John Ropella

Background

About John Ropella

20+ years – Management/Administration ∙ Supervision/Leadership ∙ Public Relations/Customer Service ∙ 4 years – Sales/Marketing ∙ 10 years – Corrections ∙ 2 years – Teaching After graduating from high school, I joined the Navy as a hospital corpsman. During a 25-year career, I had assignments as a psychiatric technician at hospitals in the U.S. and Japan, and later attached to the 2nd Marine Division, where I made two deployments. After my 2nd enlistment, I volunteered for submarines and made 12 deployments on board 5 nuclear submarines as the ship’s radiation health specialist, and only medical/dental provider. After retiring from the Navy in 1991, I taught in the Junior ROTC program near Annapolis, MD and served as a volunteer safety coach with the Naval Academy open ocean sailing team. In 1996, I moved to Texas and helped open a new Mobile Rural Health Clinic at one of the hospitals in Paris, and served as Clinic Coordinator. When the clinic was closed due to a merger with a Dallas hospital, I went to work at the Lamar County Jail as a jailer, and then for a short period as an extradition officer. From there I became a Corrections Officer with Texas Dept of Criminal Justice. During the 2006 election, I made a close, but unsuccessful bid at becoming Lamar County's first ever, Republican, County Judge. Although I wasn’t elected, I seem to have opened the door for many others to try their hands a public office. My wife, Josephine, came to this country in 2002 and became a citizen in 2007. We were pen pals before I went to the Philippines, where we were married in I have three sons, Eric, LtCol/USMC; Keith, CDR/USCG; Todd, a team supervisor at Northrup-Grumman doing those things one can't talk about. I love sailing, flying, scuba diving, camping,and rooting for the Green Bay Packers.