Gene Stern

During our Saturday evening dinner, Rick took his mic and walked around the dining room asking each of us to introduce ourselves. When Rick came to me I recounted that school administration appointed 19 of our Class in our sophomore year to be BA Prom waiters and Brokamp named me as Captain of the waiters with the admonishment that we were not allowed to spike the punch with alcohol lest I would personally be held responsible. We did not spike with alcohol but did spike with pepper when asked to juice up the drinks. The prom waiters were: Larry Alberts, Gary Beck, Bruce Bittman, Mark Blocher,, Arn Bortz, Mike Boyers, Steve Collett, Bill Compton, Andy  Hickenlooper, Dan Hites, Larry Horwitz, Bill Katz, David Mitzel, Dick Ransohoff, David Schneider, Rick Stivers, Bill Waxman, Paul youngs and me.

David Buchholz

It's rare that I add text without photographs, but I will make an exception this time.  I echo the thanks that so many have voiced to those who were responsible for the events (we all know who you are).  I had a wonderful three days at the reunion, only returning to CA on the 26th, as my brother Jack (WHHS 1961) celebrated his fiftieth wedding anniversary on the 25th.  As fun as it was to get together with Paul and Euge, and do a reprise of "Torquays Play The Ventures" cover songs, it was also a warm and loving experience to simply see classmates, especially those who I've connected with mostly through the WHHS website and Facebook.  I think I spent as much or more time talking to people I didn't know at WHHS than those I knew from so long ago.  So, I'll echo the thanks of others, and add that the WHHS website is a wonderful creation, and having this particular venue to thank my friends is deeply rewarding.  I also thank Brad Schloss, who spent the evening photographing us old fogeys at no charge, then put the images online (again at no charge), for us to download and enjoy.  If you haven't seen his website, look at his galleries and portfolio.  He's a wonderul photographer whose images of sports rival the best in the business.  One last thanks to Larry Horwitz who hosted the Saturday afternoon gathering.  I appreciated the chance to thank my WHHS classmates for accepting this Burlingame High School Class of 1964 graduate back.

Nancy Messer

Dave - you are part of WHHS Class of '64 and will be forever and ever.  Keep contributing to the Message Forum.  We all love your photos.

Philip Spiess

Jonathan:  Really missed being able to see you -- as well as others.

Gene:  Thanks for sharing that anecdote:  it was an episode that (I assume) many of us were not aware of, but which adds to our class's rich history!

Stephanie Riger

I wasn't at the reunion but i've enjoyed seeing the photos and hearing about it.  I want to support WHHS and thank those whose hard work made the reunion possible by donating to the Performing Arts Fund, but I can't find an on-line link to donate. There's a link on this web page to information about the fund, but not to donate - unless I missed it.  So would those of you who are technologically more proficient, please post the link.

Warm greetings to all,

Stephanie

Larry Klein

Stephanie (and all other classmates who wish to supplement the Class of '64 Performing Arts Fund), you will soon be receiving a reunion follow-on letter which will include all the various ways to contribute to WHHS, including a designation for The Class of 1964 Performing Arts Fund.  Thanks on behalf of our committee for your continued interest and support of WHHS.  Go Eagles!

Douglass (Dougie) Dupee (Trumble)

Just a quick hearty thanks to our hosts and our committee and to all our classmates who made the effort to be there; it was a special time. The addition of the Cincy bus tour was a terrific and impressive experience.

My other comment is a plea to all classmates (whether you have come back before or not), to not miss the next reunion! You will not regret it!

Cheers to all 70-agers!

Dougie

Philip Spiess

Friends and Colleagues:

In the interstices of time that existed while you were all attending the Reunion and I was just existing, I have been reading the Essays of E. B. White.  Tonight I have been reading the essay, "A Slight Sound at Evening" (1954), which discusses Henry David Thoreau and his masterpiece, Walden (1854).  White describes Walden as "an oddity in American letters."  He goes on to state that many literary figures and academics who deal with literature find Walden irrelevant or boring.  But White also states "I think it of some advantage to encounter the book at a period in one's life when the normal anxieties and enthusiasms and rebellions of youth closely resemble those of Thoreau. . . .  If our colleges and universities were alert, they would present a cheap pocket edition of the book to every senior upon graduating. . . ."

