Brent Weir by Hannah D. and Katie W.
Brent Weir (1983-1987)
Brent Weir went to Cascade High School from 1983 to 1987. After graduating Cascade HS he joined the Navy. He was in the Navy for 6 years, during that time he got married to his wife of now almost 20 years, Dayna Scwahn. Brent worked as a sales man for a mechanical equipment company. Then, ran a construction company for about four years and in 2002 was hired with the Everett Fire Department where he has been since then. Brent has four beautiful children; Aly, who attends University of Washington; Katie, a Junior at Cascade High School; Peter, a 7th grader at North Middle School; and Emma, a 2nd grader at Wittier Elementary.
I had two siblings, my brothers Rob and Chris. Rob was two years younger than me and Chris was two years younger than Rob. I remember vividly when my mom went to work, it was about, the early 1970’s and she decided to go down and work for my grandfather who owned a furniture store in Seattle and she worked there for a number of years and then she ended up taking over that business from him and when she sold the company she made a lot of money.
During his years at CHS… One of the things I did, I had the most fun doing was snow skiing. When I was 6 years old my mom took me up to Steven’s Pass, and me and my brother Rob and she said that she took us up to the top of the chairlift and when we got off the chairlift on daisy, and she said she couldn’t catch us as we went down the hill and we just kept on going down and down that whole day and every year after that she took us skiing and when we got to high school we started taking the ski bus up so that we could go up skiing on the ski bus with our friends. So during high school I skied quite a bit and actually me and my friend would get season passes and we’d go the three of our years that we had those seasons passes we would go probably 40-50 times every year so we had a lot of fun skiing.
As you probably know, the 80’s were quite the fashion decade. I remember some of my favorite outfits involved pink Oxford shirts with light blue knit ties you know the kind with the square bottoms. And of course the mullet, the standard mullet, business in the front and party in the rear. Also, I was a soccer player so that was quite the soccer player haircut to have the mullet going on. It’s funny now how a lot of the 80’s fashions have actually come back in style.
Cascade bruin teachers are some of the best! Actually it’s funny too because some of the teachers that are there now, were there when I was a kid! I remembered I had Ms. Powers, I know she’s not there now but she was not too long ago was one of my teachers. I actually ran cross country for Steve Bertrand and yeah so he’s a neat guy. I had pretty good teachers. Mostly just knew them for school work stuff so yeah.
One of the things that I tried to do was that I was always trying to take the hardest classes I could and I was always thinking about taking classes that would help me get into college. Even though I didn’t have to take math all years and, science all years, I took those. I don’t remember there being challenge classes like there is now. I think there might have been some, a few, but they aren’t as readily available as they are now. Like AP and Honors. I think there was a challenge, you could take an advance math class but that was for students who had taken it earlier like in 8th grade, who had taken advanced math. I took the regular classes but my problem was that I wasn’t very disciplined in my homework so I did really well on tests but as I got to be a senior, some of the classes, a big part of the grade was the homework and so I would do really well on the test and get A’s and B’s but when I didn’t turn my homework in, that brought my grade down quite a bit. I think I had about a 3.2 or 3.3 GPA when I graduated.
Sports were very common back then. It was kind of the big three, it was football, basketball, and baseball were what most of the kids would play that were pretty athletic. Like I said before, I skied a lot so that was probably the number one activity that I did. When I got to high school I played soccer for a little bit. I played soccer since I was really young so I played for a year, I played for two years in high school but the guys that were playing while I was playing won state championship for two of the years. They were really good so I wasn’t going to be on Varsity so I chose to do some other sports. You may have heard of Chris Henderson, the owner of the Seattle Sounders, he was one of the players on that team. Click Carnell, some of the players who played for the Cascade Bruins team during that time went on to play for the world cup and pro teams. So I stopped playing high school soccer but we had a rowing team for two years so I rowed for the Cascade-Everett joint rowing team so that was fun. Ran for the cross country team and lettered in cross country and when I was younger I played baseball, soccer and basketball.
