Est. March 31, 2000 41,756 Previous Hits July 7, 2003 Editor:Tommy Towery http://www.leealumni.com Class of 1964 Page Hits This Issue e-mail ttowery@memphis.edu Barbara Wilkerson Donnelly , Joy Rubins Morris, Cherri Polly Massey, Paula Spencer Kephart, Rainer Klauss, Bobby Cochran, Collins (CE) Wynn, Eddie Sykes Staff Photographers: Fred & Lynn Sanders Contributers: The Members of Lee High School Classes of 64-65-66 |
From Our Mailbox Subject: To Chip Smoat's TIME Richard "Ricky" Simmons Class of '64 That is a beautiful story on TIME. What a message!!!. I thank you for sharing it with us and I am going to share it with my friends and family here in Texas and across the country. ________________________________________ Subject: Re: June 30th Issue of Traveller David Lemaster Class of '66 What an outstanding Job you all do! I am a long ways from Huntsville and it is so good to peek into the past on your site. Thanks. _____________________________________ Subject: Guam Jim Bannister Class of '66 Tommy, I am surprised that three of us Lee Grads where at the same place on Guam... The world gets even smaller... Carl "June Bug" Walker ,who played football at Butler, and his wife Lori, who's sister was Pam McDuffy (Lee High School Class of '67), were my next door neighbors on Guam. ____________________________________ Subject: Miracle City Mike Hall mkh28@comcast.net Hello, I am looking for a photo of Miracle City....a store that was located in Huntsville in the early Sixties. My wife remembers seeing the store as a child. She thinks that the store was located where the old Service Merchandise store, and later...Research Genetics occupied. The Rock Family Worship Center just purchased that property. If you have any info on the subject...or perhaps know where we could locate a photo of Miracle City, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank You, Mike Hall (Editor's Note: Can anyone come up with a photo? I am sure that his history of the building is close to accurate.) _____________________________________________ Subject: Summer Linda B. Walker Class of '66 Tommy, pass along my thanks to Barbara Donnelly for her article, "Summr in the City." It brought back many visual memories of growing up in Huntsville. I was born in Tennessee, but I still call Huntsville home, and her article has made me homesick for friends there ( and the friends who have moved from there). ____________________________________________ |
My First Job: To Infinity and Beyond? by Rainer Klauss Class of '64 My first serious job will always be linked with a noxious odor: ammonia. When I went to work as an Engineering Aide at Spaco, Inc. in May of 1962, the first job I was assigned was folding blueprints. During the final step in the reproduction of blueprints using the diazo method, they are passed through an ammonia vapor. This "develops" them, and they emerge from the machine bearing a definite aromatic residue of the process. It wasn't an overpowering odor, but it gave the task of manipulating them an unpleasant tang. At Terry's, Collins Wynn smelled pizza all day as a baker and delivery-boy. Lynn Bozeman Van Pelt endured the seductive aroma of popcorn as part of her working environment at the Lyric. At Spaco, I labored in a light mist of NH3, eau d'smelling salts. Spaco (cool name!) was one of the dozens of small manufacturing, fabrication, and engineering companies that sprang up in Huntsville to help support Marshall Space Flight Center. When I started with the outfit, they were located in one of the buildings of the former Lincoln Mills on Meridian Street. Chrysler and Boeing were other major tenants at the multi-building complex. Although I didn't know it at the time, I was going to work where the relatives of some of my classmates at Rison and Lee had toiled years before. (This was another later twist in the socio-economic upheaval of Huntsville during the 50s and 60s that Sonny Turner and others brought to our attention in last year's Traveller.) In the 60s my father worked at the Quality, Reliability Assurance Lab at Marshall. The Saturn V program was already underway, and for years to come the rocket stages would be assembled in the huge bays of the building and then be dynamically tested to ensure that all the systems worked. His managerial position took him all over the country, but it also brought him into contact with many of the local contractors that supplied the test equipment and personnel to the lab. The executives of these companies, in order to win favor with my father, let him know that they had summer jobs available. Since it was time for me to be introduced to the world of work, Spaco, which was just a short trip down Oakwood from our house in Darwin Downs, won the prize as my first employer. So that's how I found myself standing in front of a pungent pile of blueprints one Saturday morning in May a few weeks before the 10th grade ended. I was excited to be working, of course. Hadn't Tom Swift started sort of like this? Uncle Sam was taking his cut, but I was going to be pulling in $1.15/hour (the minimum wage in those days). The office was freezing that morning and hardly anyone else was there. It's possible, of course, that the blueprint machine was only run on Saturdays, when it would bother the least people. The duplication technician welcomed me and then showed me how to do the folding. The blueprints were large, at least 3 feet by 5 feet, and the job had to be done carefully and in proper sequence. Before this, my job experience had been lawn mowing and babysitting, so my employers were expecting a lot if they wanted me to master this large-scale, engineering origami quickly. I concentrated on his technique (not hard to do when you're getting a constant rush from the ammonia) and did my best to mimic it. After awhile I was turning out fairly crisp, compact works of art. Applying criteria from the Q&RA Handbook for Teenage Engineering Aides, the technician inspected my work and found it satisfactory. I spent the rest of the day folding and talking with the guy. I can't remember if my father remarked about the clouds of ammonia I brought with me when I got into