Ronda Zoellick by Rachel T. and Jolene S.
Ronda Zoellick (1973-1977)
Ronda Zoellick graduated from Cascade High School in 1977. She didn’t have a formal college education; however, she did take classes at Everett Community College, Edmonds Community College, and Shoreline Community College. She never put the credits together to get a degree, though. Straight out of high school she began working for an insurance company as a clerk. From there she switched to John Fluke Corporation where she worked for 15 years. While working there she met her husband, Raymond Zoellick. After the marriage Ronda moved into a rental house in Bothell with her husband. She decided to quit her job in order to start a family. She had three kids: Raymond Zoellick, her oldest, Joshua Zoellick, the middle child, and Korinne Zoellick, her youngest and only girl. After 9 years of living in the rental home the Zoellicks bought an acre of land and built a house on it. They didn’t move far though as the new house was only about a mile away. After her kids grew up a little bit Ronda started working again, this time at Berry Neon Sign Company. She works in their accounting department as a biller. She still has this job today. Her husband and she have been married for 25 years. Their two oldest children are off at college and their youngest daughter is a senior in high school.
Let’s see, I graduated from Cascade High School in 1977 so I went to Cascade in the 1970’s. They didn’t have a whole lot of clubs back then. I mean they had a few but none that I was really interested in. I was more into sports so I didn’t pay that much attention to the clubs. For sports I ran cross country, track, and played basketball. The sports teams were pretty decent. I remember in my sophomore year we took 3rd in state in football. That was the only year we made it to state though. I remember we would have one or two people that would go to state for track but never very many. I went to state for cross country the year I ran. Of course it was the first year that there was a girls cross country team and they made me run. We had a pretty good basketball team but I don’t think we ever made it to state. I remember the first time I ran the hurdles as being very memorable. I took 1st place and I really wasn’t expecting to. It was during my freshman year and it was my first track meet. As for the food drive I don’t remember there being one. If there was it was really small, nothing like what you guys have now. It’s pretty exciting to hear about it on the news and to think about how it’s grown is just so cool. As for the structure of Cascade itself, I think we had 6 class periods back then. There were between 2000 and 2100 students. I remember it being a big school because there were only two high schools in the area. We had Everett and Cascade and that was it. Jackson hadn’t been added yet. My sister went to Everett and in my opinion it was a better school. My brother had a bad reputation there though so I went to Cascade. My favorite teacher at Cascade was Miss Dinnetz. She was a PE leadership teacher and just a really nice lady. She’s long gone now though. The class wasn’t like a normal leadership class, you could take those, but this class was like a PE class. However instead of the teacher teaching, the students did. The teacher acted as a guide to the student who was teaching. I liked it because that’s what I was interested in. I was going to go into college at that point in my life and possibly become a PE teacher. Physical Education is what they used to call it, but now they call it Kinesiology. My least favorite teacher was probably Mr. Millikan. He was a history teacher. He didn’t like me. He can’t still be there though because he was pretty up there in age when I went there. As for what the students wore casual dresses were pretty normal. The shorts for girls were really short. Jeans were also pretty normal. We also wore T-shirts but most of the time we tucked in our shirts. We didn’t have to wear anything fancy since we were a public school. Long hair was really in but then as I got to my senior year shorter hair started coming back. People cut their hair short and halfway through the year I cut mine too. We also had a fully open campus. You could come and go as you pleased. There was never any question about whether or not you were going to be allowed to go off campus. You could pretty much do whatever you wanted. You wouldn’t see that now. As a result I never ate at school. I left every single day. I either went to McDonalds or Wienerschnitzel. There was a McDonald’s down the street where you could get a Big Mac, fries and a drink for a dollar. Wienerschnitzel was down the road even further. I remember that I really liked their chili cheese dogs. I haven’t eaten there for 30 years though so I’m not sure if they’re still around. I don’t like McDonald’s anymore either. I’ll eat there once in a while, but not very often. We then moved on to Homecoming Week and the various festivities that went on. We had spirit dress-up days during the weeks of Homecoming. Homecoming was actually two weeks back then. You started voting during the first part of the second week and then the day of the Homecoming football game there was a big assembly. They had a big spread and they made