I think around that time girls started getting more and more involved. I don’t remember the exact year but when the title nine came in the schools had to have the same amount of sports for girls as they did for guys. So, things were kind of changing around that time. Some of the sports that I did like rowing and cross country were sort of a co-ed sport so I did sports that girls did at the same time. Definitely not as many women involved as there are today.
I remember there being a lot of clubs but I didn’t get involved in too many of them. I actually wasn’t involved with a lot of service of extra-curricular type clubs. I wish I would have, looking back now I wish that I had been more involved in those kinds of clubs. But, I had not really been encouraged in that as far as my parents or anything and it was a little intimidating to me. But looking back now I wish I would have and that’s why now I encourage my kids to be involved because there are some great opportunities and it really sets you up to be successful later in life.
We move on to national events and Ronald Reagan’s new policies and economic initiative… Back at the time I was a little ignorant of the presidents financial policies, but looking back I can tell, I think in a way they did, one of his policies was trickle down economics which they really believed that the government got out of, if the business were successful then money would be made by more and more people and the home owner taxes would be generated by sales and, in that way. So by less and less regulations, private industry could flourish. I think we were directly affected by that because my mom worked in my grandpa’s furniture store. And she was pretty successful doing that so I think that if benefitted our family in a way because we were able to have a better financial situation because of the opportunities that were available to her.
Drug problems in the 80’s… I believe they were an issue . I personally knew some kids that did drugs; I never hung out with them but yeah. There were quite a bit of drugs around. Mostly marijuana was the big one, there was always alcohol which I think has been a problem for a long time but most kids smoked marijuana. And then it was the really bad kids were the ones that you heard that did cocaine. Crack cocaine kind of came out in the 80’s but I never really saw that at Cascade.
Around the 80’s is when, during that time, when I was in high school, Nancy Reagan, who was the first lady at the time, came out with a very, public, or hmm, how would you say.. yeah they publicized their “Just Say No” campaign which came about and that was, they went out to tell kids that if they just said no to drugs they could resist it, which I personally think is a little silly because I don’t know what the power was behind it. But it was still good that they were trying to do something about it but I don’t think that it was too affective. But drugs were still readily available to people.
Threat of nuclear war… Well, I can’t say that I was scared. But I think that there was always a fear that people had because the Russians, back at the time was the Soviet Union and the United States were both, it was called the arms race, so they were building more and more nuclear missiles and so at that time we had missiles that we could actually launch that would reach Russia and vice versa. We also had nuclear submarines that were out, at any one time we had multiple submarines in the oceans that could launch and basically we could point a nuclear missile at any major city throughout the world. So, the Soviet Union and the US were both kind of flexing their muscles to see who was the toughest and so there were lots of missiles being built and it was a little scary because people realized that at any one time, if one country decided to push the button and launch their missiles the other country would do the same thing and so basically the whole world would be destroyed so it was a kind of scary time in that way but I don’t think that I personally thought that it would happen but there were a lot of people that were scared.
Now, the technology level has gone up so drastically now, it’s funny to look back. I remember when I was young; I think it was before high school, when the first Pong game came out with just the black and white screen. That was the first video game ever made and I remember seeing that at a soccer party at my friends house and that was really fun. Some of the games that came out after that, Atari was a really popular one that came out and I remember when we got that game we had a lot of fun with it. I also remember the first Apple computer came out. My friends whose dad was a dentist, they had a lot of money, and they had a Mac computer, it was the Apple 2E and the screen was just green writing with green and gray screen. If you would see it now you would just laugh. It didn’t really do a whole heck of a lot but it seemed really cool! Then I remember also that we had a Commodore 64 and it had 64 I think it was 64 kila bites of memory which is an incredibly small amount. I think that one music song on iTunes has more than that so technology has definitely increased since then.
High School students with cell phones… You’ve probably seen that big gray brick looking cell phone that was iconic of the 80’s. Well, those came out at that time and what came out before that was that they had car phones. So you didn’t actually have a phone to carry around but they started putting phones in cars and so I remember, Dayna, my current wife, we had dated during high school and her dad was a very successful realtor at the time and he had one of those car phones and it seemed pretty cool at the time.
