Shannon Fitzpatrick traveled to Austria from San Marcos as a Rotary Youth Exchange student in 1978, She shares her experience at the Rotary meeting on Aug. 18. San Marcos Rotary is 100 years old this year and plans to celebrate different programs supported by Rotary. One is the youth exchange, which brings young people from other countries to San Marcos, and sponsors San Marcos youth to go abroad.
Fitzpatrick says her first host family in Austria lived in a castle near what was then the Yugoslavian border. Then she moved to Vienna, and finally to Salzburg, where she attended a ceramics school but lived in a hotel that doubled as both a spa and a slaughterhouse for pigs. She swears that is true.
Fitzpatrick is a sixth generation San Marcan. She has bachelor and master’s degrees in education and law degree. She and her husband, Ron Bowden, lived for a time in Houston became an appellate lawyer for the state, then an Assistant DA in Hays County and finally the director of the Office of the Attorney for Students at Texas State, from which she retired in 2019.
