Heeeee’s back!! What a great trip Penny and I enjoyed to New England. We selected Newport, RI as home base and made day trips from there. The Newport mansions are impressive, although back in the early 1900’s, the magnates and tycoons referred to them as cottages. Weather was superb, except for a day on Cape Cod, when rain and drizzle set in. We made up for that in Plymouth,MA with undoubtedly the best scallops ever tasted.  Autumn color was peaking and an extra treat, since we selected the dates to go and did not worry about what the leaves would be doing. Finally, we toured Brown University and Yale. Don’t want to offend anyone, but Yale has to be one of the ugliest campuses I have ever viewed.

Preserve Jeff! Two nights ago I attended the annual meeting of the TJHS Historic Preservation Society. I was expecting a fairly large crowd, but there were maybe thirty folks there, including Jack Van Vleck from our class. If you wish to see the website, go to www.preservejeff.org.  Two items are worth reporting.

1. Digitized yearbooks: the project to digitize all the old Monticellos from 1932 through 2013 is done and saved for the Jeff history. They failed to tell us how to order them, though I expect it to be through the TJHS HPS. The project was accomplished by a firm in Illinois, who will fulfill the orders. It will cost $50 a pop, with most of the funds going to the firm and some percentage to the Society. All the scanning was done by hand, page by page, so it was a time consuming and costly process. That I know from the class history project.

2. The Student Council fountain project: They explained in some detail about the project to renovate the SC fountain, which was a gift from the class of 1932. Turns out to be a very costly process/project. It presently is not water tight, so that must be repaired. All of the piping to supply the water are rusted and must be replaced. The fountain has had all the dirt removed and it turns out that it is five feet deep! Under current law that gets re-classified as a swimming pool! So they will have to decrease the depth. Because of other projects ongoing, this will not be started till 2015. However, if you are going to add a brick to raise funds, please do it now.

The fountain again. The fountain recalled a memory I probably have not thought of since 1951. Do you guys remember joining a club and participating in some mild hazing? When I joined the Senate, I recall taking a shoeshine box to school and polishing members shoes for a day. The other memory is that we had to go out to the SC Patio and do push-ups at the fountain. With feet on the outer rim, we propelled ourselves forward and down to the raised inner circle and did push-ups. The trick was getting back erect without falling in. I do not recall the trick to that. Does anyone? And did the girls do a little hazing?

Shirley France. Another memory that came back when I was working on the history was of Shirley France, now deceased. I recall that to one of our reunions, maybe it was forty-fifth, she brought a date who was a priest. Does anyone else remember that?

Harry Jones. I have tried to contact Harry to no avail. The phone indicates it has not been set up for voice mail and it is not answered. All emails bounce back as being over quota. (Same message for Guy Bragg.) I suspect Harry has a full time care-giver now.

Photos:

Fritzie & Byrne                         Kay Gregory & Patty Ramby     Jim & Ann McNeel