When Challenge, Not Success, Becomes the Goal

Strolling down the street near her Seal Beach home, Mary E. Galvin was in a reflective mood. “The one thing I have tried to do in life is to do different things,” she said.

Galvin outlined how she roller-skated in the last Los Angeles Marathon, the six times she ran marathons, the hundreds of times she rappelled down ropes from helicopters, her parachute jump, the glider flight and her latest craze: riding dirt bikes.

And she happily talked about the time she took her three children and the family dog on a 10-day backpacking hike along the John Muir Trail in California.

“I wanted my kids to know there was never anything out there to stop them from doing what they want to do,” she said.

“In your life you want to do something meaningful,” said Galvin, 49, a registered nurse practitioner and a major in the Army Reserve. “Sometimes you like to point to a time in your life so you can say something like, ‘I saved that person’s life all by myself.’ ”

Now she’s looking for something else.

“I want to try everything I can,” Galvin said. “There are so many things I haven’t done.”

Besides her various adventures, she developed what she called the first nonprofit, low-cost day-care center in the county. She has bought and sold businesses and had fun doing it. However, she said, “When you master something, it’s not fun anymore.”

So, in a couple of years, she plans to start a hospice for people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. “People who fund those things are starting to realize that kind of place is needed,” she said. “And I’m the type of person who can run it.”

In the meantime, she spends her time caring for ill people at Kaiser Permanente as a nurse practitioner. She also helps save people stranded in the mountains as a part-time flight medic with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s search and rescue team.

She is also a licensed pilot who uses her recreational flying time to contemplate her life--to “kind of get things back in perspective,” she said. “I get a lot of answers up there and can be objective while enjoying the beauty of the world.”

As she returned from the walk to the house she is remodeling, Galvin talked about “having this fantasy of being a mercenary nurse and flying to jungles and rescuing people.

“I’m a strong, really healthy person. But I’m realistic enough to know what you can do,” she said.

Last Valentine’s Day, Roger von der Hellem of Seal Beach decided to pop the question to Cheryl Coleman, so he hired a plane to tow a banner that read: “Cheryl--Will You Marry Me. Love, Roger.”

Well, it worked.

Coleman, also of Seal Beach, just sent invitations for their July 17 wedding.

The cover of the invitation shows a plane towing a banner. It reads “She Says Yes.”

Robert Schoedl of Anaheim drove away in his Honda motor scooter last week for what he hopes will be a three-year trip around the world.

“I’m 25, single, have no bills and no responsibilities,” he said. “It’s difficult for me to find out what I want to do with my life. I’d like to see what the world has to offer and develop an opinion about people in the world.”

After stopping in Colorado Springs to see his mother, Schoedl plans to spend the first year in Mexico and South America.

He has saved $20,000, raised by buying and selling motorcycles, cars and trucks, which he hopes will see him through the trip. He is taking Pooh Bear with him, his 100-pound Anatolian shepherd dog, which, he said, “is very protective of me.”

The dog will ride in a specially built sidecar. “I made it look like an old clunker so no one will want to rip it off,” he said. “Besides, Pooh Bear thinks the sidecar is his home.”

The one-day class at Golden West College was called “Boats and Bowl,” and who would guess it was a food class? The title didn’t fool anyone. It was a sellout.

“People who take food to the Hollywood Bowl and on a boat trip want to know what to take and how to get it there,” instructor Sue Young said. “And they want to know how to make it look good once they get it there.”

Young gave these tips: Eat foods you don’t have to cut but can eat easily with a fork, such as chicken and pasta salad with shrimp and fresh fruits.

Also, take good-looking paper goods.

“People are concerned with presentation, the way it looks,” Young said.

Of course, you should have wine and lighted candles too, she added.