the gym all fancy for the coronation of the King and Queen. It was really cool because all the girls were in really pretty dresses and the guys were wearing tuxes. The assembly was at the end of the day so the girls would go and get dressed right before it started. Right after school everyone went to the Homecoming football game. The court was still wearing their dresses and tuxes. During half time an announcer would call them onto the field. They would either ride on a car or walk depending on what they wanted to do. After they were all on the field they would make a big circle. Right after the football game was the dance. It wasn’t the next day like it is now so you couldn’t spend all day getting ready. What happened is you would go home from the football game and then you would have a half hour to change before you left for the dance. Sometimes you could fit in a fancy dinner with your date but not very often. You always had a date though. You never would go singly like you do now to dances, at least that I can remember. Even though everyone went as couples it didn’t have to be romantic. You could go as friends but mostly it was couples. At the dance there was always a live band which was really cool. They would never have a DJ like they do now. I remember really liking that because you could interact with the band. Just like today some people would hang out around the edges and talk, but most people danced for the majority of the time. As for refreshments I think you could get a drink of water. I don’t remember there being too much juice though. You always had your pictures taken. The dance was held at school like everything, including graduation. For graduation you had tickets like you do today but you didn’t have very many because there wasn’t very much room in the gym. The parents would sit on the sides while the students sat in the center. They played the same graduation song that they use now and all the graduates would walk in. You sat in alphabetical order. During the ceremony the band would play and the choir would sing. Usually a small group of seniors would also sing. They handed out diplomas and then once it was done all the kids would throw stuff around. There were between 400 and 500 kids in my graduating class. After graduation all the kids would go to an all-night party. They put all the graduates onto buses and drove them to the location of the party. No one knew where you they were going to take you and it was supposed to be a big secret, but they just took us to downtown Everett. I remember driving there and being extremely excited. At the party they had games that you could play to win tickets and then you could turn in your tickets for prizes. The prizes were dishes and different things that you’d need. It was actually really silly now that I think about it. On the Sunday a few days before Graduation we had Baccalaureate. It was when a pastor actually came to the school and held a Christian service. Everybody came dressed in their cap and gown. There was a lot of singing usually by the Choir and the Pastor would talk to you about the long term goals for your life. Then he would pray for everyone. You can’t do that now because it’s religious. Now they call it Jubilation and it’s pretty much the same but without a pastor. Except now everybody rents their gowns. As for the music department as Cascade, I remember that we had a great marching band. I went to some of their performances. They also played at all of our home football games. We also had a good choir and wind orchestra. I remember that they had a full orchestra and that I would go to some of their concerts. I wasn’t in the orchestra since I quit playing the violin after having a really bad teacher in 8th grade. They were pretty good and they played at graduation and other big events. Moving on to what kids my age did for fun, there were a lot of options. We had dances after each football game. You’d go straight from the football game to the dance, still wearing your regular clothes. It wasn’t like homecoming or prom where you had to get all dressed up. They were also held at the school. I’m sad that they just don’t do stuff like that now. It’s probably because it’d be more expensive. I remember thinking it was nice because then you had somewhere to go after football games instead of going and getting in trouble somewhere else. Another thing we used to do for fun was cruise Colby. You’d go out and drive around for a while with some friends and then you’d go to Herffey’s. When you got there you could just sit around and talk because pretty soon everybody would start coming in. There were usually a couple hundred kids in and out of there in a two or three hour period. It was never malicious though. There were never any big issues. Sometimes a few kids would come in and you could tell they had been drinking but the cops were always right there. Almost all the time those kids were caught. These days they’ve taken all that away from the kids, so there’s nowhere for you guys to go and do fun stuff like that. I remember I used to cruise Colby and Renton all the time. They had really cool strips down in Renton, but now they’ve closed all those things off. I don’t know where you guys go now. It’s like they make you go to secret little parties