User:Stevijo

Stephen Joe Payne is a former high school dropout who learned to speak eight languages. Stephen is a writer and photographer, now retired from Phillips Petroleum Company (2000)in Bartlesville, OK. Stephen was born in Oklahoma City, in 1944, but his family soon moved to Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Stephen attended Union Elementary and Pawhuska High School but did not graduate from Pawhuska. In his junior year, he left school and enlisted in the United States Navy. He completed Radar “A” school in San Francisco, CA, and then was assigned to the USS Point Defiance (LSD-31) where he saw service in the Philippine Islands, Japan, and Hong Kong. The Point Defiance was part of the task force during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, served on a secret mission to Viet Nam, in 1963, and was the ship that transported the bathyscaph Trieste to Boston to recover the lost submarine, USS Thresher in 1963. Following his honorable discharge from the navy, Stephen returned to high school and graduated from College-High School, Bartlesville, OK, in 1967, at age 23 and five years behind his 1962 class. He obtained employment with Phillips Petroleum Company and began studies at the University of Tulsa in 1974. He moved through different jobs as he acquired more education and eventually learned computer programming and became a map maker. He then was employed by the Phillips unit of Drilling Specialties Company where we was a salesman, in North Dakota, and then in Texas until he was transferred to Bartlesville and become the Safety and Environmental Coordinator for the unit. He began to study Spanish, on his own, using audio tapes and books, and then learned French. After several years, he began to add German and then Italian. He has since earned degrees in Spanish and Spanish Translations from Tulsa Community College, Tulsa, Oklahoma and added additional languages. Stephen and his wife had one son, Stephen William Payne, a musician, who died in 2003 from renal failure as complication of juvenile diabetes. Stephen is the author of Pawhuska Kids’ Stuff, a memoir of child hood in Pawhuska.