the car at the end of the day. It would have been a battle of atmospheres; he was a heavy smoker. When the school year ended and I went full-time at Spaco, I never folded blueprints again. For awhile I was a go-fer, a delivery boy moving parts from one fabrication area to another or to shipping. I also spent time in the electro-plating section, checking solutions and monitoring the jobs. Among other items, Spaco manufactured cables. Workers soldered a large number of shielded wires into the back of male connectors. Next, the free ends of the wires had to be matched with the pins on the male plug. This was done by applying a small electrical charge to one of the pins and then inserting the wires in sequence into a box with a bulb on it. When the bulb lighted up, the wire was labeled with the pin number. Once all the wires were identified they were soldered into another connector. During the electronic match task, I worked beside another young engineering aide, and to spark up our workday, we would occasionally rake each other with the charged wires. Just a little fun with electricity! So, that was the start of my summer adventures on the fringes of the space industry. The next summer (and two following that) I worked for Brown Engineering. There I helped supply parts in the machine shop, filed documents, and converted data for a computer database. In the summer of 1965, my last stint with Brown, I hit the Big Time: a job at Marshall. There I assisted in cementing sensors to the outside of a Saturn fuel tank for slosh tests and worked alongside several engineering students from Georgia Tech and Auburn. Ironically, as I reached my own (insignificant) apogee in one of mankind's most monumental technological achievements, I was also flaming out. During my various summer jobs, I had met a lot of interesting and hard-working folks and had come to appreciate the satisfaction and pleasure they found in their work. This final, intensive exposure to the professional world of engineering at Marshall helped me to realize that it wasn't the environment for me. I had neither the temperament nor the aptitude for it. What lay ahead of me when I returned to Auburn that fall was figuring out where my life should go. I didn't get it right that time either. _____________________________________ |
Last Week's Music Trivia Only one brave classmate took the challenge of last week's music trivia: Music trivia -- 1. Let's Dance 2. Satisfaction 3. can't guess this one (It was Saturday Night at the Movies) 4. Soul Man 5. Happy Birthday,Sweet Sixteen Sorry, but I don't have any specific memories about these songs. I just enjoyed listening to them then and now. (Jackson does have a good oldies radio station.) Thanks again to all of you who contribute the articles and email. Keep up the good work. Linda Beal Walker Class of '66 ____________________________________________________ |
We Are Fami-LEE! |
Est. March 31, 2000 41,756 Previous Hits July 7, 2003 Editor:Tommy Towery http://www.leealumni.com Class of 1964 Page Hits This Issue e-mail ttowery@memphis.edu Barbara Wilkerson Donnelly , Joy Rubins Morris, Cherri Polly Massey, Paula Spencer Kephart, Rainer Klauss, Bobby Cochran, Collins (CE) Wynn, Eddie Sykes Staff Photographers: Fred & Lynn Sanders Contributers: The Members of Lee High School Classes of 64-65-66 |
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Well, we did not get much response from our Music Trivia, but one classmate did come up with four out of five. We've run out of "How I Ended Up" stories so please send some more in. I know we have many stories about how people got to places like Oregon and Sweeden and Florida. It's time to give back Classmates! I hope you all had a safe Fourth of July. I am still looking for the one I lost. I took off from Texas one year on the Third of July and landed in Guam on the Fifth, and never saw the Fourth, and I know there was one, so if anyone finds it, please send it back to me. I could use another 24 hours in my life. T. Tommy _____________________________________ |
What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate By Tommy Towery Class of '64 We've had some great times remembering our days at Lee. In today's world when I read back about Rainer and our other classmates who joined us from Germany, I have marveled at how they were ever able to adapt to English, and specifically the Southern idea of English. One of the entertaining things I get to do at the university is to work with foreign students who have come to the states for their education. I have had the opportunity of having some very talented and pleasant groups of students from India to serve as my graduate assistants helping me work on computers for the last few years. One of the things that I find myself doing with this group is trying very hard to educate them on "American Slang" and find that it is a real challenge. I had a greater challenge when I took four of them to see their first American Baseball game. Not only did I have to explain what was happening in the game, but also had to describe some of the food that people were eating and why they were eating it. In the process of explaining slang terms, my mind slipped back to our days at Lee and some of the terms that were common to many of us then, but that today's generation of high school students (as well as the Indian students) might not have any idea what in the world we were talking about. Most of us learned the terms from our parents and grandparents, or at least our older brothers and sisters who learned from them. I wonder how our German friends ever learned how to communicate with us, since they did not have that opportunity. For your fun and entertainment I have decided to offer up a group of phrases that were probably spoken quite often back in the early Sixties, but which may have lost their way in today's world. I first tried to come up with ten nouns, but found that some of the other slang terms were just too good to pass up. To make this fun, I offer for your explanation submissions the following terms, and will not grade you on how many you get wrong or right. I have decided that it would be better