I have not re-read Walden in many years, specifically, not since I was required to read it in one of my APP English classes (Miss Ross's?) at Walnut Hills.  I do remember enjoying it -- even to making jokes about it being preserved for posterity by now being a "Walled-In Pond" -- but, as I say, I have not taken the time to re-read it.  I have followed Thoreau, not quite Thoroughly enough, through my son's high school production of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's play, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (1971) -- there was that famous actual dialogue between Ralph Waldo Emerson, "What are you doing in there, Henry David?" and Thoreau, "What are you doing out there, Ralph Waldo?" -- and through my surprise at learning that Henry David Thoreau and his family were intimately involved in the early creation and production of wood pencils.  Who knew?  [Cf. Henry Petroski, The Pencil:  A History of Design and Circumstance (1989), chap. 9.]

Why do I bring this up, especially to all of you?  Because I was struck by E. B. White's comment that Thoreau's book was appropriate (as I take it) to teenaged youth (even though he suggests giving it to graduating college students -- but that was in a somewhat earlier time).  The teachers at Walnut Hills High School recognized the significance of this book to students of our age -- and assigned it.  I'm impressed with that.  I could name any number of other books we were required to study that I was taken with -- stunned by, really (but then I ended up an English major in college).  What I'm saying here is that the Walnut Hills curriculum was calculated to be right for us, and I think they, the faculty, succeeeded in that.  Bravo!

I'm sorry to say that recent high school English reading lists I have seen do not impress me.  Call me an "old fogey," but the accepted English Literature canon has been thrown out, not only by high schools, but, even worse, by colleges.  As Dale Gieringer told me recently, "No kid today wants to read Victorian-length novels."  I'm sure he's right, but what a treasure-trove of language and writing, in my view -- to say nothing of insight into psychology and sociology (maybe even history) -- they are missing!  A bust of Charles Dickens reigns over his entire works in my library, and I re-read him constantly (I also have his drink recipes in a book personally inscribed to me by his great-grandson, Cedric Dickens).

I did not intend to go on so long, but the gist of my missive is:  "What teachers we had, what learning!"

Jeff Daum

'No lion' Philip you continue to tickle my cognitive senses as our resident fount of knowledge!  Who among us knew indeed that Thoreau was intimately involved and thereby responsible for those damn things we took tests with?

But your point (pun intended ) in summary "What teachers we had, what learning!" is most accurate.  That is one of the big take-aways I had from our great 70th Birthday Bash weekend.

And, yes that is literally no lion, but rather a lioness above...  On Monday before I flew home I went and visited the Cincinnati Zoo where this and a number of other magnificant beasts reside.

Philip Spiess

Well, Jeff, this, of course, brings us to the story of the constipated mathematician who worked out his problem with a pencil and a piece of paper.  (It was obviously a #2 pencil.)

And I thought Lyonesse was the native country of Tristram in the Arthurian legends?  Or was Tristram just another "good knight," boiling lances and lancing boils? 

Nancy Messer

WARNING TO EVERYONE

I received a facebook request from a classmate asking to be a friend.  When I accepted I received a message from this classmate telling me how to get a large amount of money fast and provided who to contact.  I made the contact and was communicating with him and the classmate at the same time.  The program involved paying $2000 to get $150,000.  I suspected a scam but the classmate kept saying it was real and to continue with it - that he got his money.  That's why I continued with this man as long as I did.  I never finished with him that night and the next day in discussing this with a friend she said the contact with the classmate was part of the scam too - that it really wasn't the classmate.  I contacted the classmate through this website and verified the scam.  The classmate was never involved.  I had told the man I wasn't interested a few different times.  Today I continued getting messages from the "classmate".  I told him I had contacted the real classmate and knew this guy was part of the scam and to stop the messages.

I'm telling you all of this to warn you to be wary of messages you receive from people you know and trust.  It might not be that person at all.  Have a friendly chat so you know it's really that person before providing any private information.

