Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Perry HS Class if '68 Grade School Memories: WATSON ELEMENTARY

Warning: Nostalgia Rampant Here

Those of us in the Perry HS Class of ’68 who came to Watson as third graders in the fall of 1958 came as innovators and victims of change. Having been first and second graders in other Perry grade schools that were beginning to boom with us baby boomers, we were called on to fill the new space. Some of the kids were from the nearby allotment (with so much dirt dug up, the kids referred to it as "Milkshake Canyon," I assumed at the time because it looked the color of a chocolate milkshake.) But most of us lived quite aways away. I for one lived closer to Whipple, Reedurban, and even Genoa than I did from Watson, and so I spent an hour and a half on the bus each day, five days a week just to come and go, but somehow the line-drawers put me that side of the line, and in retrospect, I am glad.
Since it was a new school, we all were starting over in a way, teachers, too, and under not such easy conditions. Fourth grade was even tougher, so fifth and sixth grades seemed easier and then, we had to move out again to become “Golden Flashes.”
The first boomer innovation came because Watson didn’t have enough students for TWO second and TWO third grade classes, so they took one third of each grade and formed a classroom, half second graders and half third-graders. They jazzed our parents up with talk about how innovative a split grade was and yet how traditional because really, it was the idea of the one-room school house: the younger would learn from hearing the older doing their lessons. Yea, good for the second graders like Tara Netzley and Nancy Nisewonger. What did we get out of it?

Actually, what we got was Mrs. Cornell as a teacher, the first great teacher I ever had. She thought what we needed to manage the stress of this arrangement was more art, and her art projects were so fun and indeed creative. I remember one project that required us to bring in shoe boxes and salt boxes and oatmeal boxes, which we stacked and glued together to make a castle. And then we painted it white. And THEN, to create a stucco effect, Mrs. Cornell encouraged us to throw handfuls of Malt-o-meal cereal (uncooked) at the wet white paint. As an 8-year old who had seldom done anything more artistic than carefully color inside the lines of a coloring book, I thought that getting to throw cereal at wet paint was just a hoot. If this was art, bring it on! And she did. For Thanksgiving, the whole class built a two foot dais topped with a three foot high paper-maché turkey, made with flour paste and covered in white feathers we glued on with Elmer’s Glue. Tore Djupedal wrote lyrics to a song we sang titled “I’m Dreaming of a White Turkey.” I mean, I am in the arts today, and now we call all this “collaboration.”

I don’t know how the teachers were chosen to move to the new school, but they were a terrific crew, headed by one of the world’s great Principals, Mr. Jones. Mrs. Cornell was just the first of the four great teachers I had there, to which I’d add my sister’s fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Hross and most of the others, and Mr. Winkler, up in seventh grade and the first male teacher I had ever seen in my life, was exciting too.

 
The following year, with Perry Schools’ overpopulation still on the rise, we as fourth graders were the class chosen for half days…which sounded like a good deal, if you didn’t see the huge stacks of homework handed out by the likes of Mrs. Vosper, who, along with other fourth grade teachers, instructed our mothers how to make bookbags for us to lug all this work home in. They were drawstring style, so when the stack of books got heavy enough, the strings cut right into your hands. Don’t even let me hear how heavy the backpacks are for kids these days. They don’t give you rope burns.

We had begun learning our multiplication tables the year before, but the fourth grade teacher got SERIOUS about that year and purchased a 12-record set of forty-fives (you may recall forty-fives: they were what you needed that cylinder to put on your record player for) of songs, one record for each times table:

You will know you’re really great
When you learn your tables of eight

Are you ready, kids? Here we go!

Eight times one is eight (pause)
Eight times one is eight (pause)
Eight times two is sixteen (pause)
Eight times two is sixteen (pause)
 

Mrs. Vosper encouraged us to click our fingers at the pauses. Mrs. Vosper also taught us a song about long division sung to the tune of “Dave Crockett,” the chorus of which went

Lo-ong, long division,
Headache of the whole fourth grade.