just to print the best description of the items and list the classmate who came up with that description, so be creative. The editor is the sole judge, so the staff writers can have a chance to play the game too. Please feel free to give descriptions for all of them, but we will only print the ones selected to be the overall best entries, so try hard. We may only use one description from your list, or maybe two or three, if you are good. Everyone has a chance to be selected. Here are the ten slang (or common) phrases from our days at Lee for your consideration: 1. Coffin Nail 2. Glass Packs 3. A Slug (not the hitting action, or the slippery slimy thing or the business end of a bullet, but the other one that can be held in your hand) 4. Duck Tail 5. Fruit Loop (not the cereal) 6. Church Key 7. Wet Willie 8. Charlie Horse 9. Indian Burn 10. A Suicide Feel free also to submit any others that you might think of and we will feature them in a later issue. Any story that can be added about any of the items is welcome. Okay Classmates, you have one hour to finish the test and to turn in your papers. No cheating (Skip!). Begin. Bonus points for identifying the movie from which the photo above and the article's title phrase were taken. ______________________________________ |
From The Bench by Eddie Sykes Class of '66 There are several horrific dates that stick in our minds: December 7th, November 22nd, September 11th, and August 15th. I guess most of you are scratching your heads and wondering what happened on August 15th. Well, I am sure a hundred or so of Lee Alumni remember that date. It was the first day of football practice at Lee. Summer fun ended and two-a-day football practices began each year on that day and Huntsville was usually hot, dry, or muggy that time of year. The 1st week was all conditioning. The drills that we were put through would be considered cruel and unusual punishment today. We ran forwards, backwards, and sideways both upright and on all four's. We rolled, summer-sawed, and dove face 1st onto the grown. We did exercises the old fashion way with pushups, sit-ups and more pushups until it hurt. They called it "grass drills", but there was no grass to be found. There were no water breaks! In comparison it made "boot camp" seem like summer camp. Blood, sweat, and beers came pouring out. Did I mention we ran and ran and ran. We shaped up or shipped out. We wore shorts, helmets, and tee-shirts, but by the end of practice our tee-shirts were covered with mud and blood. (sweat and dirt make mud) The coaches seemed to love every minute. There was a whistle blow, followed by a cloud of dust, yells of "suck it up", then grunts and groans. We sucked up the dust, spit out mud, and by the end of practice we looked more like coal miners than football players. I didn't realize it then, but this was key process of making a group of teenagers into a team. There was no free ride for anyone - you either stuck it out or you quit. It was this joint participation (by all) and going through this grueling ordeal together that established each of us as peers. We did not all have equal talent or ability, but we bonded from suffering equally on the practice field. Labor Day became our favorite holiday. It marked the end of two a day practices and the start of school. At last the focus shifted from conditioning to football. The football team started school with reconditioned bodies that were both bruised and skinned up. We all proudly walked the halls with big smiles showing off our battered bodies. The smiles were not because we were jocks, but because two-a-days were over. Our pride glowed from accomplishing our first mission -- we made the Lee High School football team. Even for us that rode the bench, this made it all worth while. __________________________________________ |
Lee High Sings Way To Top Spot Extracted from story published in the Huntsville Times on 06/30/03. By Pat Newcomb Times Staff Writer patn@htimes.com Members of the Lee High School choral department knew they had swept the Music Festivals awards in Virginia Beach, Va., in May. What they didn't know was they had also won top spot in the entire competition, which was held over three months earlier this year. Lee High choral director Barry Petty recently received a letter informing him his program had won the National Choral Sweepstakes Award, besting 146 high school choir programs from around the country. The choirs had competed in festivals sponsored by Music Tours Unlimited of Birdsboro, Pa. The company held 26 competitions under its Music Festivals division during March, April and May in 20 cities in the United States and Canada. The winners of those 26 festivals had their top two scores tabulated to determine the overall choral and instrumental winners on the middle school and high school levels. Lee's show choir, concert choir, men's chorale and women's choir competed in the program, winning first in all four categories at the Virginia Beach competition. __________________________________ |
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This Week's Mystery Building Can you name this week's building? If this "sounds" like a challenge, send us your best guess. _______________________. |
Mark Bently sent in the following story: A man took his wife to the Rodeo and one of the exhibits is that of breeding bulls. They went up to the first pen and there was a sign that said, "This bull mated 50 times last year." The wife poked her husband in the ribs and said, "He mated 50 times last year." They walked a little further and saw another pen with a sign that said, "This bull mated 120 times last year." The wife hit her husband and said, "That's more than twice a week! You could learn a lot from him." They walked further and a third pen had a bull with a sign saying,"This bull mated 365 times last year." The wife got really excited and said, "That's once a day. You could REALLY learn something from this one." The husband looked at her and said, "Go up and ask him if it was with the same cow." UPDATE: The husband's condition has been reduced from critical to stable and he should make a full recovery. |
