High School Activities - Junior Council on World Affairs, Intramurals, Dramatics Club, School Plays, French Club, Library Page, Geology Club, National Honor Society, Orphean Staff, Chess Club, Voted #1 "Most Reliable"
Steve Rajtar
Orlando, FL 32806
Photos - 1969 & 1999 (left to right - daughter Kelly, Steve, wife Gayle, Kelly's husband Will, son Jason, Jason's wife Karen)
Information - Updated April 2009
High School Activities - Junior Council on World Affairs, Intramurals, Dramatics Club, School Plays, French Club, Library Page, Geology Club, National Honor Society, Orphean Staff, Chess Club, Voted #1 "Most Reliable"
At the end of the summer of '69, I left Maple Heights to go to college in Florida. I did my freshman year at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, and then the next three in Orlando at what is now called the University of Central Florida. The school made a big deal at graduation about my being the first student there to earn two degrees in four years (B.S. in Mathematics, B.A. in Anthropology). I spent the next four years at the University of Florida in Gainesville and received two more degrees (J.D. in Law, LL.M. in Taxation). For a couple of summers during that time, I worked at Disney World driving a monorail.
On November 20, 1971, I first met Gayle Prince in front of the chapel on the campus of Rollins College in Winter Park, and fell in love. On June 15, 1974, we were married in that chapel. Gayle's a musician, a singer and drummer. She's also presently a secretary at Orlando Health, on the campus of a large Orlando hospital.
Our son Jason was born in 1978 and in May of 2001 (after a summer internship at General Electric in Cincinnati) graduated from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, with a degree in Computer Science/Mathematics. He flirted with acting for a while. If you watched the movie "My Girl" very closely, you saw him and Gayle for about a second and a half. He also appeared in some PSAs on local TV. He's now a software test engineer with Microsoft in Redmond, WA. He and his wife have twins, a boy and a girl, born in 2007.
Our daughter Kelly was born in 1981 and is a graduate of the University of Central Florida. She has a degree in Psychology. She works at the Florida Virtual School, through which high school students can take courses online. She and her husband live in Orlando and have a boy born in 2007 and a girl born in 2009.
After receiving my law degree, I worked for a firm in Gainesville for a year while I worked on my master's degree, then we moved to Chattanooga, TN. That was a period of culture shock! After a year and a half, I decided that it was time to return to Florida. I came to that conclusion on the day the local TV station pre-empted the Browns-Bengals game with reruns of a Bible study show and a woodworking show. Reruns, yet!
I joined an Orlando law firm in 1979 and left it in 1985 to work as in-house counsel with a small property management company. I'm still there, doing mostly real estate closings, evictions and other stuff. It's a job that gives me lots of time to spend with my family and doing stuff I enjoy.
I've been very involved in the Boy Scouts since 1987, after having spent 10 years in the program as a kid. It allowed me to spend even more time with my own kids, while working with hundreds of others. Jason became an Eagle Scout and Kelly served as president of a high adventure venturing crew. I've taken scouts on trips throughout the Southeast, hiking, camping, rafting and caving. It was one of those trips with 116 miles of hiking and a whitewater rafting trip that caused me to miss the 30th reunion. In 1997, Kelly and I and the rest of the crew spent two weeks in Europe, touring Germany and hiking and climbing in the Swiss Alps.
As part of a scout leader training program, I wrote a long thesis on the subject of historical hiking trails. The leader in charge suggested I try to have it published, something I hadn't previously considered doing. Eventually, I found a publisher interested in a similar idea, and wound up with two hiking books. That was the start of several more books (see below). Other activities in which I'm involved can be found in 3000+ other pages which comprise this web site.
Gayle and I love to cruise, which is why she worked as a travel agent for more than a decade. Between the scouting and family trips, I've gotten to 21 foreign countries, 4 Canadian provinces and 30 states including Hawaii and Alaska. I also like to spend my free time hiking, bicycling (since turning 50, I've completed 7 rides of at least 100 kilometers, 3 of which were 100 miles each), kayaking, playing racquetball and doing anything else that gets me outdoors.
The University of Florida Alumni Association's magazine is published quarterly, and in each issue three alumni are featured in its "Alumni Profiles" section. In July of 2005, I was featured in the following article:
Published books so far:
Coming soon:
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