Craft Talks

Nancy Weisel

Nancy was born in NY- in a little town called Wantagh on Long Island. She’d like to say it was a bustling metropolis however it was a sleepy little town of houses built after WW2. She lived in one of those houses (with one bathroom) until she went away to college, so she always had one place to call home. She attended Boston University undergraduate, earning a degree in Sociology, and then went back to school at night for a Masters in Finance. She's not sure how it happened but she ended up in the finance field her entire career.

Her journey to the West Coast started in 1990 working for Merrill Lynch and living in Manhattan, when they relocated her to Dallas where she met her husband Jim. He is a cowboy from Oklahoma who was doing some work on her house. After 5 years in TX Merrill offered her another relocation to CA which she and Jim  could not turn down. Given that she had only been to CA once before, she had no idea where to live and what to look for. All  she knew was that price wise compared to TX you got half as much for twice as much. That relocation led her to a home in Redondo Beach and subsequent finance positions here in CA. She recently took an early retirement package from her last company and is now looking forward to the next phase of her life, one thatr will involve the Redondo Beach Rotary Club.

John Barnett

As children, John and his brother spent countless weekends exploring the King Harbor breakwater while their father socialized inside at KHYC.  IHe became an expert sailor and crewed for many different skippers in races around the buoys and cruises to the various channel islands.  As a certified scuba diver he dove on many of those cruises. For his Eagle Scout project he coordinated a joint beach clean up with the Boy Scout and Girl Scout Camps. During college he put himself through school at CSUN and volunteered providing sailing lessons in the summer and skiing lessons in the winter to blind people. 

After college John went to work at Price Waterhouse with his accounting degree.  After a couple years he changed course and went into software sales.  First with IBM, then CA, and finally HP. After his unit was spun-off to a UK company he decided to take some time off to give back to the community and joined Rotary.