INTRO to My 2018 PHS Class of '68 Profiles

A recent New York Times book reviewer wrote a description of characters in a novel that I think describes my schoolmates:  “The characters exhibit the range of personalities that you’d expect from a random sampling of Middle Americans: nice people, abrasive people, the churchy, the alcoholic, the educated, the not. You’d probably know which of them you’d prefer to sit with at a high school reunion.” Yep. Tru dat.

Coming home to live in Canton after 40 years of not living in Canton, I have enjoyed catching up with some of my PHS characters—I mean classmates. Five years ago, I set up this blog to tell the stories of some of them in preparation for our 45th reunion. I’m back at it again for the 50th. Below, you will find profiles on ROSEMARY HAYNE, KATHRYN CULBERTSON, JERRY SIMLER, and CHRIS LARGE HAWKINS. I also have a round-up of 10 classmates who became nurses.

I need to make clear that this is not an official class blog. No one is responsible for this but me. I choose people to profile not because they were or are the most or least popular or successful but because I think they have an interesting story to tell. Maybe you’ve known someone’s story all along. I didn’t, and as a writer, I like to learn from what I write. So I sought these people out to learn something.

In general, one of the things I’ve learned from writing this blog is that many classmates thought they didn’t have many friends in high school. Bonnie Andrews Kolberg, with whom I became friends only 40-some years after graduation, used to say that to me all the time. And yet she had one true very good friend from grade school on throughout her whole life, and she let me tell that story. That friendship with Kathy sustained the two of them through dating, marriage, babies, and grandbabies, as Bonnie acquired more and more friends, including, I'd like to think, me. Her life ended way too soon and sadly for her family and her very many friends a few years ago. We miss her. But we have her story. Similarly, another classmate once told me she didn’t have many friends from high school, but when she came to a PHS ’68 girl get-together, and she walked into the room, five women shouted her name across the room, and ran over to hug her.

It’s not the number of friends you have, but the number of friends you can count on.

Two of the people I have interviewed this time—Kathy Garnett Culbertson and Rosemary Hayne-- began by telling me they didn’t have very many friends in high school. And yet, both remember others and are remembered fondly by others I have spoken to.

This time around, all of the people I interviewed are people I knew in grade school, long before high school, and with whom I had very little contact in the halls of Perry High. And yet, I have strong, clear memories of all of them as children, and meeting up with them again, all these years later, I saw them both as the wonderful children they started out as, the interesting high school characters they were, and the fabulous adults that they have become. I can’t say that I understand their lives, so much has gone missing in our connection in the past 50 years. But as the reviewer I began with noted, “Friends, especially childhood friends, don’t need to fully understand one another in order to accept one another.”

I’d add, they don’t need to understand each other in order to show up at a 50th reunion. Think about it: Weekend of September 15th. (After note: I hope to profile three to four more people before our reunion in September. If you have any suggestions, email me at my google or website address or message me on Facebook. Please don’t put post it to everyone. I am not looking so much for success stories as STORIES, accounts of interesting things that have befallen us.)