Meet Dr. Stephen Phillips, M.D.

He once attended Gregory Heights Elementary, but now he is an eye surgeon with offices on the Highline Medical Center Burien campus and in Seattle.

When he removed the cataracts from my eyes I asked him how many times he had done the operation and he said, "I don't know, thousands."

Cataract surgery is immensely popular today and his office waiting room is usually filled.

I had mine removed about six weeks apart and the actual time for each was about 20 minutes with a 24-hour recovery period, then about 30 days till the blurriness disappears.

The eye is a pretty sensitive body part and I had some apprehension about having somebody cutting into mine, so I asked several optometrist friends of mine and they reassured me Dr. Phillips knew what he was doing.

Good news is that I can now read the Highline Times or any newspaper without glasses for the first time in 40 years. What a blessing. No forgetting where you took them off, no constant cleaning the dirty lenses, no taking them off to engage in a fist fight with the neighbor lady.

It is not all looking at the world through rose colored specs, though. Now I have to invest in botox to get rid of the suitcases under my eyes I never noticed before.

Meet Mike Emerson

This former Boeing attorney, now retired, has lived in Gregory Heights with his wife, Jane, for over 30 years. They raised four kids there who went to Mt. Rainier High.

Mike has been a trustee at Highline College for 10 years and is on the board of Highline Historical Society plus a score of other community groups.

Who could want for anything mower? Well, he could wish for a 16-year-old neighbor kid at this moment but he likes the exercise he gets from yard work. That is what his wife claims.

Together they maintain about a half acre of hillside arboretum.

Who is that masked

woman? It's Crystal

Cabellon

She is a dental assistant for Doctors Mike and Jerry Velling in White Center. And she didn't just fall of a turnip truck, but she did fall off a tobacco tractor.

She has been doing this work for the famous Velling family for 19 years but she was born and raised on a 500-acre farm in Maryland where her father was a sharecropper.

When Chris was a young girl she was helping harvest the tobacco leaves and tried to hitch a ride back to the drying sheds by leaping onto the trailer being pulled by her Dad's tractor. She missed and fell under the wheel. By some miracle she escaped death or serious injury and got back up and walked home. She has a slight hitch in her git along but can stand all day with a smile.

She is the 10th child of a family of 13 kids and they all worked on the huge farm raising corn, soybeans and tobacco. The owner had no children. When he died he left the huge acreage to Crystal's family.

Correction

Former Burien Mayor Arun Jhaveri, who was profiled last week, earned his doctoral degree from Seattle University in Educational Leadership.