July 23, 2007
I have added a page for the 1980 Ft. Pierce Central High School yearbook signatures.
I was valedictorian for my graduating class and I had to give a speech at the graduation ceremony at the civic center. After the ceremony, someone told me that they were impressed how I had recited the speech from memory. Well, I hadn’t. It looked like I was not reading the speech because I was so afraid of my mortar board falling off my head that I didn’t move the entire time I was speaking. I faced forward and pointed my eyes down to the text. From the audience point of view they couldn’t tell I was reading.
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Posted by John
July 16, 2007
My cousin Zach was the first person to leave a comment on this blog. He used this special opportunity, inscrutably, to remark, “donkey chicken”. What the hell? I was compelled to look up the term on Google and there I found the likely reference: the name of a restaurant chain in Korea.
Zach has been teaching English as a foreign language to students in Korea so it was easy to pinpoint the origin of the comment. The thing I don’t understand though is how someone who is long-term vegetarian like Zach could plug a chicken chop shop. I think under the concealment of great distance from his family and friends in Florida, he may be doing a lot of wish-deboning and finger-licking. Good.
Zach has a masters degree and his achievement impelled me to get one of my own. “How could it be that my younger cousin has a degree and I not?” I rectified the situation and completed my MBA program last year. I hope he doesn’t try to go for a doctorate because I am tired of school and I don’t want to have to go back to class to stay even.
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Posted by John
July 10, 2007
I took a drive out to Shades State Park, near Waveland (Indiana), last Saturday. It is a good park to go hiking at because it’s always less crowded than the more well-known, nearby Turkey Run State Park. I wanted to get outside and also to practice taking photos (see samples below).
On the trip back home, I decided to go a little out of my way down to Greencastle to have dinner. I entered town from the north and I thought about the Monon Grill but passed it by because I wasn’t feeling a vibe to stop there. I went through downtown and thought about Moore’s Bar but I decided my stomach couldn’t handle anything anymore from the little grease pit in the back room of the bar.
I continued on and drove down Anderson to see the fraternity house. Too sad to think about.
After a short jaunt by the park and I realized I was close to Mama Nunz, if it was still around. Sure enough, I found it and I went inside to eat. It’s not quite the same as eating in the old tiny location under the toppings sign that listed the “bla olive”. I sat by the window and flipped to the sandwich listing in the menu and tried to remember what I used to order. I knew it wasn’t garlic cheeseburgers – that was Ben McCree’s favorite. It seemed to me that it must have been the Nunziboli or the pizza burger. I got the Nunziboli and fries. It doesn’t matter what the taste was like. I was eating nostalgia.
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Posted by John
July 4, 2007
I have added a page about W.S. Rea Elementary School in Terre Haute, Indiana. It is one of three different elementary schools I attended and it is the one where I spent the most number of years. There is surprisingly little information about the school on the internet. There are probably few people who know it ever existed even though it was demolished only 27 years ago.
I would like to know whatever happened to anyone I attended classes with there. My family left town after I completed 6th grade and it would be interesting to know what the path through Chauncey Rose Junior High and North High School would have been like.
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Posted by John
June 27, 2007
I graduated from Fort Pierce Central High School in Ft. Pierce, FL. back in 1980. So much time has past since then and I rarely recall any memories from my high school experience. I had supposed that if I tried I would have trouble remembering many of my former classmates. To my surprise, as I paged through my 1979 Hamadryad (our yearbook) and looked at the faces and names I seemed to remember almost everyone. Not just remember as a distant recollection, but as a hi-def clip of how each person looked, spoke and acted. Since I left town upon graduation I have never had any contact with any of them and so no mental picture other than that from the period of the late 70’s. At least in my mind, they all exist just as they did, as kids with only vague expectations of what would lie ahead and no knowledge of whatever travails they were yet to face. Though it might be interesting to meet up with some of them today, I know they wouldn’t really be the same people I knew then, in personality or appearance.
On the other hand they may feel that they are today just as they were then. For me, I not only believe that about myself, I’m sure of it.
Looking at the comments that people wrote in my yearbook, my memory isn’t so definite on what some of them are referring to. Still it is fun to read them again. I decided that enough time has passed that no one who wrote anything should care if I posted the comments online as a permanent record of what we used to think of back then.
The comments can be found from the 1979 yearbook link on the schools page.
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Posted by John
