Two or Three a Week is Going Good

Every now and again, I get discouraged about my "Find all my lost classmates" quest. It just seems like finding 150 needles in the world haystack is impossible.  So then I take a little break and resume my activities with my wife's reunion committee. We're running a fundraiser - a classmate offered up a week's stay at his Orange Beach AL condo for a drawing at $10 a pop. So far, it's drawn a really good response. We're hoping to raise a grand out of it.

But the classmate search is a process of planting seeds and sometimes you reap rewards. As I mentioned the other day, using a truly arcane combination of people search engines, ancestry.com and good ole 411, we located and spoke with Dale Weber (as documented in our previous blog entry) and Kris Skaflestad both in North Carolina. Let me steal a page from my Reitz 1967 blog (reitz67.blogspot.com).

Just when I thought we had run into a stone wall with my Wayne Valley classmates search, we hit paydirt over the weekend, and I had a chance to reminisce with two more classmates, neither of whom knew they were lost and were both grateful that they were found. It seems nearly universal; very few consciously try to lose touch with their high school group, it just happens over time, day by day as life's demands and happenstance buffet you through the years. Whether by design or not, you come to a moment of respite and your mind starts to wander to the past, and high school days come to mind along with the inevitable speculation about this one or that one. Did they fulfill their yearbook ambitions; if they didn't are they happy anyway? I admit I've run into some classmates who .... Let's put it this way, just like my old classmate (I don't seem to have any other kind), Dale Weber being listed in the dictionary under smart ass, there are a few that can be found under hateful and paranoid. "I don't remember you. Who exactly are you and why are you contacting me and why do you want this information?" I know that this is going to cause you to have to contact your federal witness protection program handlers, and you'll probably have to move again, but your high school classmates are curious about how you turned out. Now I can tell them without you having to provide a lick of information.



On the encouraging side, as our 45th approaches, I've seen more and more classmates looking for their classmate friends and I'm delighted to be able to provide some guidance and information. The more people start looking around, the more will be found. The more that are found, the more that will attend. The more that attend, the better the event will be and that's my selfish wish.