(I do remember all three verses. For your copy, send an email or SASE.)  I loved those songs! I may have been the only one who did.  

Fourth grade was also the year of the flutaphones. I had started drum lessons by then, so I didn’t buy one, but people were always trotting off with their white plastic and maroon instruments, to play flutaphone symphonies with the visiting music teacher. Becky Haines played flutaphone. Who else?

It was also the year of getting a Shafer pen and five cartridges for $1.25, the whole class. Some people (ahem) learned to poke holes in the cartridges and squirt ink all the hell over the place, but I considered them holy instruments up until I was 22 and carried my diary to the beach and all my writing washed away. Ballpoint ever after, but I still love cartridge pens.

It wasn’t till fifth grade, when we went back to full days of school, that I felt that Watson had become a real school where we could talk meaningfully about topics such as who the bad boys were and the sweet girls and the meanest teachers. That was the year I had Mrs. Kimmins, who was not the meanest, but surely tallest teacher and woman I had ever seen with the posture of a model. She could have carried all her books on her head all day and never drop one. She used a teaching technique I myself have employed often: feeding students. Whenever we had a new social studies unit, we had food. And it was the year Hawaii became a state, and the ensuing fifth grade luau was quite the event. We spent weeks (outside of class, I’d like to make clear) making tissue flowers for strings of leis and grass skirts from newspapers and crepe paper. (As usual, I have no idea what the boys wore, but I am guessing it is where Tom Walter acquired his first of many bright shirts), and we were allowed to go barefoot in class to eat pineapple! I also distinctly recall having enchiladas for the first time in my life in that class when we studied New Mexico, which we were to understand was not a country. The enchiladas were cold out of a can and so pretty awful, in retrospect. And though Alaska had just become a state, too, we never had whale blubber, though we did learn about how warm it got in Juneau. (90 degrees in July!!)

So that was also the year that JFK was inaugurated, and back in those days, the teachers would bring in these teeny portable TV’s and two classes would crowd around them. It was a cold day in Ohio, and our teacher exclaimed how Kennedy was not wearing a coat! I did not know who Robert Frost was, but I knew a man with white hair came to the microphone and started to read from a piece of paper and couldn’t see it because of the bright sun, and just put it down and started to recite from memory. Years later in my college English classes, on Presidential Inauguration day, I would do a presentation to my students on all the poems that have ever been written for the Presidential Inaugurations and read them with the students and tell them about seeing Robert Frost on a 10-inch screen when I was 10 years old.

In sixth grade I had another of my greatest teachers of my, Elizabeth Scheub, who along with Mrs. Schissler just ruled us rowdy sixth graders. There was quite a debate about Mrs. Schissler. I was terrified of her, but the boys loved her toughness and sarcasm. Hoo, she could stare a bad boy down and not even blink, then smile smugly when she’d won the staredown.



Mrs. Scheub talked to us like adults. She would come in, smelling like the cigarettes she and all the teachers puffed away on in the Faculty lounge, her full jersey knit skirts swaying at her calves, her throat husky as Lauren Bacall’s, and tell a story. I remember her telling one about a friend “who walked where angels feared to tread,” who was hospitalized in the Soviet Union and couldn’t get any booze until some friends brought in a melon plugged with vodka. I didn’t know what it meant for angels to fear to tread, what vodka was or even a plugged melon, but I loved that story. She encouraged class discussion, too, and since Terry Tschocheff was in the class, she was in for a LOT of discussion. Terry was never disrespectful, but he was very persistent about arguing his points. One day the teacher said that some day route 30 would not go through Perry Heights but would be built around it, and Terry said what a very bad idea that was. She argued that he only felt that way because his father owned a motel. Terry said so what, his father would lose business. I think of that every time I ride past that former motel that is now a barber shop while Terry is far away in Florida, I think of the two of them debating.

One last Mrs. Scheub story. When my first book of poetry came out in 1980, I sent her a copy and thanked her for being the first to ever assign me a poem. She wrote back a marvelous note, including with it all the poems I had written in her class two decades before! What files the woman must have kept!

My best friends that year were Sue Riley and Becky (“Becka”) Bowling. Sue taught me about Brenda Starr comic books, the Massillon Museum, and Zink Dairy. She had a sister named Debby the same age as my sister Daun, and we all sat together on the interminable bus ride we had every morning and afternoon with sixth graders Gerry Morehead, Jim Vincent, Kathi Lewis, Cathy Bowen, Tim Hildebrand, Becky and her cousin Tommy Bowling and others along the route. The January of sixth grade, Debby was diagnosed with leukemia, and by the end of the school year, she had died, and the Rileys moved to California as though to move very far from all that sorrow. From near L.A., Sue wrote Becky and I long letters about going to rock concerts and about how “bitchin” the boys were out there, but I have never seen her since, and I would give anything to find her.

Michelle Droggos was the most shocking person I had ever met. She looked and talked tough, in a very glamorous way, more like an adult than another child. And her mom was more like one of my wild wacky great-aunts than a mom, with her bleached blonde hair and deep cigarette voice. In fifth grade, Michelle decided she was going to be “Shelly,” and wouldn’t answer if we shouted, “Michelle!” and then in sixth grade, she decided that she would be “Micky,” and wouldn’t answer if we called her “Shelly.” And that seemed shocking to me, that one could just change who she was, just start going by another, albeit related, name. One momentous day in sixth grade, the boys were sent outside to play while the girls saw the Walt Disney-like cartoon on menstruation, followed by a discussion.Mostly Michelle discussed. She knew all about it.

I am very sad to see her name, along with Becka’s on our “In Memoriam” list. (And Sally Doll's and Tim Hildebrand's, oh I hate this.) I stayed close to Becka all through high school and even into college, when she was in college and then after when we were both teacher. It was a terrible terrible shock to lose her in this life. I am so glad  that the Class of ’68 continues to remember the classmates we have lost, and we really have to thank Marg Hoffman Leffler, Marsha Brown Rennecker, and Kathy Ferrell Armstrong, who keep up the remembrance for us.

I have a very strong memory from that year of  standing in a line, waiting to go through the cafeteria with Sue Riley, Becka Bowling, and Tom Walter all singing, in perfect harmony, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight:” a winga wack-a winga wack. (They did not sing wim a weh, I don’t care what anyone sings now.) Also that year, we put on the play, How Boots Befooled the King, with Colin Binns as King. I think Tim Hildebrand was Boots.

Speaking of Colin, when Colin was chosen, as we all eventually were, to come to the front of the room and write down the names of anyone who was talking when Mrs. Scheub left the room, he came with a dictionary and sat at the teacher’s desk, opened the dictionary and proceeded to read it (or at least, put on a good show of pretending to read it) while we all worked quietly away, stunned at the very notion. Kids talked about that one for weeks: “Do you know Colin Binns actually readsthe dictionary?” So it is time for me to confess that I have always read the dictionary, that I love reading the dictionary. To this day, my husband and I often drag several to the table, the American Heritage and the OED and some pathetic online version to puzzle out a word we are discussing.

That year we put out “The Sixth Grade Magazine,”--the actual title, chosen after much debate and voting--which I edited and which had one of Liz Mischler’s great horse drawings…of a donkey. I lost my copy, but Jerry Simler gave me his when he came back from the service. Also that year, a boy (who left a year later) named Fred asked every girl to be his girlfriend, and when the girls all found out, they formed a club called the “Fred, One-Eighth of a Brain Club,” with Sue Riley as President.

It was the year that Alan Shepard was the first astronaut to leave the earth’s atmosphere and enter space, and the teachers hauled the teeny TV in again and we all watched him blast off. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, and some of us actually looked up to the skies and waved.

It was also the year that the seventh and eighth graders disappeared from Watson and headed off for the even newer school, Edison Junior High. As our second semester was drawing to a close, I  was a little anxious about going to Edison, a JUNIOR HIGH! A BIG one! Where we would have to change classes and probably get lost! Mrs. Scheub gave us reports on her daughter Beth’s year there to assure us we would all be fine. “And remember,” she said, “When you are on your way to a test, step on the tungsten in the light bulb in the front lobby. At the high school, no one is allowed to walk on the panther, but at Edison Junior High, everyone walks on the light bulb.” They probably hoped we would get a bright idea that way.

Soon enough that year was over, elementary school was done. I went back to Watson to visit the following year and when I bent down to the water fountain, instead of having to stand on tiptoe and get pelted in the face with water as I did at the “big” school, big tears welled in my eyes, my first experience with nostalgia. Why did I cry? I wondered. I am not crying today, but I am nostalgic and have gone on way too long. But this is all true. Ask Kathi Lewis or Wayne Hannum. Ask Becky Haines, Darlene Arbuckle, Colin Binns, Rosemary Haynes, Tom Walter. Becky Haines, Lynn Klotz, Mike Sturrett, Mike Sullivan, Terry Tsocheff, Pete Gentile, Deb Hershberger, Jay Warfield, Mark Andrews, and Tom Howenstine, Rosemary Haynes, or Mary Bryden, Jean Kirkpatrick. Jerry Simler. Patsy Orlando. Patty Siekle. Chris Lucas, Wally Stutchel, Chris Smith, Marcia Young, Sally Doll, Carlee Clapper. Rick West, Darlene Arbuckle, Gerry Morehead, Mike Grimes, Jim Vincent, Cathy Bowen. Who else?  Ask them, too, what else? What do they remember?

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Featuring Four: VIV


RICHVILLE REDUX: A Love Story 

Vivian Okey and…(read on) 


Vivian Okey was a close friend my last two years of high school, She threw me the only real birthday party I have ever had, and she wrote in my yearbook, “Dear Diane, no farewell eulogies for you from me! You’re too dear to leave….Here’s to a friendship that will grow more as we grow older...” And then, in the way of yearbook predictions, we went off to college and rarely if ever saw each other again until she found me on Facebook recently and wrote, “Diane, I have married the nicest person who went to Perry with us. I want to tell you about it sometime.”


1968 Clock
 
So one fine morning, about 40 years since we last met, we got together for lunch at Samantha’s. Arriving in the parking lot at the same moment as she did, I was struck at how little she had changed. The long hair she wore in our senior picture is short now, but it’s still dark brown, her eyes still soulful, her speech still careful and emotional. Over salads, we caught up on a lot, and she told me the story about her new husband.

 It’s a great PHS ’68 love story:

Vivian and her grandson, reading
The first part, I knew. After high school, Vivian, one of the “Top Ten Academically” went off to Heidelberg College, where she majored in math education, graduating in 1972. She married shortly after that, and stayed in Northeast Ohio, close to home but not Perry Township, and she taught for many years in various school districts. I figured she had had children, and in fact, she had two daughters, Tina and Carrie. I didn’t know she had divorced and had by now become a grandmother and grandchild sitter extraordinaire. But the love story, that’s what she wanted to talk about.
Vivian had been long divorced. One evening at the end of visiting hours at a senior residency, she and her sister bumped into an old neighbor, Art Snyder, a guy who had been a classmate at Richville Grade School and too at PHS. There in the lobby, Vivian’s sister got engaged in conversation with him, as Vivian stood there, distracted (I had forgotten till recently her tendency to distraction!) really barely remembering him at all on the ride home, when her sister commented on how nice he was.

She had remembered that he had invited her to have coffee at his church’s coffeehouse one particular upcoming night, though, and being very interested in church interests, she showed up. Within moments after sitting down at the table in the church, Vivian notes, “We were just very deep in conversation.” They talked about their previous marriages, the divorces, their kids, their jobs, all the intervening stuff of their lives since 1968. Each emphasized the importance of church in their lives. And the next thing she knew, “I looked up, and it had grown dark out, and everyone had left, and they were shutting the coffeehouse down.” Vivian and Art stood in the parking lot in the dark, saying good-bye, and she felt as though for the first time in her life, at age 58, she had found her soul mate. And then she remembered the last time she had sat in the dark with him.