The Challenger explosion was a very major deal. It was really sad because the space shuttles all seemed that it was really, you know, you never would have thought that it would explode like that. I remember seeing it on the TV and watching it go up and explode and people were really shook up because it was kind of a symbol of our countries technology and you know kind of the cutting edge of man kinds exploration of the world and space and to see something explode like that you realize all those people just died, it was really sad. It was funny, no it wasn’t funny, it was interesting because right after high school when I joined the Navy, when I was in boot camp, they had a poster of the space shuttle Challenger crew on the wall and they often referred to that and had us look at that and think about it when they were motivating us to do our best and be patriotic for our country.
Chernobyl nuclear plant accident… Well it didn’t directly affect me because the plant was actually in Russia when it happened so we didn’t actually get radiation that I know of but it really was a scary thing because nuclear reactors were being built all over the world and it was seen as a good source of a large amount of power and electrical power, and when that accident happened it made us realize that that accident could happen anywhere so it was really scary to think that having a nuclear plant like that could cause so much damage. I know in the area that the accident did happen, many people got sick with radiation poison and I think that even now it is a very contaminated area and people can’t live near it. And so yeah it was kind of scary and it was a little far removed because it was on the other side of the world but yeah, it did affect us.
Discovery of the AIDS virus… I think that the big thing that that changed was for people that were engaging in sexual activity in the high school level, it really made them realize that they couldn’t do that without the risk of consequences. I think that even back during the 60’s and 70’s you know they had the sexual revolution and more and more people were engaging in premarital sex and they thought that they could basically do it without any consequences. But not even to mention the emotional consequences that it would bring to somebody but now they realized that there were physical problems that could arise by being promiscuous and so yeah it definitely made people think and realize that they couldn’t just do whatever they wanted without consequences.
What stood out the most… I think that the war on drugs was something that had an impact while I was in high school the most because it directly affected high schoolers.
Brent Weir went to Cascade High School from 1983 to 1987. After graduating Cascade HS he joined the Navy. He was in the Navy for 6 years, during that time he got married to his wife of now almost 20 years, Dayna Scwahn. Brent worked as a sales man for a mechanical equipment company. Then, ran a construction company for about four years and in 2002 was hired with the Everett Fire Department where he has been since then. Brent has four beautiful children; Aly, who attends University of Washington; Katie, a Junior at Cascade High School; Peter, a 7th grader at North Middle School; and Emma, a 2nd grader at Wittier Elementary.
I had two siblings, my brothers Rob and Chris. Rob was two years younger than me and Chris was two years younger than Rob. I remember vividly when my mom went to work, it was about, the early 1970’s and she decided to go down and work for my grandfather who owned a furniture store in Seattle and she worked there for a number of years and then she ended up taking over that business from him and when she sold the company she made a lot of money.
During his years at CHS… One of the things I did, I had the most fun doing was snow skiing. When I was 6 years old my mom took me up to Steven’s Pass, and me and my brother Rob and she said that she took us up to the top of the chairlift and when we got off the chairlift on daisy, and she said she couldn’t catch us as we went down the hill and we just kept on going down and down that whole day and every year after that she took us skiing and when we got to high school we started taking the ski bus up so that we could go up skiing on the ski bus with our friends. So during high school I skied quite a bit and actually me and my friend would get season passes and we’d go the three of our years that we had those seasons passes we would go probably 40-50 times every year so we had a lot of fun skiing.
As you probably know, the 80’s were quite the fashion decade. I remember some of my favorite outfits involved pink Oxford shirts with light blue knit ties you know the kind with the square bottoms. And of course the mullet, the standard mullet, business in the front and party in the rear. Also, I was a soccer player so that was quite the soccer player haircut to have the mullet going on. It’s funny now how a lot of the 80’s fashions have actually come back in style.
