Richard Senzig

Richard M. Senzig, (Rick) grew up in the greater Los Angeles, California area living mostly around Thousand Oaks and later in Fountain Valley near Huntington Beach. His parents, Richard L. Senzig and Marjorie M. Bloomquist moved out to Los Angeles from Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1960 when Rick was two years old. Rick has two younger brothers, Tim and Chris Senzig. Rick attended Fountain Valley High School and graduated as a honor student in 1976. After a year and half at Orange Coast College, Rick left college to pursue a career in forestry in Auburn near Sacramento. Rick was hired as a seasonal firefighter with the California Department of Forestry and saw action as a member of a California Department of Forestry pumper truck crew on the Scarface Fire in Modoc National Forest in 1977. In March 1978, Rick joined the US NAVY and served six years as a shipboard electronics technician. He was stationed aboard USS Towers DDG-9 in Yokosuka, Japan and proudly served in the Western Indian Ocean near Iran four months after the Iranian Hostage Crisis had ended. This earned him the Navy Expeditionary and Humanitarian medals, Battle Efficiency and Sea Service awards. Rick was meritoriously promoted to petty officer second class, E-5 while in Japan. He later earned a Letter of Commendation for special operations aboard USS Enhance MSO-437, a minesweeper home-ported in Tacoma, Washington. After Rick left the Navy in 1984, he worked as an Electronic Engineering Technician for ITT, Apple Computer, Intel and AT&T. Rick moved to Seattle, WA from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1994 due to mass layoffs in the technology sector. Rick married twice, first to Tracy A. Williams of Los Gatos, CA and later Dominique M. Burkhardt of Lucerne, Switzerland. Sadly, no children resulted from either marriage. Rick learned in 1985 that he had 800+ European relatives living in Germany and France and began studying German. Rick took up German folk dancing to improve his German and made his first trip to Germany in 1989 meeting his extended family. When Rick moved to Seattle, he continued German folk dancing and made two more trips to Germany. In 2005, Rick began to dance less frequently because of arthritis, so he took up a new hobby with world war two and world war one reenacting. Rick's first debut as an actor came in the summer of 2010 when he learned by accident of a casting call for German infantry for "Pathfinders" filming near Portland, Oregon. When the director asked, "Who can speak German?", only Rick had his hand up. So, Rick got a speaking part in his first movie. How is that for luck? "Wilkommen zu Der Normandie", was the last thing the wounded American paratroopers heard before they were shot. It was a sad footnote in the context of a greater second world war that was finally brought to a conclusion by the largest invasion of all history... the D-Day Landings at Normandy, France June 6, 1944. Rick is proud to have been a part of this film, which pays tribute to the bravery and sacrifice of the young warriors that died that day to restore freedom and hope to Europe.