|
John Hicks
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
John Hicks
7813 EDGE VIEW WAY APT E SYLVANIA, OH 43560 419 351-1730 john_jalil+hotmail.com To use the above email address, replace the "+" with an at sign, (@),. This is done so robots will not pick up the address to use for spam. |
In 1966 I moved to Detroit to attend Wayne State University. Little did I know that I would be spending the next 48 years in the same Detroit neighborhood. Being a history major and trained as a secondary school teacher I of course got a job as a banker. National Bank of Detroit begat NBD, begat Bank One, then morphed into JP Morgan Chase. For 35 years I was the neighborhood banker walking to work before being transferred to downtown headquarters for the last 8 years of my career. In downtown Detroit I was the bank liaison for various law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the DEA. Of course working in Detroit kept me pretty busy.
During the early 1980s I continued studies in my college major; Russian and Soviet history, making several trips to the USSR. Looking back now I am happy that I made those trips then when such travels were rare and affordable. I was fortunate to make contacts that allowed me entry to various institutions in Moscow, Leningrad (St Petersburg) and Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1983 I struck up a friendship in Detroit that would completely change the rest of my life. I became very close to a Kuwaiti family of whom the head of the family was studying in the US. In 1987 I made my first trip to Kuwait and have been going back and forth to Kuwait once or twice a year for the past 30 years. Various world and family crises have only served to solidify the relationship and we have truly become family. In each of the 4 houses we have built in Kuwait over the past 30 years there was always a suite of rooms for me. Now that I am retired I spend more and more of my time in Mahboula, Kuwait. We have built a vacation retreat in Negombo, Sri Lanka. I’m looking forward to my first visit sometime in the next year. As usual there is a suite with my name on the door. Retiring from Chase in 2014 I decided that Detroit was not the best of places in which to grow old. I am now living in Sylvania, Ohio, a Toledo suburb just south of the Michigan border. Needless to say it is quite a change from Detroit. It is only an hour from the Detroit airport so I can be in Kuwait within 24 hours. Sorry that I won’t be attending the reunion as I will be spending the summer in Kuwait. |