1970s BJ State Desk reporter Cathy Robinson Strong’s feet are paying the price for her active life.

During her three years of teaching in Dubai, United Arab Emirate, she slipped on a stairwell and broke her left foot in two places.

Five years of snowboarding in New Zealand, where she’s lived for nearly four decades, keep cracking two bones on her right foot.  So she had foot surgery, a Metatorsophalangeal fusion, six weeks ago.

Cathy still is in a cast and unable to drive and taking “lots of pain-killers.”  She’s staying with a friend who has NO stairs in her house.

Cathy’s snowboarding coach was Henry C. “Hank” Parker. She also was a snowboarding instructor herself.

Cathy also has done a lot of water-skiing, apparently with better results for her feet.

The BJ’s most famous skier (real skis, not the snowboarding kind) is retired photographer Ott Gangl, who also dealt with a leg fracture in his days of swooshing down mountains all over the world.

1970s BJ State Desk reporter Cathy Strong, who created the journalism master’s program at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand, and who stays in one place about as long as a hummingbird does, is off to Washington State with her granddaughter, Katie Belle, whose parents are Cathy’s daughter, Rebecca and her husband, Dion.

Cathy hops from continent to continent for academic, vacation and family-visiting reasons.

Cathy’s sister, Janet Mullins, lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Cathy saw daughter Penelope marry international patent attorney John Pint, originally from Minnesota, in New Zealand.

In 2005 Cathy's daughter, Rebecca, and husband Dion, were married in Otaki, New Zealand. They have three daughters and a son. 

In 2013 Cathy’s daughter, Amanda, married Jeff Shima near Waiouru, New Zealand. They have a daughter. 

Cathy visits them from time to time, and even jumped into a hot tub with BJ friend Pam McCarthy, a retired Hoover High teacher, in Boston somewhere along the way.

No wonder Cathy is cast as the poster woman for a footrest.

The late Fran Murphey, retired BJ photographer Don Roese, former State Desk reporter Paula Stone Tucker and I have visited Cathy in New Zealand.

If you’re in New Zealand and want to look up  Cathy, she’s in the Massey University School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, Room SF47, Block 5 in Wellington. Her phone number is (04) 801-5799, extension 63549 and her email is C.R.Strong@massey.ac.nz