Ira Goldberg

Thanks Nancy! FYI all, it was my FB site that got hacked. So, caveat emptor. Right, Phil?

Dale Siemer

Ira- I had a request from you yo be friends on Facebook. Was that legit?

Steven Levinson

Phony Facebook friend requests are common these days.  I get several a week.  You can tell because the requestor usually clams to be someone you've already friended.  And their site only contains 1 friend.  Click on the requestor's name to get to their site.  Your computor may tell you that the site is inaccessible, or it may lead you to an obviously cobbled site.  Delete the email.  DON'T ACCEPT THE REQUEST!

Philip Spiess

Right, Ira!  "Buyer, beware!" -- and "cave canem," too -- those dogs of scammers can be vicious.  (Who let the dogs out?)

Bruce Fette

By the way, all you folks, today is the anniversary of man's first landing on the moon in 1969. I am sure each of you remember where you were and what you were doing when this event occured in our young lives.

Philip Spiess

Well, son of a gun!  Thank you, Bruce, for bringing this anniversary to our attention.  Indeed, I well remember where I was when the moon landing occurred:  I was ushering at the Cincinnati Opera at the Cincinnati Zoo, which was doing a performace of Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment -- Daughter of the Regiment (or was it L'Elisir d'Amore -- The Elixir of Love -- somehow, I have a feeling it was the latter).  Of course, they did have some television sets set around the Opera Pavilion so that we could experience the moment of the moon landing.  But the highlight of the evening, as I recall, was the star soprano Mary Costa (Nelson Abanto or Jon Marks, correct me if I have her name wrong here), instead of singing the line from the libretto, "You don't impress me like those soldiers do!", sang the line as "You don't impress me like those astronauts do!"  She got a rousing round of applause.  The opera performance did, indeed, pause while we all watched Neil Armstrong descend on the moon's surface (there are still many today, around the world, who believe this did not really occur, but was staged -- I'm not among them).  Oh, and by the way, if you visit Washington, D.C. and the National Cathedral, be sure and look for the exquisite "Moon Rock" stained glass window (south side of the triforium, half way down), which features an actual rock from the moon imbedded in the glass.

[N.B.:  Musicians Union No. 1, the first professional musicians' organized national labor union in the United States, was formed in Cincinnati in the 1920s.  It is the same group which established the Cincinnati Opera at the Cincinnati Zoo in the 1920s -- its origins there being a German beer garden pavilion in the Zoo -- the beginnings of the Opera Pavilion itself.]

One other note:  my grandmother was born in 1900; three years later, the Wright brothers (of Ohio) flew the first successful man-powered operational air-born flight (ask me later about the Wright Brothers' convoluted fight over the history of flight with the Smithsonian Institution).  Just 69 years later -- still in her lifetime -- man landed on the moon.  Circa 1895, H. G. Wells, the famed prognosticator of future events, had proclaimed that man would land on the moon by the year 5000!  

Bruce Fette

Hello again,

As I was reading Phil's response, it occured to me to ask, were the parents of any other members of the class, or any members of the class themselves, involved in the moon shots?

I recently found that my Dad was somehow involved in the design of the moon buggy when he worked in Ann Arbor Michigan.(Not sure but it was either Hughes Research or Willow Run Labs at the time).  So it occured to me that perhaps other members of the class may have had parents at GE or Crosley or other companies who also had a role. 

I think it would be fascinating to see how many had parents involved.

I worked at Texas Instruments prior to the launch, and we built chips, but never knew how or where they were used.

Larry Klein

Yes, Phil, I do remember where I was that day in '69.  I had a 6-man patrol traipsing around in the Elephant Valley about 25 miles behind the lines NW of DaNang.  It would be almost two years later before I saw a replay of the event on a TV news special (don't ask me to remember THAT one).

And Bruce, on my 28th birthday, 12/4/73, I went to work at Texas Instruments in Richardson, in the mold room of the LC Group, then a year later transferred to the new Lubbock plant to run the calculator assembly line.  Small world indeed.  And, I doubt my parents had any part in the moonshots.  My step-Dad was a letter-carrier and Mom was a hairdresser (her clientelle included Uncle Al's wife and Mrs. Paul Dixon).  That in itself was a real "moonshot".

