Barbara Wilkerson Donnelly, Joy Rubins Morris, Rainer Klauss, Bobby Cochran, Collins (CE) Wynn, Eddie Sykes, Don Wynn, Paula Spencer Kephart, Cherri Polly Massey
Contributors: The Members of Lee High School Classes of 64-65-66 and Others
From Our
Mailbox
I'm in Lexington, Kentucky, again this weekend visiting with grandkids and getting in a practice round of golf with my son-in-law before the Reunion Golf Match. Remember we'll be playing on Friday at 3pm at the Sunset Landing Golf Course near the airport.
Time is drawing near, and I don't know about the rest of you but there is no way I can get everything done that I wanted to do before it gets here. So...I've decided not to loose 20 pounds and not to grow back my head of hair. I only have so many harmones, and I hate to waste them on growing hair.
Please include your name and class year with your e-mail to me.
T. Tommy
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Last Week's
Lee-Bay Item
Reunion Opened For Visitors
Remember that you don't have to be a member of the Classes of '64-'65-'66 to sign up and to come to our reunion. The Reunion Committee has elected to open our doors and hearts to members of other classes or just friends from other schools who would like to attend. Even if you did not graduate with us, you're still invited. The Reunion Application can be found below and you are welcome to send it in with your money and attend all the activities. We welcome all who want to party with us.
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Last week we asked:
(1) What was the name of the movie?
(2) In which theater did it premier in Huntsville?
(3) What was the high tech feature of that theater at the time?
(4) What was the name of the hoop-la ceremony that was held at the opening of this movie at that theater?
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J.R. Brooks - Class of '64 - I think the movie was Shoot For The Stars and the opening was at the
Lyric Theatre. But, I don't have any idea as to the rest.
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Gilda Davis - Class of '64 -The movie question is "I Aim At The Stars".
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Tommy Towery, Class of '64 - Last week’s Lee-Bay item was a poster for the movie “I Aim at the Stars” that had its Southern Gala Premier Opening at the Tony/Martin Theater, across the street from the Lyric. I don’t know which one it was at the time. The original name of the theater was The Tony. The first movie that was shown there was “Wild River” which was about the TVA dams being built on the Tennessee River. The high tech thing about the movie theater when it opened was that it had a lighted moving marquee with hundreds of little light bulbs spelling out the name of the movie being shown as they raced from one side of the sign to the other. I remember standing in the front row of the opening of “I Aim at the Stars” and seeing Von Braun and his family and several stars from the movie walk into the theater, on a red carpet I believe. A local radio station was covering the event and the broadcaster stopped and talked to me about how exciting it all was. At some time, the Tony was renamed the Martin.
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Pre-Orders Available
For Souvenir Shop Items
by Tommy Towery
Class of '64
With the reunion less than a month away, I am busy trying to remember all the things that I want to bring with me when I attend. So far I’ve got two laptop computer and two video projectors and a screen lined up, along with various books and knick-knacks. Those of you who know me also know that I can’t possibly bring all my Lee memorabilia, so here’s the plan.
If you have never visited our Lee’s Traveller “Souvenir Shop” you might want to. It can be found by clicking on the link at the top left of this page. Here are some of the best sellers and the highlights we offer.
If you have lost your 1964 or 1965 or 1966 Lee High School yearbook even if by divorce, we can help you. I have scanned each page of each of these books into computer files and have burned them to CDs viewable on your computer. I have two different styles for you to choose from. One CD format is a “Flip Album” which is presented on your computer screen like a book and you click on it and the pages turn forward and back. You can enlarge them to read better and see them at real scale.
The other CD format is one in which the yearbooks are stored in three formats. One format is just “jpg” or picture files. One format is Microsoft Word, and the third format is as an Adobe PDF file. You can download a free PDF viewer to read them on your computer. The best thing about the PDF is that you can print out any or all pages and they will be almost the same size and the original yearbooks. Instructions are included for all formats, however these are primarily PC and not Apple Macintosh files.
I also have hard copies of both of my own personal “Great American Novel” books available. The first one is “A Million Tomorrows…Memories of the Class of ‘64” and is over 350 pages of life at Lee during my senior year in 1963-64. The other one is my latest “While Our Hearts Were Young, Vol. 1” and is a collection of 12 Huntsville related stories about the times we lived in when we were kids.
To insure that you will absolutely get a copy of any of these things, I am going to take pre-orders and bring them with me. If you e-mail me with your order, I’ll have your name on it and it will be waiting for you. Pay me when you pick them up. Pay me? Oh, yes…the prices.
For Reunion 2005, I’ve come up with some special prices. I hope those of you who have already bought them at the original price can appreciate that this is a one-time special sale.
“A Million Tomorrows…Memories of the Class of ‘64” is cut to $7.50.
“While Our Hearts Were Young, Vol. 1” will be $5.00.
All three yearbooks in the jpg, MS Word, PDF formats on one CD is $15.00.
Individual year jpg, MS Word, PDF formatted yearbooks are $7.50 each.
Each year Flip Album Yearbook is $7.50 each.
