Do You Remember?

The most common question asked on Saturday night, July 22, 2006 was ..."Do You Remember? ....when we did whatever, who else we did it with, and maybe queried ourselves as to why we did what we did back in Southwest High.

Unlike earlier reunions, it wasn't really important to know where you worked, what kind of car you drove, or if you had a summer home with five grandchildren.

For me, I was too jealous to ask my fellow classmates if they were retired. In my case, I have a long working career ahead of me since my kids are still in college. But aside from that personal hangup, I was glad to see people that I had not seen in 40 years.

Yes, most of us could not really identify each other without cheating and looking at our name tags that had our high school senior picture. On the other hand there are people like Charlie Scott, RicSchaferer, Rob Ciampoli, Jeff McLellan, Dave Dembeck, Dan Kelly, Bev Kerr, Henry Plag, Charlie Heineman, Lou Galloway, Frank Zilm, just to name a few, who really look the same. In those cases we would point to the person and say.....Hey I know you your're...and we'd look at their name tags just to be sure.

Of course, the real problem with having 200 people in a large room, with music playing and conversations raging, is there were too many distractions and people to read all the name badges. Thank goodness people did take the initiative to grab people that they wanted to talk with. I was fairly lucky and managed to find people like Darlene Ketten, Dave Fannon, Stefan Kozak, Bob Rogger, Joe Rombolo, Dave Shaw, Cheryl and John Heddell, and a host of Dog Town childhood friends like Kenny Weissflug, Jane Ax, Jim Economon, Phyllis Rice, Beverly Graham, Gary Tash and Doug Nuelle.

But I missed talking with Don Frank, Alan Purvis, Willard Watts, Jim West, Judy Daman, Kathy Graf, Craig Hirsh, Mike Luther, Fred Stevenson and a lot of other people. I actually made a list this time of people I wanted to talk to, but even this wasn't enough. But I have a feeling that there were a lot of other people who felt the same way, a little overwhelmed.

People started to arrive as early as 6:30 and the banquet hall was literally throwing us out of the place at 12:30 am. There just wasn't enough time.

After the reunion, the next few days were a let down. I liken it to the feeling of just climbing Mt Everest. Maybe thatÂ’s an exaggeration. Never the less, judging from the emails the committee received and phone calls many of us had with old found classmates, the event was exhausting yet very satisfying. Perhaps it was a simple validation that our days at Southwest High, good and bad, made a lasting impression on all of us.

We will be keeping the Blog open, and posting photoÂ’s as we get them. So please stay tuned. If you want to get instant notification of new postings click the RSS box on the blog and it should automatically post to your email computer account. If you donÂ’t know what RSS is or means, it stands for Really Simple Syndication and it allow people to track Blogs or syndicated columns as they are written.

Stay cool St. Louis, and while there was a power outage that darkened over 300,000 homes and businesses, the Christy was lit up like a Christmas tree with lots of smiles, hugs, and dancing feet on Saturday night, July 22, 2006


Dennis Hayashi