Monday, October 13, 2008
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11 comments:
Here we are - 63 year olds from the class of 63. It's hard to believe. Doesn't it make you want to tell young people not to be in a hurry to grow up?
I am currently working as a Business System Analyst at Sprint and hope to stay here until I'm ready to retire at about 70. With the crazy corporate world I sometimes wonder if I should have stayed with teaching. I still read and practice French to keep it up but find more of a need for Spanish these days.
Speaking of Spanish, we are scheduled for a cruise to the Mexican Riviera in January. We love cruising because of all the fun things you can do on a ship. We usually take in 2 shows a night and then I watch a movie or do line dancing or go to a lecture while my husband plays blackjack. When we are in port I like to shop or hike or go sightseeing.
Our oldest son is single and living in Denver and the younger one is married and living in Phoenix and I will be a grandmother for the first time in May 2009.
I still love Jazzercise classes and my 20-year old parrot, Juan Valdez.
When we get too old and feeble to come to a reunion we can still blog!
It's hard to believe that we are getting ready to attend our "45th" high school reunion. We're still young, right??
After 36 years of working as an Administrative Assistant for various employers, I am now retired. I still would like to do something part time but didn't have any luck finding anything so far.
I have one son who lives here in town and works at Sprint, still single, but very happy.
For the last 4 years or so I have been exercising regularly 3 times a week and it seems to be working mostly. I love to garden and have had good luck with tomatoes and onions. I really enjoy being outside and hate when the weather turns cold. When my husband retires, our goal is to move to Tucson, AZ where my sister lives which we both enjoy.
Looking forward to seeing everyone and renewing old friendships.
I Spent 36 years in the Trust Department of UMB Bank. I am currently the Executive Director of Christian Family Services in Overland Park, KS and self employed with Reece and Nichols Realtors. My kids who are now 36, and 39 are great and live in the KC area. My 10 year old grandson is the delight of our lives. I have been married to Nancy (she is a CPA with her own business) for over 42 years and been attending the same church for 46 years, pretty boring aren't I. I can't believe that we are having our 45th reunion. We are going on a cruise after Thanksgiving to the southern Caribbean. We have an eight year old cat named Max. Best
Hello everyone. I will add my comment that it doesn't seem like 45 years have gone by and then some days it does. More and more when I look in the mirror, I wonder who that person is. Scary.
Well My husband and I have been married 43 years. He was in the service 3 years and we lived in Germany 2 of those. Finished up in Tacoma Wash. Where our oldest son was born. Moved back to the area, Blue Springs, and had 3 more sons while living there. In '78 moved to northern N.Y. State as volunteer missionaries and served there 8 years, moving to Liberty in '86. In '88, I went back to college and finished up my Occupational Therapy degree. Worked about 10 years before having to resign due to Fibromyalgia. Have worked part time as a seamstress and now care for my widowed mother more/less full time.
The children: Mike, 40, married 2 daughters 9 and almost 1 (can you say surprise?!!)Same Mom. Live in Richmond, Mo. Both have their own businesses and home school. Steve, deceased, car accident at 19 almost 19 years ago. we still miss our beautiful, funny son. What would he be?? He was taking criminal justice classes and wanted to be an FBI agent. Dave, 35, married, 1 step daughter, 1 son and 1 one on the way. They live in Lees Summit. He is a biologist in Pharmaceutical Research and she is a school teacher. John, 33 divorced, no children, a carpenter, works for a commercial remoldeling company, travels alot, has a home in Orrick.
The grandchildren are a delight. I am especially enjoying having girls!
We love to travel and we have property in the Ozarks where the "boys" like to camp and go hunting. We girls go down when the ticks are gone.
Looking forward to seeing you all.
Unfortunately, I can’t make it to the reunion. Working in politics as I do, my “busy season” comes up every four years like this one. Since I won’t see you in K.C., I’ll give a longer update than I would otherwise.
I have such a good time every day. I teach, write, speak, and consult on interesting topics with interesting people—and, amazingly, I actually get paid to do this! To give you an idea of the kind of students I get to work with: Barack Obama was a student of mine in 1991 when he took my course at Harvard University. My “work” takes me to fascinating places around the world. Best of all, I’ve been able to enjoy this stimulating career AND maintain a whimsical and unorthodox attitude toward life at the same time, always taking my work seriously but not myself.
I’m an avid sports fan living in a sports fan’s heaven (Red Sox, Patriots, and Celtics). Over the years, I’ve also visited (with my son) every Major League baseball park in the country. I play singles tennis 7 days a week and work-out at the gym. I’m actually in better physical shape today than I was in high school.