1967 Clock
One summer in seventh grade, a Richville boy she barely knew showed up on her front porch. Now he tells us that his friend had had a crush on one Vivian Okey, and he was there to check up on her, to see what exactly she was like, whether worthy of his friend. He sat down beside her on the porch, and they talked for hours. “And then, I remember my father coming to the door and saying, ‘It’s really late. You have to come in now,’” Vivian says today. And that was the only time in her twelve years of school that she spoke to Art Snyder.

And yet, here he was again, and there they were again, in conversation, and in love, just like that. Within months, they were married, and now, as the fairy tale goes, “are living happily ever after” in a new house they have bought together in North Canton.

 
And Vivian and me? Well, I can say that now, forty years later, we are finally getting back to that friendship that grows more as we grow…wiser.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Featuring Four: CHUCK

Chuck


Name: Chuck Frascone
 

Where do you live now? For how long?
I Live in San Jose, California.

I was drafted in 1969 and was discharged on Treasure Island in San Francisco in 1973 and have been here ever since. I love living in California and especially in Silicon Valley, where there is so much activity.
1968 Clock
 

Employed or retired? At what or from what?
I am a real estate broker working full time.

Painting in the studio

Any hobbies or activities outside of work you want people to know about?

I love to ride my Honda VTX 1300  motor cycle along Highway 1 on a sunny day and look out at the ocean or ride up to Alice's Restaurant in the Santa Cruz mountains with my friends to have lunch. I'm also an artist and have a studio that I built in my back yard where I paint. My latest hobby is learning how to play the guitar.

 
Who or What is the best part of your life these days?

I'd have to say that the best part(s) of my life these days is spending time with my family and close friends. My wife and I enjoy being at home and entertaining, cooking for everyone and just hanging
With son and youngest grandchild
out. Also, being grandparents is a lot of fun.


Have you attended any previous reunions? If so, which and if not, any particular reason?

The only HS reunion that I've been to in the past was the 15th. Someone back then contacted my parents to get my address in order to send the announcement. I had a great time at that reunion but I never heard about another reunion until this one. Thank goodness for social media.
 

Why have you decided to attend this reunion?

I'm looking forward to attending this reunion because I have made contact with some of my classmates over the past few years (again due to social media) and want to catch up and find out how and what they have been doing. I'm also looking forward to seeing who I can recognize. When I looked at the pictures from the 40th reunion on FB, I was not able to connect a lot of those images with the "kids" that I went to HS with. I know that we'll all laugh when we see each other

Best and/or worst high school memory?

I have no best or worst HS memories. For many reasons, that was a time in my life when all I wanted was to be done with it and move on. The times I remember having the most fun back then were the times away from school when I was hanging out with my close friends. I really don't think about HS very often.

 
Anything else you want your classmates to know about you?

With Kathleen in front of the Frascone Hat Shop in Sora, Italhy
If there is anything that I would like my classmates to know about me today, it is that I am happy with who I am and where I am in my life and I look forward to seeing many of them again in October and to hear their stories as well.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Featuring Four: BECKY

HOME AGAIN, BECKY HAINES:
The Pregnant Teen Comes Home a Chrome Diva    

I wanted my presence to say,
‘Hey, I may have gotten pregnant,
but I am still around, and I am a good person.’”  
 
When I finally reach Becky by phone in San Diego, we have put off this interview twice tonight while she tended to business for her upcoming move back to Florida. Actually, we have had to put this interview off for weeks, due to our time zones and work and travel schedules, so when she finally answers with, “Hello, Diane,” and I answer, “Contact!,” we are both laughing. Though I have known Becky since sixth grade at Watson Elementary, we have never spoken by phone before that I can recall, not even in junior high, when we all seemed to talk more on the phone than in person. No problem: we are both talkers in any medium, and Facebook and email have kept us in touch for the past year.

