As expected, the 50th reunion came and went in a heartbeat. All the reports coming my way say that a wonderful time was had by...EVERYONE!  I would like to recognize these classmates for their contributions to the success of our reunion:

The entire weekend's venue was put together by Sue Hunter. Sue did a wonderful job in organizing what we saw as a seamless celebration of our 50th.  

Bill Kouri spent many days and dollars looking for and finding classmates.

Warren & Joanne Shifini selflessly spent time and money providing me a '63 Lycurgean, lists of names to add to the hunt and notes to Classmates.com members about the reunion.

Linda Joseph Duncan provided floral arrangements and party accessories.

Judy Phillips Wallace provided the pizza for the Friday night party.

Carol Holroyd McLendon helped to organize the Friday pizza party and clean-up.

Bill Ashdown , class of '61, provided his DJ services for our Saturday night dinner/dance.

Carol Hunter Stewart, class of '61, (Sue's sister) and her husband manned the registration table Friday and Saturday.

Steve Lambright provided those awesome photos of life on campus back in the day. 


Thank you,
Bud

The 50 year class reunion is fast approaching. 38 days hence we will be basking in the beautiful sunshine and dry air of Cathedral City at The Doral Desert Princess. While we are still looking for 95 classmates, we have found and accounted for 226. You can view all the Lost/Found/InMemory/Attending pages here - http://wchs63reunion.com/

Signed up to attend The Reunion so far, we have 67 classmates with another dozen lurking in the wings keeping us all in suspense. Sue Hunter has made all the arrangements and says there is a little wiggle room for unexpected folks, but try not to be one of those, please.

You may know that we started a Flickr page, Classmates Now, and classmates are encouraged to send in a current selfie that can be posted there. In jest, I posed this as a place to reveal yourself as you are now to ease the shock of the big expose at the reunion. I am truly, in awe of the utter handsomeness, character, and poise of all who dared.

This reunion is something to cherish. Join in the fun and make the most of it.

Bud

The West Covina High School class of 1963 Reunion is only 68 days away. 72% of the class has been accounted for and nearly 70 have already signed up for the dinner/dance during the 3 day gathering at the Doral Desert Princess in Cathedral City, Oct 4th - 6th. Any classmate who wants to attend and hasn't signed up yet can do so by sending a check ($40 per person) to ;

Sue Hunter
28963 Isleta Court
Cathedral City, CA 92234

 The class website can be visited at www.wchs63reunion.com 

(Be sure to click on the buttons atop the website to view all the pages.)

The last classmate found to date, Loajean Brailey Young, gets us up to the 62% in classmates accounted for from WCHS '63. Loajean is 156th of the 319 we identify with our class. Not every one of the 319 classmates we have searched for graduated with the class, but were with us most of those years.

With 4 1/2 months until the reunion we have slowed way down in finding people on the lost list. Word of mouth and curiosity have got to kick in as I think it did with Loajean. We are well into 2013, our 50th year since graduation so lost folks just might start wondering about good old West Covina Hi and what happened to all those bright young faces.

Today, I took a count of those committed to attending the reunion dinner and came up with 47 classmates. Still lots of folks who haven't decided if they're going. That makes it tough on Sue Hunter who has to deal with the country club banquet room manager.

It has been awhile since the last post. Have had some chores that needed doing.

I wanted to share with the class the sad news that Ernie Ewegen lost his battle with cancer last month. His brother, John was clearing out Ernie's phone messages when he heard mine about the class reunuion. John was so kind in letting us know about Ernie's passing so that we could honor him "In Memory" on our class website.

On a happier note, we have found another classmate. Thanks to Laura Wine Paster sending in a phone number she had we were able to do a reverse lookup and get an address for Linda Guerrero, now Linda Grensted. Bill Kouri, ace detective, vacationing in Encinitas where the reverse lookup showed Linda went by and left a note. Linda, arriving home from exotic faraway places, found the note and called Bill.

So the list of classmates to find "dwindles" to 134. We've still got a lot of work to do.

We have surpassed the halfway mark in accounting for classmates. Sadly, it was by posting three more classmates "In Memory":

Valerie Goodell
Terry Kiley
Diana Lile

RIP

Just found Carole Tyner Bergeron. Also Linda Plesetz Hennings sent her email in to be put on the group email list. We have accounted for 156 classmates so 3 more puts us over the halfway point.

Sue Hunter tells me the call for dinner/dance money has checks arriving at a high rate. She asked that it be made clear that the $40 ea., posted on the website, was for each person, so a couple would be $80. 

