Obregon served in the military and left it in the San Francisco Bay area and got a job working for Kaiser Industries.

“I met my wife at that location,” Obregon said. “She’s from Belvedere, Illinois. She wanted to come back home. She had a little boy called Boris. I thought that I would resign from my position, give them a week’s notice and she could do the same thing and we would go to Illinois. And we did that. We had a little Opal Cadet and everything we owned was in that little car. We drove to Belvedere. Her father had rented a house for us with the money we sent him. When we got to Belvedere, I had written to Kaiser in Chicago and sent them my vita. They told me they would hire me, but they wouldn’t be able to transfer me. I went to Chicago for an interview. And I decided I wasn’t going to work in Chicago or move to Chicago.”

Obregon went to work for Sun Strand Aviation in Rockford and got involved in the Latino community in Belvedere.

“We got a group of people together and formed a center and submitted a proposal to the Illinois Dept. of Children and Families to fund a program for migrant children,” Obregon said. “It was funded and we were given a month to open the center. So I resigned as chair of that group and applied for the executive position of the daycare center, which I got. And I spent a couple of years there. The center is still there in a Lutheran Church in Belvedere. It is doing quite well. Putting together a Latino organization in Belvedere wasn’t a hard thing because there were already people involved to put it together. But they were not really organized and so I helped do that.”

Obregon also got an appointment in the Illinois Governor’s office while living in Belvedere.

“I got involved with the Illinois Migrant Council,” Obregon said. “I ended up becoming chairman of the group that had offices in Chicago and throughout the state of Illinois. I ended up working for the Governor’s Office of Illinois and the Manpower office that had offices in Chicago and Springfield. Dan Walker was governor at the time.  He was defeated by James Thompson. They offered to let me stay on in the position, but they wanted me to support whatever effort they had for the Latino community. I made the wrong statement in a way. I said, ‘I’m not going to support something that I don’t know what it is. Show me your documents and if I agree with it, I will be more than glad to go along with it.’ They said, ‘Forget about it. We’ll find someone else.’ Allen Dixson at that time was secretary of State. He hired me for six months under contract to do what I had been doing with the governor’s office for the secretary of State.”

Obregon wasn’t out of work for long. A job in Wisconsin came a calling.

“A friend of mine called me and told me that his position was going to be open,” Obregon said. “He was personnel manager/safety director for a canning company in Belgium, Wisconsin called Cure Preserving. It was a family operation. I said I would come up and take a look. I did and made the application out. I was hired for that position. That was in 1978-1979. We moved to Port Washington, Wisconsin at that point so that I could continue my work there. I ended up working with people in Port Washington to establish a bi-lingual program for the kids whom we had at the canning company. There was a housing program at the canning company with cabins and whatnot. We established what was called the Community Learning Center at a Lutheran Church in Port Washington. All this time, I’ve been a member of Kiwanis International, for over 50 years. Wherever I lived, I became part of that group. So I went to work with the canning company and they kind of offered me the chance to travel to Texas to recruit migrant workers. The way I looked at it, I made a complete circle. I kind of made a complete circle and now it was my responsibility to go and recruit the migrant workers for the company. That worked out pretty well. I did that for a couple of years.”

But public service came a calling.

“There was an open position with the Department of Public Instruction under Superintendent Herbert Grover, a Title I Migrant Program position,” Obregon said. “I applied for it and got approved. I did that for no more than a year. At the time that I left that job, I was told that they were not going to replace me, but they did. That program worked with the different CESAs in the state to establish Latino Parent Councils within those CESA offices. I travelled quite a bit. I made a couple of presentations at a couple of conferences for teachers and other education professionals. At one presentation that I did in Oconomowoc, I started my presentation in Spanish for no more than four minutes. And then I reverted to English. When I spoke in Spanish, there were a number of people who walked out of the conference room. When I reverted to English, most of them came back. After my presentation, we opened it up for questions. One person asked, ‘If you speak good English, why did you start your presentation in Spanish?’ I told them, ‘Look, you guys are professionals. You’re teachers. The children you have in your class may not understand what you say and they can’t walk out. We’re taught to give respect and to trust the teaching staff because they are the leaders and they are going to teach us how to do the right things. That’s why I spoke in Spanish. If you walked out and you’re a professional person, a child in your classroom cannot do that. He or she would get in trouble.’ Grover said it was a good presentation.”

Part 2: Community Service