“So why move back to Florida?” I ask, after we have ascertained that San Diego weather is muchbetter than Florida weather (IMHO, any weather is better than Florida’s).

“I have a home there, and my daughter is there,” she says.

“But then why did you ever moved out to California three years ago?” I ask.

“A relationship that broke up seven months after I moved here,” she laughs ruefully.

“Oh yes,” I rejoin, “The old ‘I-need-more-space.’”

“And I was working four days a week and my partner was on the road three days a week, so how much more alone time can you get than that?” she asks.

And we both laugh. Ruefully, too, because Becky has had several difficult relationships, each one of which caused some setback in life. But none of them has kept her from becoming who she is today: a terrific Labor and Delivery Nurse, a proud mother of two adult children, and one hot member of the Chrome Divas, a women’s motorcycle-riding group.

But that is now. For the backstory, I return to spring 1967, when we
The 1967 Clock
last saw her in the halls of PHS. Becky, who sat in front of me in Spanish III, just disappeared from her desk one day, as far as I was concerned. Mr. Perez kept asking after her, and then someone said she wasn‘t coming back, and Mr. Perez stopped asking. Apparently, Omar and I were the only two who hadn’t realized weeks previously that she was pregnant. Becky had realized but was trying not to think about it till her sister took her off in February to a doctor, who pronounced her most definitely pregnant.
    
Back then pregnant teens had few options for finishing school, but Becky had one option: her very good grades. (Think about it: no one got into Omar’s Spanish III class with “C’s.”) She attended classes as long as she could, then sat out the last six weeks of the school year gestating, receiving “F’s,” for that period, which averaged with her first semester grades to enable her to pass junior year. “If I had quit, I would have had to repeat,” she says today, “And I couldn’t stand that.”

She continued to gestate until September 1967 when her son Billy was born. “And back then,” she notes, “You had to stay in the hospital five days after giving birth, which was so stupid, and five days later, on a Saturday, as they were wheeling me out with my baby in my arms, in limped three members of the Perry football team who had been injured at the game the night before.”

So as life limped on as usual for the PHS football team and other students, Becky’s life sped by suddenly as she joined her husband, who was stationed in Panama with the military. And while Becky missed Spanish IV at PHS, she was speaking Spanish often on the streets of Panama City where they weren’t as picky about pronunciation or the Spanish Academy rules of grammar as Omar. She found herself getting more fluent in the language which she would eventually use on the job in her future career. And in the following fall of 1968, her daughter Brenda was born in Panama. Becky in labor heard gunfire all around her as the car sped her to the hospital. “I remember looking up and seeing a billboard that said, “Ponga un tigre en su tanque,” she laughs today. (Put a tiger in your tank.)

“I didn’t have a name picked out for my daughter,” she recalls, “So at the last minute, I named her after ‘Brenda Starr.’” I remind her that in sixth grade at Watson, many of us girls considered Brenda Starr our heroine: beautiful with red hair, an exciting career in journalism, and a boyfriend who was incredibly handsome and gone a lot. Perfect. Sue Riley used to buy all the Brenda Starr comic books and pass them around.

“A great name!” I say approvingly.               
         
However, Becky’s relationship with her husband worsened when they were transferred to Ft. Hood. Soon they drifted apart and separated. In the meantime, she had met another Ft. Hood soldier whom she was married to for 14 years before the domestic abuse in their home escalated. A family member stopped her husband once from choking Becky, and after that time, he kept to verbal and emotional abuse, but once when he went after one of her children, her mother instincts kicked in, and she got herself and the children out. For awhile, she had to leave them with a grandparent, which was very hard.

“But I had been a stay-at-home-Mom for the first six years and didn’t have the kind of job that enables you to support a family,” she says. She acknowledges that she had been drinking too much as the domestic violence in her home had escalated, and so she quit drinking and set out to out to find employment and a new life in Florida.

For a while she was a secretary at Florida State.

