Steve Raymond

Four days after graduation, I went in the Air Force. After completing tech school, I was stationed in Luke AFB, Arizona. I then applied for and received a presidential appointment to the USAF Academy in Colorado Springs. While there, I contracted strep throat which settled in my kidneys and then prompted my discharge from the air force with a service related disability retirement.

I then went through SRJC and SSU, graduating in 1970. During that time, I created the South Park Youth Organization and ran a summer camp for underprivileged children from around Sonoma County until 1980. In 1972 After two years working at Long's Drugs. I collected donations of drugs which I took to a Catholic school and clinic in Creel, Chihuahua, Mexico and in 1974, walked 1,800 miles from Santa Rosa to Guachochi, Chihuahua to raise funds for an orphanage.

Beginning in 1973, I started working in the tourism industry, first with an incentive company and then with a receptive company in San Francisco. In 1977, I began my own receptive company which grew to become the largest in San Francisco by the mid 1980's. In 1985, I started a destination management company in Bangkok, Thailand and in 1987, I moved to Thailand. In 1989, I was arrested in Thailand and spent over two years in prison both in Thailand and in San Francisco even though I did not commit a crime and was never convicted of anything, before a judge finally ordered that I be released immediately. The full story is in a book published in 1994. ("The Poison River").

I then returned to San Francisco and worked for Mari Zatman (Wife of Murray Zatman, Mayor of Santa Rosa in 1972), in her hotel reservation company. In 1993, I was project manager, and then later General Manager and Director of Sales for the Renoir Hotel, San Francisco. In 1997, rode a bicycle from Santa Rosa to Costa Rica, and then flew to Nepal and hiked the Annapurna Circuit. In 2000, I was hired to run restaurants and a hotel in Saigon, and then moved to Vietnam. In 2006, I began as General Manager of the Pandanus Resort (www.pandanusresort.com) which I ran for ten years and then retired to my farm in Phan Thiet with my adopted Vietnamese family. To keep busy, I teach English at my old resort and am helping the owner with his newly purchased resort. I'm also creating a website for Phan Thiet, working with CityPass.

Throughout my life, I have traveled through 69 countries around the world. The only one I have no desire to return to is India.

On the first day at MHS, I was detained in Montgomery Village by upper classmen and forced to drink an entire bottle of tabasco sauce. I have hated tabasco sauce ever since.

In 1962, I was star of the school play, "The Winslow Boy"