here and there instead of being out in the open. There was also homework that you had to do. I did some homework but not very much. I wasn’t a bad student, but I definitely wasn’t a good student. I passed, though, and that was all that mattered to me. As for world events, such as the 1973 Oil Crisis, I didn’t really care. I was only 18 so none of the stuff going on in the world really interested me yet. They’ve changed the education system since then. Back then though, I don’t think anybody cared that was my age. It just didn’t seem to affect us. There were probably a couple kids that were really interested in history or politics that cared. They could probably have given you all kinds of data about events but I didn’t really care. I think that the change in the teaching styles of the education system is definitely better in the long run because back then Cascade didn’t really care what you did as long as you went to school. They had classes and all that mattered was whether or not you actually attended classes. At least that’s my opinion. The Watergate Scandal was also not really a big deal to me. The 200th Anniversary of the United States was in 1976 when I was a junior. It wasn’t too big of a deal either. I just remember that there were a lot of big parties. Normally it wasn’t the kids that were partying though. I also remember collecting coins. I have tons of quarters that came out special for the Bicentennial. As for the President at the time, President Ford, I remember thinking he was a good President, but again it just didn’t affect me that much. At least I didn’t think it did so I just didn’t bother caring about stuff like that. I was a busy teenager that didn’t really care about what was happening in the world. Partly it was because of what was happening in my family at the time. However the school system also didn’t put much of an emphasis on it either. School was run differently back then. You were still required to take a certain amount of English and History, but the classes were really different. In English they didn’t teach you how to write teach you the rules of grammar. They had a class called Rock poetry. Basically all you did was go sit in a classroom and listen to rock music all day, and then you would discuss it with your teacher. Your teacher was usually a hippie with long hair. He was a pretty cool guy, but you didn’t really do anything in the class. In my sophomore year they offered a class on English grammar but they were forced to cancel it because not enough kids signed up. The English class I took was also really easy. You basically picked any book you wanted, read it, and then talked to the teacher about it. You didn’t write a paper. There was never much writing in our English classes. All you did was tell your teacher what the book was about. So all you really had to do was pick a book that had a movie, watch the movie, and then tell the teacher about the book based on the movie you watched. You pretty much always got away with it too. That would never happen these days. They would catch you easily. Plus these days you actually have classes that actually teach you how to write. In history I remember writing a few papers. During my junior year I was really sick. I caught mom at the beginning of the year and ended up missing about six months of my junior year. I was hardly at school that year. However instead of allowing me to retake the classes the next year so I could actually learn the material, my teachers all gave me D’s so that I would pass. That made it so I would move onto my senior year, but I really didn’t learn what I should have from my junior year. I would try going to school when I was sick and I would make it to my 1st period class, but then I’d be too tired to make it to my 2nd period so I’d go to my car and sleep for 3 hours. Afterwards I would get up and go to one or two of my afternoon classes. You couldn’t get away with that now. So that’s pretty much what I remember about Cascade from the 1970’s.
Ronda Zoellick graduated from Cascade High School in 1977. She didn’t have a formal college education; however, she did take classes at Everett Community College, Edmonds Community College, and Shoreline Community College. She never put the credits together to get a degree, though. Straight out of high school she began working for an insurance company as a clerk. From there she switched to John Fluke Corporation where she worked for 15 years. While working there she met her husband, Raymond Zoellick. After the marriage Ronda moved into a rental house in Bothell with her husband. She decided to quit her job in order to start a family. She had three kids: Raymond Zoellick, her oldest, Joshua Zoellick, the middle child, and Korinne Zoellick, her youngest and only girl. After 9 years of living in the rental home the Zoellicks bought an acre of land and built a house on it. They didn’t move far though as the new house was only about a mile away. After her kids grew up a little bit Ronda started working again, this time at Berry Neon Sign Company. She works in their accounting department as a biller. She still has this job today. Her husband and she have been married for 25 years. Their two oldest children are off at college and their youngest daughter is a senior in high school.