“Is that the one in Tallahassee?” I ask. Becky, surprised at my ignorance, practically shouts into the phone: “No! Ugh! Those are the Seminoles! We are the Gators!”

She remembers distinctly the moment there when she got a 20 cent raise, which back then, made a difference, and she decided to go for a nursing degree. She obtained her degree in nursing in 1993 and worked as a nurse at North Florida Regional Medical Center till 2010, when she moved to California and worked at Palomar Hospital. Labor and Delivery is clearly an area she loves, and she will be working in Labor and Delivery at North Florida Regional by the time we see her in October, a total of 22 years as a nurse in the field now.

Speaking of now, I decide we’ve spent enough time in the past, and I want to know about the present, specifically about her children and her life as a Chrome Diva.

“You post often on Facebook how proud you are of your kids,” I begin, and I don’t need to say any more: off she goes.

“Yes, my daughter is a terrific nurse,” she says, “so right now, her hospital is paying for her to get her Master’s degree in nursing. And my son, who lives in Arizona, is sohard-working. He is holding down two jobs right now, one working in the cell phone business. And I have a grandson!” she adds without stopping for a breath.

Of course: grandchildren. I had forgotten, that’s usually the first thing you are supposed to ask PHS ’68 classmates about. But Becky is on a roll, and I don’t have to ask, as she continues, “Brenda’s son is 22 years old and studying in the College of Agriculture at University of Florida. I am so proud of him too.”

Okay, so now that we have covered some of the current family details, I ask her to tell me about the Chrome Divas—and what kind of bike she rides.

“A 1600 cc Yamaha Road Star painted turquoise with flames down the side. It’s really beautiful.

I was going to ride it to the last class reunion [the 40th, in 2008], but since the event was a Friday night, I couldn’t get it up there in time.”

“And how about this year?” I ask.

“Oh no, not Ohio in October,” she says. “I don’t so much like cold weather anymore.”

“Maybe the 50th?”

The question hangs in the air.  

 
I learn from Becky that the “Chrome Divas” is a national organization of women who ride their motorcycles to raise money for women’s issues. (http://www.chromedivas.com/) Started in Tallahassee, the club is now national. Each member is required to ride in at least one fund raiser benefitting women a year. Becky’s favorite benefit, due to her personal history with domestic violence, is Peaceful Paths, a domestic abuse network (http://www.peacefulpaths.org/). She is glad to be back riding for them now that she is returning to Gainesville. I ask her to please send a photo of her riding her bike to accompany this essay, and we do the technology wrestle—how to get it from her phone to my email. Cell phones and email, images and jpg's. Remember how technology was going to make everything so easy? Oh yea.

Before we hang up, I ask her about the first reunion she ever came home to, our 20th, back in 1988. Nearly two years previously, at Thanksgiving of 1986, she had divorced for the second time so was living alone for the first time in her life. (We laugh now at the irony of the fact that I had gotten married for the first time that same weekend and was living with someone for the first time in my life.) She had called me to ask if she would be allowed to come. Of course she could!

Today I ask her what she would say to the classmates who are coming to their first reunion this year.

“One person has said on Facebook that she is a little intimidated,” I explain. “She says she was gone to so long, and she was so shy then. How did you feel in 1988 getting ready to come back? Why did you want to come back?”

“I was terrified,” she said. “I was afraid no one would talk to me and everyone would make comments about how I got pregnant in high school. But I wanted my presence to say, ‘Hey, I may have gotten pregnant, but I am still around, and I am a good person.’”

I recall meeting her that 20th PHS ’68 Reunion at the Friday night TGIF, wearing her Florida tan and skinny jeans. She played pool with my husband, who was glad to have someone to play pool with (because “No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe.” I don’t do pool.) We laughed a lot then, too. To know Becky is to remember her laugh, that head-back, enjoying-life raspy cackle.

Thinking back to that weekend, I ask her now on the phone, “And how was that reunion, for you, what would you tell the people about coming to the 45th reunion? How did your fears pan out?” I ask her finally.

