Remember this? The Seasons in The Sun series … in which I’m trying to write about one former sports co-worker for the 33 years (or parts of years) I spent at the San Bernardino Sun?

By no means do all the interesting folks get in. There were too many. Especially during the periods when the staff had a lot of volatility, and a staff of 13 (counting part-timers) might actually be 15-18 people in one year. And because I’m trying to peg everyone pretty much to a year in which they worked … and because I perhaps never really knew as much as I thought I needed to know to do a piece … there are gaps in here. No question.

Anyway, case in point: Lisa Renfro. AKA Yelizaveta Renfro, a quite competent but also quite cryptic part-timer from the mid-1990s.

She recently came across this blog, and with her help I have enough information to plug her into this series. Even though the “series” actually has moved past the period (1994-96) when she worked with us at 399 North D Street.

In short, know this: Lisa quite soon will become the most academically successful of anyone who worked at the paper in the 33 years I was on the roster. She is about to get a Ph.D.

I have not seen Lisa in more than 10 years. My last contact with her was an e-mail (or was it a phone call?) maybe five years ago, when she told me she was working at a cemetery. Somehow, that seemed about right.

My first recent note from Lisa:

“I was recently poking around online and discovered your blog. I’ve enjoyed reading it these past few weeks, especially during the Olympics. I’m sorry to hear about the end of your  career with The Sun. I always think of you being there at 399 N. D Street, even though I realize a lot has changed in the last, what, dozen years or so. … So many people who once worked [there] are … posting to your blog. I’m amazed that I was there such a short time yet knew so many of them. That must have been part of the golden era. Even though I didn’t stay in sports or journalism, I consider myself very lucky to have been there.”

She told me about her academic career, which includes about every degree a student can acquire. I replied, telling her The Sun no longer is at 399 North D Street, and complimenting her on an ability to stay in college so long. She wrote back.

“I guess when you leave a place, you think of it as unchanging. I was just shocked when we drove back to SoCal last year and Victorville was this big sprawling mess of a city. (My grandmother lived on a homestead in Victorville as a child and shot rattlesnakes. And even in my day — which I’m allowed to say now because I’m over 30 and have kids — it wasn’t much of a place.) And it’s not just Victorville. I can’t believe how much all of it has changed. (And since I now live in a town of 6,000 with the nearest “big” city — Cheyenne, Wyoming — 100 miles away, SoCal seems even more congested and crowded than ever.) So I guess it should come as no surprise that 399 N D is not as it once was. I didn’t know there was a Sun reunion. What are those other guys up to?”

I told her about the “Seasons” feature, and did a few thumbnails on other people from her years. I also asked her if she was OK with me posting the news from her, because people from her era were asking about her.

She was OK with that, and sent along a nice, meaty update of what she’s been up to. But before we get to that, my sense of Lisa Renfro, back when she was working on an agateer for us.

Lisa came to us from Riverside Community College, which had turned into a pipeline of competent people in the mid-1990s thanks to former staffer Dan Evans, who had become the advisor to the student newspaper there. Others he sent our way: Brian Goff, Dennis Pope and Derek Rich, and probably a few more I’m forgetting just because I’m old.

Lisa was different because 1) she was the only woman to come over, 2) she clearly was very bright but also more than a little distant; 3) her mother was born in Russia, and Lisa’s actual first name is the very Russian “Yelizaveta” … and that seemed, to me, to explain some of the at-a-remove mystery of her.

As well as her ability to drink a co-worker under the table — at a semi-notorious farewell party (for Joel Boyd, or Brian Neale, one or the other). Lisa and another part-timer were slugging down Goldschlager, a particularly lethal liqueur … and it was the male colleague who ended up unconscious on the apartment-complex lawn. Lisa’s victory in that competition struck me as something perhaps genetic.

Lisa never said much, in the office. Though she often was asked direct questions. She would shrug off the questions, or give vague answers. That made her more interesting but it also, eventually, led to most guys giving up asking her about herself.

For me, anyway, it turned into a “best guess” characterization.

At first, I probably was thinking “Goth” — she tended to wear black, along with big black boots, and she had that sort of “I don’t care what anyone thinks about me” vibe that I associated with the Goth crew.

But eventually, after I found out about her Russian heritage, my assessment of her quickly veered toward Slavic stereotypes. I decided she was more Russian than American. She was aloof, hardy, practical. That seemed very Russian to me; survival tactics bred into her bones from generations of survival in a czarist/Communist regime. She could be terse. Blunt. And she was no shrinking violet. I remember her as being tall and solid. “Hardy peasant stock.” Of course. And, clearly, she could hold her liquor. Oh, yes. Very Russian. Hey, that’s all I had to go on.