I am going to assume that we can create a list of those paid and call it "Attending - Confirmed" or some such. Keep an eye out for the list. I will probably post the list in our private group emailing and the private group blog. So if you read this and haven't gotten in your email address to me you might want to now.

A video of West Covina High School's Class of 1963

The reunion crowd is growing, we stand at 118 found of the 315 1963 alums. Folks are excited about getting together to celebrate 50 years of character building after high school. Maybe not so surprising, only 8 of those found have expressed no desire to go to a reunion of such upstanding citizens as ourselves.

The latest info has been posted on the facebook page and the website so everybody can plan accordingly.

How about a room with a view

Available at Reunion Central -
The Doral Desert Princess Resort

#100 - Sandy Mickels  -  But now we stand at 108 already. Lot of fun and satisfaction comes from finding and communicating with more and more classmates. Hearing what life has brought to them generates warm feelings, by and large. I spoke with one this morning, the best reader in Mrs. Bigelow's 6th grade class, and she described to me an idylic retirement in the mountains, creeks rising, dogs snuggling up. I'm loving it

We already have over 1/3 of the class found. We stand at 99 "Found", 197 "Lost" and 17 "In Memory".

Certainly, we will go over 100 classmates found tomorrow. I wonder who that will be?

Yesterday I posted that we had 77. Shoot, I was premature on that call because Bill Kouri wasn't done for the day! If you look at the website you will see that we now have 88 on the found list. Not all of them have an interest in the reunion, of course, but it is good to see they are alive and kicking, none the less.

The Found list of classmates for Reunion '63 is now up to 77. I had to move Thomas back over to the Lost list as earlier reports proved wrong. Commins is checking out the latest lead, however.

Today is a banner day for finding folks from West Covina High School's Class of 1963:
With Bill Kouri sending in 7 classmate contacts; Blanton, Batten, Ahlstrand, Day and Cash, Harrison, Hamm. And more still coming in!
And Warren and Joanne Schifini today completing yeoman work finding and alerting classmates to the reunion. They subscribed to MyLife.com and Classmates and left a note about the reunion with each classmate on those sites! The Schifini's have insured that we will have a stream of classmates checking in from now on.

Sadly, two classmates, Anthony Arroyo and Barbara Mason, were added to the "In Memory" page. It was reported that they passed away several years ago.

Though we have found over 60 classmates in preparing for the 50 year class reunion we are missing key people, our class officers or most of them. Sue Hunter - Vice President is very present and accounted for and organizing the reunion. However, these MIA's must be found:

Bill Hartman - President,
Harvest Thomas - Treasurer,
Pat Skelton - Secretary,

In toto, the Class Council, 29 strong, has 11 on the Found list.   Class'63, "Where Are You?"

I will hope that through the year, up to October 4th, someone tells them or they realize the significance of 2013 and come searching for reunion information. That info can be found with an internet search for "West Covina High School Class of 1963".

Our website is www.wchs63reunion.com.
or contact:
sue.hunter@wchs63reunion.com 

Today, all of the Lost classmates were put up on the "Lost & Found" page at www.wchs63reunion.com. There are 241 of them listed there next to the Found folks. OMG!   Have we got a long way to go. More coffee! 

We've hit a bit of a slump the last few days locating classmates. However, on the bright side Sue Hunter emailed today that she has hot leads on the whereabouts of Wine and Gordon. Great going Sue, would be wonderful to hear about Laura and Marsha.

Currently, I am on a hunt for two classmates, specifically; Sherry Williams and Alan Kinder. Any info as to their whereabouts would be greatly appreciated.

Not to say these classmates are any more special than all the others we need to find, they just have friends in high places, let's say.

So, come on class, put on your thinking hats and help me out.

A classmate just emailed me about the difficulty of commenting on this blog. What the heck is going on I thought, how come? So I wandered around a bit and found Settings. Interesting stuff in there and one item was to click and allow public comment. Unknowingly, it was set for super secret decoder ring required. Well, I fixed that so now comment away (after you solve the funny word puzzle).

There is some concern that too much info or communication is bombarding classmates about the reunion. Classmates/Memory Lane has a purpose, make money. Those of use who signed on with Classmates have to learn to ignore them. Every time I visit their site I get 3, 4 immediate solicitations from them to "upgrade". Then their usual daily effort to help me find out who has visited for the low, low monthly rate of...

This leads many to block or put C/ML in the spam catcher, I'll bet. So, me thinks, even though C/ML sent out a Reunion Notice to those listed there in WCHS class of 1963, at my request, it fell on deaf ears in many cases. As for me, I frequent their site because I have this "need to know" under the guise of building the "Found" list so I put up with their noise. At the end of October I'll put them back in the spam catcher.