Roads To Success 4

Ron & Cristy Varela

Success comes in all kinds of packages and for all kinds of reasons.  There is always the lottery winner, of course, that lucky individual whose birthday numerals happen to match nicely with numbered ping-pong balls in the $80 million Power Ball drawing.  Sometimes it comes with a good idea.  Bill Gates coming up with the DOS operating system was a pretty good one, and it is unlikely anyone would debate the level of success that followed the idea.

Most of the time, though, success only comes with hard work and persistence.  For Ron and Cristy Varela that is precisely the way it came, but they were too busy at the time to give such a philosophical question much thought.

Ron was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, a small city extending into the desert from the base of the Santa Catalina Mountains.  The youngest of three brothers, he remembers that his family life was rather typical for the 1950s and 1960s.  His mother was a housewife who took care of her husband and boys, making sure they were always clothed and fed.  In later years she broke out of the “typical” mold and became a paralegal.  His father was a car salesman, good natured, fun loving man with a strong work ethic.  “He always took care of his family,” Ron told me during his on-camera interview.

“Being a Mexican family there was always lots of people around and lots of food,” he reminisced.  There was also a spiritual influence; like many Mexican families, the Varelas were Catholic.  It wasn’t something Ron or his brothers willingly embraced.  “We were born and raised Catholic,” Ron explained.  “We’d go to church, but we were expected to go.”

What Ron did enjoy was working at the bakery his aunt owned in Tucson.  He enthusiastically worked there whenever he could, beginning when he was about ten-years-old.  “I always enjoyed making some money,” Ron explained.  “My aunt gave us that opportunity and all the donuts we could eat.  She taught us a lot of work ethics.”

Ron was fourteen when his father accepted a position as an auto salesman at a Southern California dealership.  The Varelas packed up and made the 480 mile move to the Golden State.  At least, most of the family moved.  One of Ron’s brothers had just graduated from high school; his other brother was still attending college.  They remained in Arizona.

“I was a desert boy so I wasn’t quite ready for it,” Ron explained.  “And you don’t want to leave your friends.”  Still, the prospect of living in California excited Ron, and he had no idea at the time how the move would radically change his life.

The Varela family settled in Anaheim, California, an up-and-coming city in Orange County.  The completion of the Interstate 5 freeway in 1954 began a wave of commercial and residential development in Orange County, but in the mid-1960s the area still consisted largely of citrus fields.  Avocado and strawberry farms were everywhere and Buena Park native Walter Knott was doing well with his boysenberry crops.  Disneyland was still bordered on two sides by orange groves.

Ron began attending Ball Junior High School, entering the ninth grade.  Although he was fresh from the desert and not exactly a natural fit in the Orange County sun and surf environment, his positive attitude and sense of humor enabled him to make quite a few new friends.  One of those new friends was a girl named Cristy McKenzie.

Cristy McKenzie was born in Long Beach, California, and had grown up in Orange County.  Her parents divorced when she was two and Cristy only saw her father twice annually.   Cristy’s mother eventually remarried and had children with her second husband, supplying Cristy with three new brothers and a sister.

For Cristy, Ron was hard to miss.  “We were raised in a beach area and beach atmosphere, and he just dressed differently.  He talked differently,” she told me.  “He was funny.  That’s what made him interesting; he had a good sense of humor.”

“She was like a surfer girl,” Ron recollected.  “Long, blonde hair.”

Ron and Cristy became close friends, increasingly including each other in school and social activities.  Eventually, the friendship flourished into romance and the couple began dating.

Cristy explained, “The social activities at school back in the ninth grade were mainly dances and football games, and that’s what we did.  We’d mostly hang around with groups of kids and eventually he invited me to his home to meet his family.”

Continuing into high school, Ron and Cristy’s relationship grew stronger than ever.  They were happy together and they were in love.  They were also human, and teenagers being teenagers with romance in their hearts and raging hormones, a new aspect to their relationship developed.  In the eleventh grade Cristy found herself pregnant.

© 2011 Philip Kassel