2008 Woodie Awards
This Is One Rose in Full Bloom
Student survives horrific accident and more to pursue her dreams at Valley.
Jacqui Brown
Issue date: 5/26/04 Section: News
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 Media Credit: Tammy Abbott THANK YOU - California Highway Patrol Officer Michael Warner receives a big thanks for his and other officers´ assistance when Robyn Mae Rose (seated) was seriously injured by a hit-and-run driver in 2002. The ceremony was held in the Music Recital Hall on Monday. |
Robyn Mae Rose has become a Valley College fixture, motoring about in her wheelchair and chatting it up with friends. She's wrapping up her third semester this spring, her first on the Dean's List. But from her sunny disposition one wouldn't guess that just two years ago, the aspiring choir teacher was lying by the side of the road after a hit-and-run driver left her for dead.
Dianne Wintrob, chair of the music department and one of Rose's instructors said that you can't help but love Robyn because she has this incredible zest for life in spite of everything she's been through.
"She's older than most of the other students in class but when she came in here she just galvanized the class," Wintrob said. "She got the younger students involved in talking and expressing themselves just by the sheer energy of her personality."
Rose, 42, is mother to five children ranging in age from 13 to 24 and has three grandchildren. She was born in Canadajua, which is just north of Rochester in New York and is currently living in Panorama City with her 13-year-old daughter.
Everything she emanates gives you the distinct understanding that her positive, happy outlook is due to the fact that she's been given a second chance at life; an opportunity to recreate herself all the while surrounded by people that love her and are inspired by her.
You'd never guess by her bubbly personality that most of her life has been plagued by ill fortune. From the tender age of five, Rose and her three-year-old brother Chuck were separated and jostled around the foster care system in what Rose would call 'some good homes and some very bad ones' throughout the San Fernando Valley and Orange County. Her father, who disappeared from their lives for years, found the two siblings when Rose was nine and brought them back together for three years after which, he returned them back to foster care. It was another 22 years before she saw him again. Rose's birth mother, who she recalls last seeing around the age of six, died from an accidental self-inflicted gun shot when Rose was 12.