My daughter lives in Hollywood where she is an aspiring comedy actress and writer; my son has launched an upscale pickle business in New York (see wheelhousepickles.com). Neither of them has a whiff of job security or a pension. I guess you train your children to be independent, and then they punish you for your success.
I’ve saved the best and worst for last. During my sophomore year in college I fell in love with a beautiful woman who is adored by everyone she knows. To my everlasting surprise, she succumbed to my pursuits and we got married. To my even greater surprise, she has tolerated my goofy behavior for more than 40 years. A year ago we learned she has advanced stage lung cancer. We’re praying she will beat the grim odds, and in the meantime, we’re grateful for every day we still have together.
Have a great time at the reunion. I look forward to joining you at our 50th. . Hopefully, we’ll all still be alive and well then--and who knows, maybe by then our 401(k)’s will have come back to life.
My wife, M.E. (Civello) Beach and I live in the country just east of Sprinfield, MO. We moved here in 1992 from Louisiana. Purchased a small business in 1993 which looked like a good idea at that time, but not so good today with the building trade at its lowest point since 1945! What is that date 1945? Probably significant for about 190 of us! Seems like a long time passed, but then again, not so long ago. We were married in 1969 after my first year in the Air Force. Lived in San Antonio and then Rantoul, ILL. Left the Air Force and moved to Dallas, TX to attend graduate school. Left Dallas for Los Angeles where I was a research geologist for Chevron Oil. We then lived in New Orleans until 1992, early retirement. M.E. is an accomplished artist. She inherited that skill from her mother who worked side-by-side with J.C. Hall when he started his card company in Kansas City. M.E. had a successful graphics art business in New Orleans for almost 15 years. She worked continuously except for a 2 year break when our son Steven was born in 1979. After moving to Springfield in 1992 she returned to school and got her nursing certificate. She is now a VP for a drug research company that sets up studies for the pharmaceutical companies that want to test new drugs for release. She and our son are the wonderful part of my life. Family and friends are the core of our enjoyment. We love to entertain and be entertained. I cook, she cleans up my mess. My current major project is a vineyard. Hope to see good results in a couple of years. We are looking forward to this weekend. And as they say in South Louisiana, "Let the good times roll"!
Wow, the 45th reunion? Amazing!! I won’t feel ancient until the 50th, though. My husband Robert and I live in the country outside of Greenwood, MO (close to Lees Summit) and have just totally restored our 100 year old home. We had to live elsewhere for an entire year! When we retire, we might transform our 10 acres into some type of hobby farm, but we’re still in the ‘what will that look like?’ stage.
Robert is a mortgage broker where business as you can imagine is slowing down, and I am still doing software development. I’m actually working with my son, Jon, who surpasses me in intelligence and creativity by a long shot. He has a U.S. and European patent pending in the works for an architectural framework he has developed for building distributed enterprise software applications. It’s much more rewarding working for him than directly for a manger in the corporate world. I’ve had enough of that!
My daughter Heather is in software sales for IBM, and has 3 children, ages 13, 9, and 2. Jon has 2 sons, ages 9 and 10, and Robert has a daughter and a 14 year old granddaughter. We are lucky that all the grandchildren live here, and we can be involved in their lives. I’m enjoying the youngest, Maximus, as he learns to talk and does all the cute things that 2 year olds do, knowing that he is my last grandchild. He was born with one artery missing to his heart, and had to have open heart surgery at the age of 3 days. He will have at least 3 surgeries in his lifetime to replace the artery which was inserted in that first surgery. It really makes each day with him so very precious. I have to recommend a book that Heather let me borrow, “Miracle in the Andes”, written about a survivor of a plane crash, Nando Parrado. Remember the book (& movie) “Alive”? It’s truly incredible, and you will feel like you were there! Heather heard Nando speak in California at an IBM event, where he was the guest inspirational speaker. She talked with him later, and he sent her an autographed copy of his book.
We enjoy friends and family, reading, hiking, and gardening. Robert and I love to travel, but this year has been all about working. We are planning for a trip to Ireland in the next year or two, and I want to visit my sister-in-law in St.Thomas within a year or so. She wakes up in paradise every day – can you imagine it?
I’m involved in a Respite Care program through our church for children (& their siblings) who have disabilities, so the parents can get a break for a few hours. It happens to fall on the night of the reunion, so I won’t be there on Saturday, but look forward to seeing everyone on Friday night!
To the Class of “63”
After all these years I feel I owe you an explanation for some of the things I did in high school and why I did them. I had a tough time growing up as a kid with a father that never encouraged me and continually told me that I would never amount to anything in life.