Cascade bruin teachers are some of the best! Actually it’s funny too because some of the teachers that are there now, were there when I was a kid! I remembered I had Ms. Powers, I know she’s not there now but she was not too long ago was one of my teachers. I actually ran cross country for Steve Bertrand and yeah so he’s a neat guy. I had pretty good teachers. Mostly just knew them for school work stuff so yeah.
One of the things that I tried to do was that I was always trying to take the hardest classes I could and I was always thinking about taking classes that would help me get into college. Even though I didn’t have to take math all years and, science all years, I took those. I don’t remember there being challenge classes like there is now. I think there might have been some, a few, but they aren’t as readily available as they are now. Like AP and Honors. I think there was a challenge, you could take an advance math class but that was for students who had taken it earlier like in 8th grade, who had taken advanced math. I took the regular classes but my problem was that I wasn’t very disciplined in my homework so I did really well on tests but as I got to be a senior, some of the classes, a big part of the grade was the homework and so I would do really well on the test and get A’s and B’s but when I didn’t turn my homework in, that brought my grade down quite a bit. I think I had about a 3.2 or 3.3 GPA when I graduated.
Sports were very common back then. It was kind of the big three, it was football, basketball, and baseball were what most of the kids would play that were pretty athletic. Like I said before, I skied a lot so that was probably the number one activity that I did. When I got to high school I played soccer for a little bit. I played soccer since I was really young so I played for a year, I played for two years in high school but the guys that were playing while I was playing won state championship for two of the years. They were really good so I wasn’t going to be on Varsity so I chose to do some other sports. You may have heard of Chris Henderson, the owner of the Seattle Sounders, he was one of the players on that team. Click Carnell, some of the players who played for the Cascade Bruins team during that time went on to play for the world cup and pro teams. So I stopped playing high school soccer but we had a rowing team for two years so I rowed for the Cascade-Everett joint rowing team so that was fun. Ran for the cross country team and lettered in cross country and when I was younger I played baseball, soccer and basketball.
I think around that time girls started getting more and more involved. I don’t remember the exact year but when the title nine came in the schools had to have the same amount of sports for girls as they did for guys. So, things were kind of changing around that time. Some of the sports that I did like rowing and cross country were sort of a co-ed sport so I did sports that girls did at the same time. Definitely not as many women involved as there are today.
I remember there being a lot of clubs but I didn’t get involved in too many of them. I actually wasn’t involved with a lot of service of extra-curricular type clubs. I wish I would have, looking back now I wish that I had been more involved in those kinds of clubs. But, I had not really been encouraged in that as far as my parents or anything and it was a little intimidating to me. But looking back now I wish I would have and that’s why now I encourage my kids to be involved because there are some great opportunities and it really sets you up to be successful later in life.
We move on to national events and Ronald Reagan’s new policies and economic initiative… Back at the time I was a little ignorant of the presidents financial policies, but looking back I can tell, I think in a way they did, one of his policies was trickle down economics which they really believed that the government got out of, if the business were successful then money would be made by more and more people and the home owner taxes would be generated by sales and, in that way. So by less and less regulations, private industry could flourish. I think we were directly affected by that because my mom worked in my grandpa’s furniture store. And she was pretty successful doing that so I think that if benefitted our family in a way because we were able to have a better financial situation because of the opportunities that were available to her.
Drug problems in the 80’s… I believe they were an issue . I personally knew some kids that did drugs; I never hung out with them but yeah. There were quite a bit of drugs around. Mostly marijuana was the big one, there was always alcohol which I think has been a problem for a long time but most kids smoked marijuana. And then it was the really bad kids were the ones that you heard that did cocaine. Crack cocaine kind of came out in the 80’s but I never really saw that at Cascade.
Around the 80’s is when, during that time, when I was in high school, Nancy Reagan, who was the first lady at the time, came out with a very, public, or hmm, how would you say.. yeah they publicized their “Just Say No” campaign which came about and that was, they went out to tell kids that if they just said no to drugs they could resist it, which I personally think is a little silly because I don’t know what the power was behind it. But it was still good that they were trying to do something about it but I don’t think that it was too affective. But drugs were still readily available to people.