Let’s see, I graduated from Cascade High School in 1977 so I went to Cascade in the 1970’s. They didn’t have a whole lot of clubs back then. I mean they had a few but none that I was really interested in. I was more into sports so I didn’t pay that much attention to the clubs. For sports I ran cross country, track, and played basketball. The sports teams were pretty decent. I remember in my sophomore year we took 3rd in state in football. That was the only year we made it to state though. I remember we would have one or two people that would go to state for track but never very many. I went to state for cross country the year I ran. Of course it was the first year that there was a girls cross country team and they made me run. We had a pretty good basketball team but I don’t think we ever made it to state. I remember the first time I ran the hurdles as being very memorable. I took 1st place and I really wasn’t expecting to. It was during my freshman year and it was my first track meet. As for the food drive I don’t remember there being one. If there was it was really small, nothing like what you guys have now. It’s pretty exciting to hear about it on the news and to think about how it’s grown is just so cool. As for the structure of Cascade itself, I think we had 6 class periods back then. There were between 2000 and 2100 students. I remember it being a big school because there were only two high schools in the area. We had Everett and Cascade and that was it. Jackson hadn’t been added yet. My sister went to Everett and in my opinion it was a better school. My brother had a bad reputation there though so I went to Cascade. My favorite teacher at Cascade was Miss Dinnetz. She was a PE leadership teacher and just a really nice lady. She’s long gone now though. The class wasn’t like a normal leadership class, you could take those, but this class was like a PE class. However instead of the teacher teaching, the students did. The teacher acted as a guide to the student who was teaching. I liked it because that’s what I was interested in. I was going to go into college at that point in my life and possibly become a PE teacher. Physical Education is what they used to call it, but now they call it Kinesiology. My least favorite teacher was probably Mr. Millikan. He was a history teacher. He didn’t like me. He can’t still be there though because he was pretty up there in age when I went there. As for what the students wore casual dresses were pretty normal. The shorts for girls were really short. Jeans were also pretty normal. We also wore T-shirts but most of the time we tucked in our shirts. We didn’t have to wear anything fancy since we were a public school. Long hair was really in but then as I got to my senior year shorter hair started coming back. People cut their hair short and halfway through the year I cut mine too. We also had a fully open campus. You could come and go as you pleased. There was never any question about whether or not you were going to be allowed to go off campus. You could pretty much do whatever you wanted. You wouldn’t see that now. As a result I never ate at school. I left every single day. I either went to McDonalds or Wienerschnitzel. There was a McDonald’s down the street where you could get a Big Mac, fries and a drink for a dollar. Wienerschnitzel was down the road even further. I remember that I really liked their chili cheese dogs. I haven’t eaten there for 30 years though so I’m not sure if they’re still around. I don’t like McDonald’s anymore either. I’ll eat there once in a while, but not very often. We then moved on to Homecoming Week and the various festivities that went on. We had spirit dress-up days during the weeks of Homecoming. Homecoming was actually two weeks back then. You started voting during the first part of the second week and then the day of the Homecoming football game there was a big assembly. They had a big spread and they made the gym all fancy for the coronation of the King and Queen. It was really cool because all the girls were in really pretty dresses and the guys were wearing tuxes. The assembly was at the end of the day so the girls would go and get dressed right before it started. Right after school everyone went to the Homecoming football game. The court was still wearing their dresses and tuxes. During half time an announcer would call them onto the field. They would either ride on a car or walk depending on what they wanted to do. After they were all on the field they would make a big circle. Right after the football game was the dance. It wasn’t the next day like it is now so you couldn’t spend all day getting ready. What happened is you would go home from the football game and then you would have a half hour to change before you left for the dance. Sometimes you could fit in a fancy dinner with your date but not very often. You always had a date though. You never would go singly like you do now to dances, at least that I can remember. Even though everyone went as couples it didn’t have to be romantic. You could go as friends but mostly it was couples. At the dance there was always a live band which was really cool. They would never have a DJ like they do now. I remember really liking that because you could interact with the band. Just like today some people would hang out around the edges and talk, but most people danced for the majority of the time. As for refreshments I think you could get a drink of water. I don’t remember there being too much juice though. You always had your pictures taken. The dance was held at school like everything, including graduation. For graduation you had tickets like you do today but you didn’t have very many because there wasn’t very much room in the gym. The parents would sit on the sides while the students sat in the center. They played the same graduation song that they use now and all the graduates would walk in. You sat in alphabetical order. During the ceremony the band would play and the choir would sing. Usually a small group of seniors would also sing. They handed out diplomas and then once it was done all the kids would throw stuff around. There were between 400 and 500 kids in my graduating class. After graduation all the kids would go to an all-night party. They put all the graduates onto buses and drove them to the location of the party. No one knew where you they were going to take you and it was supposed to be a big secret, but they just took us to downtown Everett. I remember driving there and being extremely excited. At the party they had games that you could play to win tickets and then you could turn