“It was great. Nobody was mean at all. What I remember are the hugs,” she laughed. “Everybody hugged me. Hugging.”

***
That’s our class! Love them, those huggers! The prodigals and the perfect! The wannabe’s and the been-there-and-done-that's, the successful by their own account, and all, all those like Becky, who are good people. Here’s to lots of hugging on the October 19, 2013 weekend, and as long as we all shall reunite!               

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Featuring Four: ADELA

The Clock 1968,
Adela tells people where to go

ADELA


Name: Adela Rosca Seal

Where do you live now? For how long?

Evanston, IL for seven years (We have also lived in Charlottesville, VA; Norman, OK; El Paso, TX, and Ft. Worth, TX.) All of our moves were job-related for Bob, who is now Dean of Libraries at Loyola Univ. Chicago.

 Employed or retired? At what or from what?

Happily retired after 25 years of teaching and 9 years staying at home to raise our two daughters.


Any hobbies or activities outside of work you want people to know about?

I enjoy water aerobics and yoga every week. Also, I love flying to Texas 3-4 times a year to visit our daughters and their families: Katee (35), her husband  David and 4 children (Shelby Leigh, 12; Reese Anne, 8; Joshua David, 6; Laney Kate, 2) and Corrie (33), husband Brendan and 2 children (Isabelle Catherine, 4; Connor Patrick, 2). Bob and I love to travel, and I think Paris is my favorite city, but Prague, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Barcelona are also fabulous.
Bob & Adela with the Grands

Who or What is the best part of your life these days? 

Being retired and enjoying life every day. Bob and I had our 42nd wedding anniversary on July 10 (began dating in February of 1966 when he was a senior at PHS). Being with our daughters, their husbands, and 6 grandchildren. Having such a close relationship with them all is such a blessing.


Have you attended any previous reunions? If so, which and if not, any particular reason? Why have you decided to attend this reunion?

[No, except for the 50th birthday party in 2000.] Bob and I have lived so far from Ohio. Now that we live in Illinois, it is much easier.

Best and/or worst high school memory?

Best, meeting Bob Seal and going to sock hops and out on dates with him. Mr. Featheringham’s “Advanced Psychology Class,” going to speech tournaments and being in plays, the way Mr. Perez would roll the “r” of my name at the beginning of roll call rrrrrrrrRosca! and Louie Mattachione, my all-time favorite teacher ever!
 

Worst…after I bombed out on the ACT, the counselor (name withheld) looked at the scores and under his breath said, “With these scores, you couldn’t  even get a job as maid at the Holiday in.”  I attended Akron U and graduated with a B.S. cum laude in 3 years. It was tempting to take this degree to Perry and ask the counselor if there were any jobs available at the Holiday Inn.  
 

Teacher of the District at a Rangers game
Anything else you want your classmates to know about you?
 
In March 2006 I was named the Teacher of the Year for the Crowley Independent School District. All the teachers in the district were honored at a Texas Rangers baseball game. What a thrill to walk out from the outfield to all the cheering fans. It is a night I will remember always.

Friday, August 9, 2013

Featuring Four Classmates: Intro

Featuring Four: Adela, Becky, Viv & Chuck



For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we'll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

                                 Robert Burns, 1788


 As we prepare for a forty-fifth class reunion, I'd like to feature four of my former high school classmates: Adela Rosca Seal, Becky Haines, Chuck Frascone, and Vivian Okey Snyder. I asked many people to participate in this series. I wasn't so interested in wealth or fame as those who had interesting stories, both those who had left and those who had stayed close to home. Some declined, some were busy. What all of these four have in common is that they have been to no previous reunions (or in Chuck's case, one many years ago) and all are coming back this fall for the forty-fifth.

I conducted in-person interviews with Becky and Viv and I asked Adela and Chuck to fill out a questionnaire.  I wanted to know about their present and why they've chosen to come back now. In addition, I have a reminiscence of Watson Grade School. I'll be posting one of these a day for the next five days, for the interest and edification of PHS people. The first will be Saturday, August 10th. Stay tuned!