Who’s coming: update

Time to update the list of who’s coming to the reunion. The responses have slowed down, but you still have 10 days to reply or recruit. Since the last list, here are the additional people who have told me they are going to be there:

• Cindy Brenneman
• Conrad (Mark) Zapanta
• Mark Showalter
• Monica Ross Compagnari
• Steve Gerber
• Rodney King (I ran into all three of these cousins, Rod, Monica, and Steve, the other night at a birthday party for Rod’s daugher, Harriet, who turned five)
• Rene Emswiler Rhodes
• Shawn Yoder McDaniel

All told, I have heard from 25 people (36 percent, not as many as I’d like) and we’re looking at 59 people (29 adults and 30 kids).

 

The directions page…

… now has actual directions and a map on it. This should be good news for those of you who keep telling me you lost your letter. You know, so you can find the reunion. By the way, the reunion is October 20, and I still haven’t heard from enough of you. Let me know! (Updated list of who I have heard from coming soon.)

 

Your classmates in the news(-record)

In the last few days, there have been two sightings in the Daily News-Record of EMHS ‘87 graduates.

This morning, while waiting for my physical therapy appointment to start (update: I can walk now, if by “walking” one means “hobble about like a 92-year-old man”) and saw this story on the Mongolian barbeque offering now available in the Bridgewater College cafeteria. As I had skipped breakfast, it instantly made me starving. Then I noticed the cook in the picture was our own Kimberley (Shook) Shull. Take a look here.

And on Sept. 12, on the front cover of the DN-R, in a story about a new flag pole going up at a camp near Harrisonburg in honor of Sept. 11/Patriot Day, there was this. That’s just the story, which has no mention of the people in the picture that went with it, but some of the people in the picture were Ed Bollinger and his son, Wyatt. Alas, I can’t fine the picture online so you’ll have to take my word for it.

 Show up in your own local paper? Let me know and I’ll attempt to fire up one of those link things.

 

So far…

With about a month to go before the reunion, here is where we stand:

I have heard from 16 (23.2%) of you.

These people have replied and plan to attend:

• Amy Rush
• Craig Boyers
• Craig and Joy Cline Heatwole
• Ed Bollinger (he better attend–he offered his truck to help me set up stuff)
• Jenny Shenk Mahone
• Jeremy Nafziger (who has no choice in the matter)
• Patty Matheny Baisden
• Suzanne Kiblinger Kratz
• Valerie Brunk Hertzler

All told, counting kids and spouses, that’s close to 40 people. My backyard appears smaller and smaller…

These people replied and, though they are varying degress of heartbroken about it, will not be able to make it:

• Andrea Garrison Baibeche (she lives in Puerto Rico)
• Donna Shenk Sensenig (she lives in Goshen, which, you know, isn’t really that far away)
• Jeana Driver Golin (she lives in Thailand, which, you know, really is pretty far away)
• LaRee Miller Eby (she lives in Oregon. Maybe we could hire some charter flight starting in Thailand, passing through Oregon, stopping in Goshen, and really get some people showing up)
• Corey Ross (he lives in England)
• Lawson Yoder (he lives in Egypt. OK, I haven’t actually heard from Law, because he apparently hasn’t learned how to operate an Egyptian e-mail machine since moving there this summer, but you got to figure….)

The rest of you, now’s the time! For the record, I tried to Google up some people for whom we don’t have a current address and who have less-than-common names. I found a few mentions of Faben Assegid, but the e-mails got returned. Anyone know where Fofi is?

 

Mr. Rush

Another thing in the EMHS Today that came the other day is a page noting the impending retirement of Mr. Jim Rush.

Mr. Rush has taught at EMHS since 1967, before any of us (including our classmante and his daughter, Amy) were born. His government classes were easily among the best-taught courses I had at EMHS, and I’m sure most of you would agree. I still remember the mock Congress, the trips to local government functions, and the almost daily news clips that he played for us at the start of class. (I also got a B in government one semester because it was the first class of the day and my dad had some trouble getting me to school on time. The unexcused tardies got me a letter grade lower.)

After college, I started working for the Daily News-Record covering local government, primarily the courts. And I was astonished how good my introduction to these topics via Mr. Rush’s government class, had been. I knew things that even reporters already at the paper were unaware of. From the first day, I knew where the various courts were, recognized the late, great Judge Graves from the trial we attended, could find the clerk’s office, knew how the city council and county board of supervisers were elected, all that. Same with local history: I had done a project for Mr. Rush where me and my mom drove around taking pictures of houses in Rockingham County built between 1815 and 1860; I still remember the dates, and I still have the pictures. I knew where all that stuff was. Mr. Rush’s classes were among the most direct education-to-real life gifts that I recall. (Another would be Mrs. Matheny’s–another parent of a fellow classmate–typing class, which I have used more than any single class I ever took. But government class, in relation to newspaper reporting, was extremely close.)

So, thanks to Mr. Rush. There must be hundreds of us who could say the same thing.

I have to include one of my favorite stories about Mr. Rush, as well. Galen Horst, our world civilizations teacher, told it. One night, Mr. Horst was in his classroom checking out the new TV he had there. He would push the buttons on it, sit down and start to watch, and suddenly the channel or the volume would change. This went on for some time. Eventually, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, some movement in the bushes outside the window. Upon further review, he found Mr. Rush out there with the remote control he had stolen from the new TV, changing the channels and pretty much laughing his head off at his colleague. For some reason, the mental images always killed me.

The EMHS Today notes that there is a reception at the high school for Mr. Rush at 6:15 on the evening of our reunion, Oct. 20. If you recall his gracious assistance as fondly as I do, you will want to make plans to stop by and say thank you.

 

Nope

If any of you got the EMHS Today today, you’ll notice that it claims our reunion is at 11 p.m.

It is not.

The previous edition said the reunion is at 1 p.m.

That is also wrong.

The reunion is October 20, from about 11 a.m. until 1 p.m., give or take.

 

Send me your information from this blog!

I successfully added a “Contact” page. You can see the link in the “Pages” list on the right, and at the top of the blog. Basically, click there and type in the text box to tell me what you’ve been up to. Then click Submit, and I will get an e-mail. Stuff typed on the Contact page does not get posted on the blog; if you want to post something that everyone else can see, leave a comment under one of the posts.

 

Another sign…

…that we are getting old.

I will be limping around at the reunion due to having torn my ACL this summer. The cool version of the story is that I did so playing soccer. The actual, full story is less cool. I did in fact hurt my knee playing soccer, in the goal as usual. However, I didn’t do it in a dramatic fashion but rather jumped up, not very high, to try to tip a little header over the top of the goal. I got a hand on it, barely, and pushed it into the bar. But as I came down on my knee, it hyperextended and I was instantly on the ground.

In years not that far past, I would have probably reacted quicker and had better technique, and would have either caught the ball or got more of it, and definitely would have come down less awkwardly. However, that didn’t happen.

Fortunately, my wife’s sister’s husband is an orthopedic surgeon, and they live just down the road. (And my wife’s sister is a pediatrician–we’re really set on the medical front.) Ramon determined that the LCL was sprained and that I might return to the summer soccer league in four to six weeks.

After four weeks, my knee was somewhat better but not better enough to start playing again. It was better enough to mow the yard. I accomplished the riding mower part without harming myself. Then I went to start trimming with the push mower, yanked the starting cord and stepped back, and my knee totally collapsed. It hurt maybe 20 times more than it had the first time, and whatever was not torn in the first incident was now.

So I’m having knee surgery on August 26. Apparently you need crutches for a week or so, and since it’s my right knee, I can’t drive for up to four weeks. It’s six months before you can do anything real athletic, and a year before you can try that without a brace, which I don’t plan to do. I plan to wear a brace for years to come. I might even get one for my left knee, just in case.

 

The EMHS Class of 1987 Reunion Blog

Hello, everyone. I’ve never tried this blogging thing before, and it didn’t even exist when we were in high school. But it’s 20 years later now, and things change. Maybe some of you whose addresses are missing from the remarkably incomplete EMHS records will find this and find out about our reunion, when you otherwise might not have. Maybe some of you will send your information this way, hopefully to let me know you’ll be attending.

For the record, our reunion–the 20th-year reunion, in case you lost track–will be on October 20, 2007, at 11 a.m. until 1 p.m., give or take. It will be at our house in Weyers Cave, 10 miles south of Harrisonburg. I was worried about rain, and the forecast didn’t seem to be very specific that far in advance, but we have a church next to us and a church behind us (we’re well protected, I guess you could say) and I will sign up for the use of one of their fellowship halls, to take care of that possible wrench in the works.

For now, mark your calendars and set your bookmarks. Let me know if you stop by. I’ll put up more information as it develops, and also try to write some articles about what’s happening around the area lately for those of you who are now from out of town. Also, let me know if there’s something you’d really like to do at the reunion.

 

Eli’s Fun Center

Some of you may remember that the night before graduation, way back then, a sizeable group of us got all radical and went to a–gasp!–dance club. This was on top of the highly unusual, Footloose-style rebellion that was the post-Junior/Senior banquet dance-o-rama on Phil Showalter’s tennis court.

I don’t know what the dance place was really called, but it was in Verona and we referred to it as “Eli’s.” I live near Verona now, and occassionally drive by that spot. It was off the street in a metal shack sort of place, and it’s now Harvest Life Church or something like that. So thankfully, it has found redemption.

But a teen dance club by the same name recently sprang up on Rt. 11 between Verona and Weyers Cave. I saw the signs for it–Eli’s Fun Center–as did my son, whose name is Eli. When additional signs started popping up nearby for “Club Eli’s,” a weekend teen dance extravaganza, I got suspicious that the place had been revived.

Indeed it had. An article in our local weekly rag, the Northern Augusta Journal, had an interview with the owners of the place. Here is an excerpt:

At some point in their lives, most men and women experience a mid-life crisis. Be it fast cars, expensive clothes, or a wild new hairstyle, people will do anything to stay young. [Editor's note: Let's hope Miss Beachy didn't see the dangling parts of that sentence.] But for Dan and Carol Shifflet, that mid-life crisis manifested itself in a new fun center and dance club aimed at providing safe fun….

For the Shifflets, the motivation to keep the club going comes from a mixture of goodwill and nostalgia. More than 25 years ago, the couple remembers dancing the night away at Club Eli’s, which was under different management and eventually closed down. Students lined up around the block, waiting hours just to get in.

“A lot of people met their husbands and wives there,” Dan said.

I don’t know if any of us met our husbands or wives there, but it does go to show that everything old is new, and everything new is pretty much old. Also, that we are pretty much old.

One saving grace, I guess: They have metal detectors now. So at least we were non-violent radicals.