Duluth Central High School Class of 1961
Classmates
Marja Karppinen (Sadeniemi+)
Comments
Profession: Press and PR manager at the University of Helsinki
Retired in 2008
Spouse: Pentti
2 Children
5 Grandchildren
Information update: 3/9/11

I was the foreign exchange student in Duluth Central High in 1960-61. My year in Duluth was full of interesting experiences, the most exciting of which was being crowned Helen of Troy, which was of course a great honor and almost too much for the shy little girl from Finland.

After returning back to Finland, I studied at the University of Helsinki, where I gratuated with M.A.'s degree. Directly after that I got a job at the same University. I took care of the Press and Public Relations for the University of Helsinki for thirty nine years, excluding some eight years I lived abroad. I retired three years ago.

In 1969 I married a fellow exchange student Pentti Sadeniemi, who spent the year 1960-61 at the Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut. Pentti is a journalist, who later got a doctorate in international politics. The last ten years before retirement he was an editorial writer for the largest Finnish daily paper. He was a correspondent in Moscow in 1973-77, where we spent very interesting four and half years in Breshnev's time Soviet Union. Later on, in 1981-85 he worked in Bonn, then still the capital of West Germany. Our four years in Germany included quite a lot of traveling, because no place in Europe was very far for us, compared to traveling from Finland.

We have two children, a son and a daugter. They both are married and the son has three children, the daughter two little boys. We spend a lot of time with our grandchildren, and especially in summertime we all spend several weeks in our summer house, which is on a big lake some hundred miles from Helsinki, our winter home.

I like to read, go to symphony concerts and theater, travel and take care of the grandchildren. Our latest trip was in December and took us for two weeks to Thailand, together with our son's family.
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