Donna DeCostas Reed
Donna DeCostas Reed
511 South Taft Street
Lakewood, CO 80228
(303) 274-1462
Risk Manager
Mike Miller and I married in 1964. I graduated from the U of Miami in 1966 with a degree in art education. Mike and I had daughters Wendy in 1968, Brandi in 1969 and Melanie in 1971. Our son Chad was born in 1973 soon after we moved to Denver, Colorado. Mike and I divorced. Both Mike and I got married again and both marriages ended in divorce. I spent 16 years in the ski business, eleven of them at Vail in the field of Risk Management. Then in 1990 I moved to Columbus, OH to take another job in Risk Management. Mike moved back to Miami. The girls stayed in Colorado and Chad went with me to Columbus. He fell in love and got married and is still there, working as an electrician.
After living in Miami and Vail, premiere resorts that they are, I looked around Columbus and decided I might as well take advantage of being in the Mecca of secondary education. I enrolled in night law school and graduated in 1995, two months before my 51st birthday! By then I had moved to La Quinta, California to take a job in Risk Management with the executives from Vail who had formed their own company, KSL Recreation Corporation. I took and passed the California bar exam in 1995. I found a great man, Bob Reed (who was in the first graduating class of Orange, CA high school in 1962) and we were married in 1996. His daughters were born the same years as my three daughters. In 1999 I took a job as Director of Risk Management for USFilter Corporation in Palm Desert, CA, which at the time had 20,000 employees in 13 countries. In 1997 KSL sent Bob and me to Georgia for a couple years and I took and passed the GA bar exam, also. I now had licenses on both coasts!
In 2002 Bob passed away four months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. The next year USFilter announced it was for sale and was shutting down the California office. I decided to move back to Colorado to be with my daughters. Siemens Corporation purchased USFilter and in 2004 asked me to stay on. I did, and I'm in a new office in Denver. We are now Siemens Water Technologies Corporation. I really enjoy being back in Colorado with my daughters, their husbands and my grandchildren - Wendy has a daughter born in 1986 and a son born in 2004. Brandi has two sons born in 1988 and 1996 and daughters born in 1991 and 1994. Melanie is still single and lives with me. Their dad moved back to Denver this December after both his parents passed away. My life is very full. I have taken painting trips to Europe for the past three years, two of them with Barbara Krueger Daly (Gables class of '63), although the trips are the only time I paint! It will give me something to do when I retire at age 70!
I hope to see everyone in 2012!