My Dad was a very smart man. He graduated from Northwestern first in his class with 3 engineering degrees simultaneously: Mechanical, Industrial and Electrical Engineering, a 7 year course of study that he completed in 5 ½ yrs by going straight through including summers. As a kid coming up in this environment I could never quite measure up to all the achievements that he had accomplished, and being his only son he wanted the very best for me but didn’t know how to inspire me to be successful. So needless to say we didn’t get alone and I rebelled and you probably have heard of or saw some of the problems I had in high school.
I didn’t enjoy my time in high school and couldn’t wait to get out and go out on my own and see what I could do. I went to college for a couple of years and made average grades but my heart wasn’t in it so I dropped out for a semester and was immediately drafted into the Army. This made a big difference in my life, it actually changed my whole way of thinking because for the first time in my life I had someone who believed in me and saw that I had the ability to do a lot of things.
When I was first drafted I had to take a battery of tests to see what I was best suited for and found out that I qualified for any school the Army had. I picked flight school and off to basic training I went. Flight school was one tough son-of-a-gun; half of our class didn’t make it and when I graduated I finally realized that if I applied myself I could do anything I wanted … this was a true confidence builder for me and changed my outlook for the rest of my life.
I went on to fly two combat tours in Vietnam and lost a lot of friends, but was lucky enough to get out of there without any physical or mental damage. After that I was a flight instructor and platform instructor at Fort Rucker, Alabama off and on for several years working with some of the sharpest pilots the Army had to offer. It was a real hoot!!! We all got to be “hot sticks” and could push our tin through the air better than anyone around, another confidence builder for a guy who was told he would never amount to anything. Life was good and I had turned the corner forever.
I went back and finished college and proceeded to get a masters degree in case I ever wanted to teach at the college level after I retired. I retired from the Army, became a corporate pilot for 8 years but it just wasn’t challenging enough so I got back into the action again around the environment I enjoyed and I wanted to give something back for all the good things the Army had done for me. So today I’m an aviation analyst for Northrop Grumman working with the Army and the Joint Forces to help solve problems and pass on my experience to the younger officers of today. I get to travel the world and work with some of the sharpest minds in the Army and they pay me well to do it. Life for me and my family is great!!
I am married to my lovely wife Rose and have 3 children, two of which are in high school and are doing fantastic. They are both in advanced classes and are knocking down straight A’s and are involved in a lot of school activities (must be from my wife’s side of the family’s DNA) and we are very proud of them.
My wife and I enjoy going to sporting events, going to concerts, plays, and traveling. My wife works at the same high school that our kids go to and she works with the Special Ed kids, maybe that’s how she has learned to put up with me over the years!!!
My favorite movies to date are: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Meet Joe Black, and Fracture. I love movies that make you think, and mysteries that you have to figure out who did it.
Well I think I have brought you up to speed on what’s been going on in my life and now you know the rest of the story concerning my strange behavior as a kid. Oh by the way, before my Dad passed away in 2006 we became very good friends. My Mom told me that he was very proud of my accomplishments, even though he never really told me, but I guess he told all his friends how proud he was of me. That meant a lot to me and I learned a valuable lesson about how to inspire and communicate with my kids.
In closing I just want to say that I want to live the rest of my life to the fullest. I want to completely use up what God has given me physically and mentally and in the end I want to come sliding in sideways at mach 2 with my hair on fire, all used up, yelling “what a ride it’s been”…
God bless you all…..
It was a treat to see so many "63 graduates at the renuion. Thanks to Rusty and the team.
It is also a treat to read the comments and info that has been posted by our classmates.
I am still living in Kansas City. After college, I taught for a few years and then decided to figure out what my purpose in life was. I'm still figuring. However, along the way, I have met some amazing people, had some interesting jobs, and don't regret most of it.
About 5 years ago I thought it would be a good idea to buy an old house on 2 acres. Hummm, we love the trees, not so sure about the rest.
I am divorced and have one child. She has just turned 18. Yup, I had her when I was 45. She is a delight.
If you are reading this and have not added your comments, please do so. I'm sure lots of us would like to know how you are doing.
Hi everyone, and sorry I didnt make the reunion, I will be at the next. I am semi-retired, working only 12 hours a week, I like getting out. I have seven grandchildren from 17 to 3 years old. Rog is going to retire this year. we spend our time playing golf. We both love it, and play several times a week. Two of my grandchildren, the 11 yr old and 7 year old also play golf. The 11 year old is in the jr. PGA and a very competitive golfer. The 7 yr old is coming right behind her. My oldest girl grandchild is a varsity cheerleader.
We have taken several golf vacations and are planning to go to Hawaii this spring with another couple to play golf there.
Dont really like water,so Im not interested in a cruise "yet".
Our two dogs are our "kids" now they are so spoiled. I just finished writting a childrens book about them. Dont know how far that will go. I try to keep my thoughts young and stay healthy and fit. Dont want to think of old age. Cindy (Scott) Hummel
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