President and Mrs. Barack Obama have sent birthday greetings to my friend and neighbor Phyllis Friedricks who is one hundred years old today. You’ll notice in the photographs that Phyllis stands as ramrod straight as she did when she was a twenty-something young teacher in a one-room school (four grades) at rural Descanso in the Cuyamaca Mountains of San Diego County. She had just graduated from San Diego State, and because there were no openings in the city of San Diego, she bought a Model-T Ford and headed east into the mountains. Her salary that first year was a thousand dollars. She later taught for another year or maybe it was two at Warner Springs before landing a teaching job at Escondido where she taught for fifty-five years… a truly amazing woman.