Bob Ronka - Biography

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 (1892–1983)

    Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.
    James Boswell (1740–95)

    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)