in your tickets for prizes. The prizes were dishes and different things that you’d need. It was actually really silly now that I think about it. On the Sunday a few days before Graduation we had Baccalaureate. It was when a pastor actually came to the school and held a Christian service. Everybody came dressed in their cap and gown. There was a lot of singing usually by the Choir and the Pastor would talk to you about the long term goals for your life. Then he would pray for everyone. You can’t do that now because it’s religious. Now they call it Jubilation and it’s pretty much the same but without a pastor. Except now everybody rents their gowns. As for the music department as Cascade, I remember that we had a great marching band. I went to some of their performances. They also played at all of our home football games. We also had a good choir and wind orchestra. I remember that they had a full orchestra and that I would go to some of their concerts. I wasn’t in the orchestra since I quit playing the violin after having a really bad teacher in 8th grade. They were pretty good and they played at graduation and other big events. Moving on to what kids my age did for fun, there were a lot of options. We had dances after each football game. You’d go straight from the football game to the dance, still wearing your regular clothes. It wasn’t like homecoming or prom where you had to get all dressed up. They were also held at the school. I’m sad that they just don’t do stuff like that now. It’s probably because it’d be more expensive. I remember thinking it was nice because then you had somewhere to go after football games instead of going and getting in trouble somewhere else. Another thing we used to do for fun was cruise Colby. You’d go out and drive around for a while with some friends and then you’d go to Herffey’s. When you got there you could just sit around and talk because pretty soon everybody would start coming in. There were usually a couple hundred kids in and out of there in a two or three hour period. It was never malicious though. There were never any big issues. Sometimes a few kids would come in and you could tell they had been drinking but the cops were always right there. Almost all the time those kids were caught. These days they’ve taken all that away from the kids, so there’s nowhere for you guys to go and do fun stuff like that. I remember I used to cruise Colby and Renton all the time. They had really cool strips down in Renton, but now they’ve closed all those things off. I don’t know where you guys go now. It’s like they make you go to secret little parties here and there instead of being out in the open. There was also homework that you had to do. I did some homework but not very much. I wasn’t a bad student, but I definitely wasn’t a good student. I passed, though, and that was all that mattered to me. As for world events, such as the 1973 Oil Crisis, I didn’t really care. I was only 18 so none of the stuff going on in the world really interested me yet. They’ve changed the education system since then. Back then though, I don’t think anybody cared that was my age. It just didn’t seem to affect us. There were probably a couple kids that were really interested in history or politics that cared. They could probably have given you all kinds of data about events but I didn’t really care. I think that the change in the teaching styles of the education system is definitely better in the long run because back then Cascade didn’t really care what you did as long as you went to school. They had classes and all that mattered was whether or not you actually attended classes. At least that’s my opinion. The Watergate Scandal was also not really a big deal to me. The 200th Anniversary of the United States was in 1976 when I was a junior. It wasn’t too big of a deal either. I just remember that there were a lot of big parties. Normally it wasn’t the kids that were partying though. I also remember collecting coins. I have tons of quarters that came out special for the Bicentennial. As for the President at the time, President Ford, I remember thinking he was a good President, but again it just didn’t affect me that much. At least I didn’t think it did so I just didn’t bother caring about stuff like that. I was a busy teenager that didn’t really care about what was happening in the world. Partly it was because of what was happening in my family at the time. However the school system also didn’t put much of an emphasis on it either. School was run differently back then. You were still required to take a certain amount of English and History, but the classes were really different. In English they didn’t teach you how to write teach you the rules of grammar. They had a class called Rock poetry. Basically all you did was go sit in a classroom and listen to rock music all day, and then you would discuss it with your teacher. Your teacher was usually a hippie with long hair. He was a pretty cool guy, but you didn’t really do anything in the class. In my sophomore year they offered a class on English grammar but they were forced to cancel it because not enough kids signed up. The English class I took was also really easy. You basically picked any book you wanted, read it, and then talked to the teacher about it. You didn’t write a paper. There was never much writing in our English classes. All you did was tell your teacher what the book was about. So all you really had to do was pick a book that had a movie, watch the movie, and then tell the teacher about the book based on the movie you watched. You pretty much always got away with it too. That would never happen these days. They would catch you easily. Plus these days you actually have classes that actually teach you how to write. In history I remember writing a few papers. During my junior year I was really sick. I caught mom at the beginning of the year and ended up missing about six months of my junior year. I was hardly at school that year. However instead of allowing me to retake the classes the next year so I could actually learn the material, my teachers all gave me D’s so that I would pass. That made it so I would move onto my senior year, but I really didn’t learn what I should have from my junior year. I would try going to school when I was sick and I would make it to my 1st period class, but then I’d be too tired to make it to my 2nd period so I’d go to my car and sleep for 3 hours. Afterwards I would get up and go to one or two of my afternoon classes. You couldn’t get away with that now. So that’s pretty much what I remember about Cascade from the 1970’s.