Threat of nuclear war… Well, I can’t say that I was scared. But I think that there was always a fear that people had because the Russians, back at the time was the Soviet Union and the United States were both, it was called the arms race, so they were building more and more nuclear missiles and so at that time we had missiles that we could actually launch that would reach Russia and vice versa. We also had nuclear submarines that were out, at any one time we had multiple submarines in the oceans that could launch and basically we could point a nuclear missile at any major city throughout the world. So, the Soviet Union and the US were both kind of flexing their muscles to see who was the toughest and so there were lots of missiles being built and it was a little scary because people realized that at any one time, if one country decided to push the button and launch their missiles the other country would do the same thing and so basically the whole world would be destroyed so it was a kind of scary time in that way but I don’t think that I personally thought that it would happen but there were a lot of people that were scared.
Now, the technology level has gone up so drastically now, it’s funny to look back. I remember when I was young; I think it was before high school, when the first Pong game came out with just the black and white screen. That was the first video game ever made and I remember seeing that at a soccer party at my friends house and that was really fun. Some of the games that came out after that, Atari was a really popular one that came out and I remember when we got that game we had a lot of fun with it. I also remember the first Apple computer came out. My friends whose dad was a dentist, they had a lot of money, and they had a Mac computer, it was the Apple 2E and the screen was just green writing with green and gray screen. If you would see it now you would just laugh. It didn’t really do a whole heck of a lot but it seemed really cool! Then I remember also that we had a Commodore 64 and it had 64 I think it was 64 kila bites of memory which is an incredibly small amount. I think that one music song on iTunes has more than that so technology has definitely increased since then.
High School students with cell phones… You’ve probably seen that big gray brick looking cell phone that was iconic of the 80’s. Well, those came out at that time and what came out before that was that they had car phones. So you didn’t actually have a phone to carry around but they started putting phones in cars and so I remember, Dayna, my current wife, we had dated during high school and her dad was a very successful realtor at the time and he had one of those car phones and it seemed pretty cool at the time.
The Challenger explosion was a very major deal. It was really sad because the space shuttles all seemed that it was really, you know, you never would have thought that it would explode like that. I remember seeing it on the TV and watching it go up and explode and people were really shook up because it was kind of a symbol of our countries technology and you know kind of the cutting edge of man kinds exploration of the world and space and to see something explode like that you realize all those people just died, it was really sad. It was funny, no it wasn’t funny, it was interesting because right after high school when I joined the Navy, when I was in boot camp, they had a poster of the space shuttle Challenger crew on the wall and they often referred to that and had us look at that and think about it when they were motivating us to do our best and be patriotic for our country.
Chernobyl nuclear plant accident… Well it didn’t directly affect me because the plant was actually in Russia when it happened so we didn’t actually get radiation that I know of but it really was a scary thing because nuclear reactors were being built all over the world and it was seen as a good source of a large amount of power and electrical power, and when that accident happened it made us realize that that accident could happen anywhere so it was really scary to think that having a nuclear plant like that could cause so much damage. I know in the area that the accident did happen, many people got sick with radiation poison and I think that even now it is a very contaminated area and people can’t live near it. And so yeah it was kind of scary and it was a little far removed because it was on the other side of the world but yeah, it did affect us.
Discovery of the AIDS virus… I think that the big thing that that changed was for people that were engaging in sexual activity in the high school level, it really made them realize that they couldn’t do that without the risk of consequences. I think that even back during the 60’s and 70’s you know they had the sexual revolution and more and more people were engaging in premarital sex and they thought that they could basically do it without any consequences. But not even to mention the emotional consequences that it would bring to somebody but now they realized that there were physical problems that could arise by being promiscuous and so yeah it definitely made people think and realize that they couldn’t just do whatever they wanted without consequences.
What stood out the most… I think that the war on drugs was something that had an impact while I was in high school the most because it directly affected high schoolers.