an offshoot of the local phone company. He stayed with that job until he retired, though the details of what he did changed over time (he started out selling phone systems to local businesses, but then launched and managed a long distance phone service that turned out to be very profitable for the company). Meanwhile, my mother worked as an investment advisor for a while, and then started her own business as a management consultant (she's a master of helping groups with conflicting priorities reach a consensus). She's become very well respected and popular in the field, and was actually selected to as one of Nebraska's representatives to the World Trade Center memorial planning sessions in New York.

Meanwhile, my sister Charlotte was born in 1981. She was always more social than I was, but she excelled academically as well. For example, she was chosen to be one of the first students at Southeast High School to participate in a special internship program (hers was with St. Elizabeth's hospital and had something to do with cardiology). Beyond academics, Charlotte played on the Southeast JV tennis team and sang in Ars Nova, Southeast's elite jazz choir. (Deservedly so, too: Charlotte can sing really well. In fact, one time while we were out to eat, a waitress who recognized Charlotte asked our server, "Did you know you were serving the best singer in Lincoln?" I'd like to think that she was referring to me, but I'm afraid she wasn't. You can hear Charlotte sing a duet with herself in this MP3, made very informally while we were playing with my computer's sound recording and editing abilities one afternoon).

She went on to go to college at Pomona College (another of the Claremont colleges, just like Harvey Mudd) and majored in psychology. Embarassingly, I don't know all that many stories about her time there. She was an exchange student in France for the second half of her junior year). Charlotte is now back in Lincoln, where she works at a human resources firm called Talent Plus; she really likes her job there.

Within the past few years, my father retired from his job in the long distance business, and after some time off, he worked as a sales representative for a company called Images II that makes an advanced computer-based photo printing system for professional photographers. Later, he taught a course on human resource management at a local college. Meanwhile, my mother decided to give up her independent consulting business to work at Olson engineering firm (still as a management consultant). On a sad note, the two of them are in the process of getting divorced; we're all handling it as best we can, and I think it'll all turn out okay.

Well, that's enough family background for now. All in all, I'll just say that they're all great people, and that they've all been instrumental in making me what I am today. (I hope that's a compliment: my friends say that my father is without a doubt the source of my sense of humor, which they don't always mean in a good way.) I think family is remarkably important, and I'm thankful to have had one as wonderful as I've got.