Biography
Ronka was born about 1943, the son of Ilmari Ronka, first-chair trombonist in the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and Loraine Vera Aalbu of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who worked with her sisters as vaudeville artists. Besides Bob, there was a daughter, Harriet (later Hodge). The family moved to California in 1945, and Ronka attended North Hollywood High School, where he played trombone in a dance-band workshop that studied music ranging from the big-band sound of the early 1930s to the progressive jazz of Stan Kenton. He also played with the Dixie Smallfry youth group sponsored by radio-television personality Bill Baldwin.
A Phi Beta Kappa student at Stanford University, Ronka earned a law degree at Harvard University before serving in the Army in Vietnam, where he was awarded a Bronze Star.
Read more about this topic: Bob Ronka
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)