VALERIE OSIER | INTERIM FEATURES ED.
She’s the friendly face students see while getting a quick snack in the Riverside City College bookstore. Her short, sometimes spiky blonde hair makes her easily recognizable. She’s not only the head cashier at the bookstore, but she is also a student at RCC.
Kiki Cox Rosenberger began working at RCC in fall of 2004. When she first started at RCC, students would call the bookstore and order their books over the phone.
Rosenberger decided to take a computer class in the summer of 2007. The last computer class she took was in the 80s. She continued on to take business classes and earn an Associates of Science in business with a concentration in accounting.
“After I completed (a business degree), I still liked going to school,” said Rosenberger. “There was a class I had been looking at, seeing the books and all that for the whole time I had been here. It was a Humanities class … since I no longer had to take classes I needed, I took that humanities class: Humanities 18-‘Death.’ So now I’m just taking classes that look interesting.”
Rosenberger started her college career after high school at Indiana University. After two semesters, she left college to join her family stationed in Pakistan.
“I’ll tell ya, at 18 I had no idea what I was doing,” Rosenberger said. “I think the community college system is the best thing ever created. It gets you used to college requirements- what they expect of you, yet the classes aren’t real big … It’s really great, not to mention much less expensive.”
Rosenberger was born June 1950 in Spokane, Wash. to Airforce parents. When her father shipped off to war, her mother left Kiki as an infant with a long-term baby sitter and never came back.
Her father was unable to care for a baby by himself, but by happenstance, her father’s commanding officer and his wife were looking to adopt. They paid for her birth parents’ divorce and Kiki’s birth-father was able to sign the adoption papers to give her to them.
“Being adopted was actually the best thing that could ever have happened to me,” Rosenberger said “Being an “Airforce Brat,” Rosenberger has traveled all over the world. She has toured Europe and has walked the steps of the Parthenon in Greece. While with her family in Pakistan, she trained as a dental assistant. She left Pakistan right before the political coups in the late 60s that led to riots.
“But I was in Virginia, right outside of D.C. when D.C. went up in flames in ’68,” Rosenberger said. “I was living in San Bernardino during the Watts Riots. And I was in the San Fernando Valley during the Rodney King riots… I’ve been around for a few riots.” Upon return to the US, she earned an Associates of Science in Dental Assisting at Chaffey College and was in the first group of certified dental assistants in California.
Currently, Rosenberger and her husband have been married for 35 years. They enjoy showing their 1956 Chevy Station wagon at car shows and going on weekend cruises.
