Clarification: Additional Project

There seems to be a little confusion about what I am doing. It is a two fold project. It started finding our Not Located classmates based upon the list on the website which is now shorter than it was 2 months ago. That project ties into and is a subset of the greater work.

Unlike the reunion directory, which records current information for the people who attend the reunion, my chosen task is to create a directory, based mostly upon Embers, and adding in those that seemed to have missed the yearbook shoots. It is meant to be an inclusive comprehensive listing of all information that classmates choose to make public so they can be contacted conveniently in one document.

If you want, a listing will include your high school photo, your choice of a current photo, married name, address, city, state, zip, email address, phone number, facebook name and a short bio highlighting the last 45 years. It will include only that information that you want to be included and participation is entirely VOLUNTARY. Those of you who follow this monologue know what I think about privacy in the Internet age, but some folks do still believe in maintaining more of their information less publicly. That choice is their right, and we don't intend to violate it. I don't FB or Twitter advertising our absence while we are on vacation either, even though Evansville is about as safe a place as an in the country.

There are several ways this publication can be distributed. It can be delivered as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file although it will be large; it can be delivered as a physical disc. I seriously doubt it will be printed, unless it is printed by each person that gets it. The cost will be dependent on the cost of media and postage but it will be minimal to encourage distribution, a penny for penny reimbursement.

I will likely produce a sample entry and post it somewhere. I'll let everyone know where. Probably on the www.reitz67.com website, where the student listings give you the general idea. We did a comprehensive directory with more info for my wife's class and it has been a continuing hit and best seller among those graduates. We continue to update it as people move and generally, they keep us well informed.

Those of us on Facebook have already been enriched by the free flow of information afforded there, and reconnecting with those of us on Facebook (when we know given names along with married names) has provided a relatively painless way to do so. A complete directory extends that ability to those either not on Facebook for whatever reason, or those without computers or computer skills.

I confess, as computer skilled as I have become over the years, I still edit better on paper printouts. Maybe it's because we started out when computers were as big as houses and had to reside in huge temperature/humidity controlled rooms.  I never even dealt with computers in college after seeing computer science majors labor for an entire semester so they could print out Santa and his Reindeer in X's and O's - that wasn't my idea of a good time. I didn't start with computers until the late 70's. Now my phone has more computing ability than my first personal computer. My grandkids regard this particular write/print/edit eccentricity as a handicap from which they do not suffer.

By the way, I happened to remember that I had a group of photos my parents took at the graduation, delayed one day by rain (as I was reminded by Ted Dobson). Thankfully I scanned them before our house fire and while the original Kodachrome slides are gone, the images are preserved still. I have posted them on Facebook and encourage people to tag themselves. I am reviewing some of the others to make sure they were not too Milton-centric and will put them up as well. That is of course, the privilege of parenthood. I'm just glad that my Dad was a Nikon guy at the time so the original resolution of the photos withstood the slide scanning and people are actually recognizable in the crowd.

So that's the clarification. The directory is in addition to everything that is going on in preparation for the 45, to which I encourage everyone to attend. My count shows 621. Anyone with a different number of classmates?