She worked almost 40 hours a week and had to forego college after high school. “We’d know she was coming home because we could hear the sound of the grocery cart – chak-ke-chak-chak-ke-chak – on the pavement,” Breckheimer says.īreckheimer and her brothers had to work at an early age. When her mother found work downtown as a bank teller, her mother would take the bus every day, leaving the house at 5 a.m. Her mother supported all five children by running a daycare center in their home babysitting kids. Her father had a massive stroke shortly after and couldn’t work. “I’m second to the oldest, so I was kinda like mom,” she says. Raised by a single mother, Breckheimer grew up with four brothers. She’s come a long way since then, but the journey was anything but easy. “I didn’t think I was college material at all, just like so many students today,” Breckheimer says. It was something she had to struggle with when she started college at 28. The straightforward, authoritative manner with which she speaks contradicts the image of someone who had to wrestle with self-doubts.īut self-belief was not something Breckheimer had a lot of growing up in Westchester, California, in the 1960s. She contemplates the questions, but when she opens her mouth her sentences come in rapid succession. When I stepped behind this desk, I thought, ‘What the heck am I doing? … And I’m just gonna believe that I’m gonna make it.’”īy “desk” she means her desk as the dean of humanities at El Camino College, her job since July 2018, from which she’s retiring at the end of the spring semester.Ĭlad in a white and blue plaid blazer over a black shirt and black pants, the 63-year-old thinks before she speaks. ![]() There’s a magnet in Debra Breckheimer’s office perched prominently on the filing cabinet above her desk. Breckheimer will retire at the end of the spring semester. Dean of Humanities Debra Breckheimer leans on the railing outside the entrance to the second floor of the Humanities on March 27.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |