Presentation - Berkeley 1969 Class Reunion

I have been absent from most of my online social presence (myspace; facebook, twitter, this blog, etc), because I have been busy working on coordinating a 40th class reunion.

It started with a conversation of "why can't we get together again and have another reunion for those who couldn't make it in 2007?" So, I put it out there, and there was interest. I guess I just took the "bull by the horns" and decided to just do it!

I started out with 25 already located graduates from the 2007 reunion through the courtesy of two former classmates who coordinated the last reunion. Then, someone on our Yahoo!Group asked a question about "does anybody know where...is?" So, I quietly took that as a challenge and started searching the internet. When, to my surprise, I found a long-lost teacher! I immediately posted it to our Yahoo!Group. I received another challenge to locate another missing classmate, and boom, I found her as well; and then that's when the fun started. I looked on classmates and noticed the now "married" names and started more searches. I did general searches on my deep-search engines and found at least 20 more!

Out of a total graduating class of 79; (minus 2 that have gone on to greater glory), that makes a total of 45 girls located, leaving 34 left to find. Granted, not all will attend the reunion, but I'm on a mission to find them all regardless.

What started out as just a quirk, has ended up being a wonderful treasure-like hunt, and I'm enjoying every minute of it! One of my former classmates even sent me the yearbooks she had saved from back then, so that I could scan and hand out copies for anyone interested at our reunion coming up in September. I will now have my very own copies saved to a disk for whenever I feel like viewing them.

I also discovered that there are classmates on Facebook, so I'm making sure that we all reconnected through that social network. It's amazing what you can do with a little impetus and interest!

I have even located some of the nuns that taught us at that wonderful "all girl" school in Berkeley, and to my enjoyment and surprise, two will be attending our 40th reunion. Boy, do we have some catching up to do!



An even greater surprise (mostly to myself) was finding our Art Teacher, Miss Peel who teaches at California College of the Arts . Thanks to Nancy for sending me those yearbooks, I've can now search for names of faculty from back then (which I had long forgotten about; dimentia, old age, or just too many duh moments?). Now, I wonder...is Mrs. Rodenbaugh still alive. I'm sure she would love to scold me for bringing water pistols to history class, even now. I know how upset she was when I accidentally spritzed her, and she thought someone was spitting at her (oops!) . I was such a bad girl...but I have good memories and I'm glad I can still remember, period!

Well, gotta go. Gotta finish scanning those yearbooks, and reach for the kleenex each time a memory flies into my brain about high school...little did I know I would miss that dang school so much. Who knew!?!?