 Today, continuing with our "Getting to Know Them" series, Esteemed member, Mark Urban was on the "Hot Seat" in our quest to get Mark to "tell all" about himself. Please click on "Read more" below to find out. |
Mark was born in 1950 in Los Angeles. His father owned a small business. He was from a small town in Iowa where almost everyone was of Luxembourg descent. His mother was a housewife and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati. Her parents were from Zhitomir, Ukraine and emigrated to the United States to avoid czarist pogroms in Russia.
Mark has a younger brother who lives in Los Angeles. Mark graduated from Hamilton High School in L.A. in 1967. UCLA in 1971 and UCLA Law School in 1974 and passed the bar in 1974. He also met his wife Terri Friedman in 1974. They married in 1977 and moved to Carmichael in 1978. Mark and Terri have 3 daughters. One daughter lives in Oakland with her husband and son. Her husband is from Kharkiv and left the Soviet Union as a child. The other two daughters live in Sacramento.
His first law job was as a Graduate Legal Assistant in 1973 in the California Secretary of State’s office. When the then Secretary of State was elected Governor in 1974, he worked on his transition team helping set up the California Energy Commission and then worked as a deputy general counsel at the Energy Commission. In 1983, he transferred to the Attorney General’s office where he represented more than 25 state agencies and appeared before all levels of the state and federal judicial systems, including the California and United States Supreme Courts. Mark retired from state service in 2008.
At various times he's done some community service work. He served on the boards of the American River Natural History Association, the Carmichael Planning Advisory Council, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Mosaic Law Synagogue. After he retired, he served five years as a volunteer, small claims court judge. Most of his time in retirement has been spent as an amateur musician. Mark started taking violin lessons when he was six years old, and that continued until he was in his early teens. He then took up the viola in the mid-1990s which he had started to learn as a child. For five years he was a violist with the Camellia Symphony Orchestra, and since 2015 he’s been a pit musician with the Davis Musical Theatre Company. The last three years he has played both the violin and viola with DMTC
Mark says he and Terri have also spent a lot of his retirement time traveling. They’ve been to, among other places, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Borneo and Greenland. In 2018 they spent two weeks touring western and central Ukraine. Mark says: “We met many wonderful people in Ukraine. “When I see places that I visited being bombed, I’m filled with pain, disgust and profound anger. What I learned visiting Ukraine is that the people are resilient, they're brave and they're patriotic. This is something that the rest of the world is now discovering. So fellow Rotarians, tonight I stand with Ukraine.”