I wasn’t sure what she hoped to accomplish while working for us, and she certainly didn’t say. It was all guesswork. Maybe some of her younger colleagues knew what she was about. I certainly didn’t, beyond the happy reality that she was someone who was thoroughly dependable, never complained — and made the section better.

So it was that I was grateful to get some details, and more background … via e-mail. I know far more about her, 10 years later, than I did when she worked among us five days a week, six hours a pop.

This is what she sent:

“Sure, go ahead and post my stellar achievements (academic or otherwise) on your blog. In brief: I’ve been married eight years. My husband is named Doug, and my kids are named Katherine and Nicholas. Kate is three (“three and a half!” as she insists) and Nick is 8 months. I have an AA from RCC (which I count as a degree because it gets my total up higher), a BA (summa cum laude) from (UC Riverside) in comparative literature, a master’s (MFA) in creative writing from George Mason University, and I am very, very close to having a Ph.D in English from (Nebraska-Lincoln). (I have a complete draft of my dissertation; I just need to clean it up and defend.) Next spring I should have the degree. So I am not yet the only Sun alum with a Ph.D but look forward to having that distinction soon.) I left SoCal eight years ago when I married. I lived four years in Virginia and the past four in Nebraska. I currently live in Sidney, Nebraska.

“A slightly longer version: After leaving the Sun, I worked for the (Riverside Press Enterprise), first in the Jurupa bureau, and later in their new San Bernardino office when it just opened. They hired me full-time then, and I was doing a bunch of cops reporting and other reporting, though my title stayed office assistant (or something like that) because I hadn’t finished my degree (and had basically dropped out of school to work). I couldn’t stand taking more journalism or reporting classes since I was already doing it at work. I think that journalism is a field where you do learn more on the job than in the classroom (a point that I think you made in a previous e-mail). Anyway, I didn’t stay in newspapers that long. I went back to school full-time at UCR in 1998 and took up something esoteric and useless: comparative literature. I liked to read anyway, so it was easy. I studied abroad in Russia in 1999, graduated in 2000.

“The same month I graduated, I got married and left SoCal for good. I moved to Northern Virginia (near Washington D.C.) for four years where my husband had a job. It was there that I worked at the cemetery in 2001-2002. My title (once again) was something like “office assistant,” but besides doing all the record-keeping I was basically the backup for the cemetery manager — there were only the two of us in the office — so if he was gone or if we had more than one customer at a time, I had to meet with the families and make the sales, issue the deeds, coordinate with funeral homes. And I dealt with all the phone calls and general inquiries: people looking for particular graves, people complaining about landscaping or vandalism, etc. I wrote an essay about, among other things, my job at the cemetery that was published in the North American Review about four years ago.

“In 2004, I finished my MFA at George Mason, and my husband and I were pretty sick of the D.C. area (cost of living, congestion, etc.), so I applied to a handful of PhD programs, and I enrolled in the one that offered me the best funding package: UNL. So we moved to Lincoln in 2004 and lived there three years. My daughter was born there in 2005. (In those three years, I did not attend a single Huskers [football] game, though I did enjoy going downtown to the Haymarket on game day, getting a cup of coffee, and sitting down to watch all of the insane people in red descend upon the city. I have never seen anything like it.) I love Lincoln and would have been happy to stay, but my husband got a great job offer at Cabela’s corporate headquarters (in Sidney), so we moved out here to the middle of nowhere almost a year and a half ago (and Nick was born here). (I thought Lincoln was the middle of nowhere; little did I know!) Speaking of gun-toters, you should see the people in Sidney, Nebraska. …

“I still have more than a dozen relatives in Riverside — including my grandmother (the one who lived on a homestead in Victorville and is pushing 90), my sister, and my parents (my dad is mostly retired and my mom now teaches English at Cal Baptist) — but SoCal depresses and overwhelms me and I don’t go back often. My brother is living in Sidney with us — he too has a job at Cabela’s. (He is quite brilliant and spent two years in a PhD program in Geophysics and then dropped out, much to the consternation of our family.) Anyway, that’s probably more than you wanted to know.

“Lisa”

It’s not more than I want to know. It’s just right.

(And for more about Cabela’s, check this link. Essentially, it’s a huge, mail-order “outdoors” firm.)

So, Lisa the Academic. The Mom (her two quite-blonde children are part of her e-mail profile). The Writer. The “Perfessor” (as we in sports tend to call perceived eggheads).

I wonder how many of those she worked with at 399 North D in the mid-1990s have ended up her short stories?

Anyway, let’s call Lisa Renfro “Seasons in The Sun” entry 1995A.