Philip Spiess

Bruce:  I think my parents' only involvement in the space program was watching (with us kids) Jackie Gleason's and Audrey Meadows' "The Honeymooners" on TV, with Gleason's famous line, "To the moon, Alice"!  Other than that, I do remember my father taking my sister and me up to Mount Storm Park (behind our house) to watch "Sputnik" sail over the world (yes, you could actually see it -- a little red dot a-travelin' fast) in the Fall of 1957.  I was so excited about it, that my Hallowe'en costume that year at the Clifton School Hallowe'en parade, made with my father's help, was a giant globe (which I wore over me) with a little "Sputnik" sphere circling the globe, cranked by me from inside.  It was a big hit, especially when the "Sputnik" struck kids who were trying to impede its progress.  (This was also the era of the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile so-called "crisis" -- and I remember, even as an eleven-year-old 6th grader, thinking how obscene the commonly-used phrase "ICBM" sounded.)  Then there was the time Frank Honebrink "mooned" us in Shop class -- but I digress.

Oh, Larry:  I was recently sent, by an early Clifton friend, a copy of a photographic book on the early days of Cincinnati television.  It brought back so many memories (among them "Uncle Al" and Paul Dixon).  I shall speak of it soon on this Forum, if only to keep this Forum going till the next Reunion (and God keep us all going till the next Reunion!).

Gene Stern

The day of the Moon Landing I was three weeks into my Officer Training School at Medina, AB (next to Lackland Tx). I remember standing in the CQ watching the black and white TV with the blurred photos.  The reason they were blurred: the TV stations did not have the equipment to transmit the absolutely clear and in color streaming video from the moon, so the TV stations had to aim their TV cameras on the black and white TV monitors. What we saw was the picture of the picture and that is why they looked so surreal.

Tina Preuninger (Hisrich)

So where were you Bruce?  I was visiting a friend who was a Navy pilot at the SF base, waiting to return to his aircraft carrier and Vietnam. We were on base with a group of navy pilots watching. Learned a lot about stress on those pilots from landings and take offs on a postage stamp space. Our picture was black and white and grainy too. 

Anyone else?

Bruce Fette

Tina, I was in Motorola's Government Electronics Group in Scottsdale during the landing and the B&W video. I had just been explaining MOS circuit design to their engineers, and how it could save battery power.

Paul Simons

Jon Singer - yep, I noticed you weren't at this reunion. Well, make it to the next one. About this one - I'm kinda wondering if the music jam and/or the "talk around" were video-recorded. Not sure I want to see them - I never like seeing/hearing myself - but it's a learning tool. Anyway many thanks to everyone who had a hand in this thing. What an amazing bunch of people. Now get to the polls in November and kindly help prevent the country from being taken over by a gang that today, right now, would have trouble reading, let alone passing, the exam we took to get into Walnut Hills High School.

Richard Murdock

Wow this thread does bring back old memories.  In July 1969 I was a young Lieutenant (junior grade) ( and yes, that title did piss me off a bit), onboard an old converted CVE that was launched toward the last days of WWII, then decommissioned and then put back in service for the Vietnam war as basically a Navy communications relay station.  So the ship was packed to the hilt with radio gear and what had been the flight deck (wooden by the way) was filled with antennas.    We were in the Mediterranean having just transited from station off the coast of Vietnam.  We looked so much like a spy ship that we had been refused permission to dock in several ports along the way.   Once in the Med we were all much happier to be there than off the coast of Vietnam where even at sea it was hotter than blue blazes.  I don't think we we able to watch the landing on TV but we all certainly knew about it. 

To finish off the story, after doing basically a circuit of the Mediterranean, the ship was then ordered to the Philadelphia Navy Yard to be put out of commission for the 2nd time.  I remember being one of the last guys to leave the ship since I was a Supply Corps officer and decommissioning tasks were in my line of work.  It was around Christmas time and it was really really cold in Philadelphia.  Then I took some RnR back home in CA and then on to my last duty station at Charleston, SC.