There's no postage charge, since delivery will be made in person
I can't bring everything, so I am making this offer. E-mail me at ttowery@memphis.edu if you have questions or want to pre-order any of these items from the Souvenir Shop. All profits help support the cost of producing Lee’s Traveller each week.
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Reunion Questions
For those who will be in attendance on Saturday night, we would like you to answer one or both of the following questions;
1) "My greatest but least known accomplishment (honor, achievement) since I left LHS is ________________________"
2) "A fact about me (what I have done, who I have met, where I have been) that most of my classmates would probably never guess is __________________"
E-mail them to Niles Prestage, Class of '65, at napjr@aol.com .
The rules are that the statement or fact must be true and they are to tell no other classmate who will be in attendance their answers. We are really going to have fun with this!
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“Crunkery – Past and Present”
by Barbara Wilkerson Donnelly
Class of ‘64
One day recently, while thinking about fads and words from our Lee and pre-Lee years, I came upon an article by James J. Kilpatrick entitled, “Vogue for all things crunk.” In the article, he defines “crunk” as “ . . . a neologism . . . a new word, usage or expression.” I like that word, crunk. It immediately makes me think that James J. would have appreciated our “slam” books, or how we used to “have a blast” at a party. At the very least, he would have wanted to know the origins of such words, actions, and items. I think “slam” would translate to “diss” today, with one exception: The worst diss I ever read in a slam book was “stuck-up.”
Some of the items I remember for girls were Maryjane shoes, socks with little puffballs attached, culottes, pedal pushers, Bobby Brooks and Villager clothing, bobby socks, penny loafers, saddle oxfords, poodle skirts, Suzie Wong coats, and virgin pins. (Except that Barbara Seeley wore a circle pin, because she must have been absent the day they were dubbed virgin pins!) Bleeding Madras clothing, huarache sandals (courtesy of the Beach Boys), and flip-flops were in vogue for both sexes, if I recall correctly.
The boys wore corduroys, jeans, or dungarees (Were yours put on stretchers to dry so stiff that they could stand up in a corner at a party and serve as an extra male?), and Oxford shirts with fruit loops in the back. Weren’t Bass-Weejuns popular? And those big, old Converse tennis shoes? We never said “sneakers” back then. They were always tennis shoes, even if they were used for playing basketball. Buster Brown shoes were popular for both boys and girls, too.
Billy Joel has a nice way of pulling all the memories together for me with a song called “Keepin’ the Faith.” It has such a great rhythm to it, and you can feel the friendships living throughout the lyrics. Sort of like our group (read: “the ones who stay in touch” here, whether by an occasional email or at an occasional reunion), except a lot of Billy’s friends were bad-boyish. Sort of-ish. We had some bad boys at Lee who came by it naturally. Then there were those who worked at being bad but never quite made it. The worst thing I remember any girls getting in trouble for was smoking in the bathroom. Were we a “bunch of little heathens,” as my grandmother would’ve said, or what?
“ . . . Combed my hair in a pompadour,
Like the rest of the Romeos wore,
And ditty-bop shades . . .”
I remember the guys wearing pompadours, possibly pre-Lee years, but I do not EVER recall any of you Romeos wearing anything called ditty-bop shades! Can anyone enlighten me here? Ya know, I don’t believe I’d tell that if I were Billy! I remember guys wearing D.A.’s, crew-cuts, flat-tops, and buzz-cuts, particularly in the summer. There were more names for girls’ hair-dos than I could list here. A few of the more popular were: beehive, D.A., flip, French twist, pixie, bubble, and swan. The swan was a fancier version of the D.A., pulled off by only Linda Ragland, to the best of my knowledge.
Remember when the girls drank Shirley Temples and the boys drank Rob Roys? How about those sno-cones? What about calling the athletes “jocks”? Which came first, the athlete or the clothing article? Remember saying a guy was “tuff”? Or something was really “neat”? The guys said a girl was “stacked.” (Well, I heard they said that. I never personally encountered that adjective.) There were Beatniks who were groovy as well as hip and were the precursors to hippies. They tended to snap their fingers a lot. I think Woody Beck was a Beatnik. Maybe he still is. Maybe he really wasn’t. Wasn’t that finger-snapping gig simply a ploy to keep the elephants away? If you don’t know the joke, email me!
We did the Bop, the Twist, and the Dog. We danced to Wipeout and all things Beach Boys at Bradley’s and sang the infamous “Louie, Louie.” Of course, everyone was singing a different version, which didn’t really matter because no one understood the words anyway. The song was supposed to be dirty, and EVERYONE claimed to be singing the dirty version; however, truth be told, the lyrics of the original song are anything but dirty. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when a friend, a former singer in a band, showed me the actual words. I don’t care. “Louie, Louie” is still cool. The important part was:
“Louie, Lou-eye. Oh, no.
I said, We gotta go. Ya, ya, ya, ya, ya.
. . . I said, We gotta go now.
Let’s go!”
It just doesn’t get much smoother than that, does it? The only thing better than listening to “Louie, Louie” was listening to the Tics (Jerry Brewer and friends), the Tempests (Lehman Williams and friends), and the Roadrunners (Terry Preston and friends) playing any song.
Words have gone through numerous transitional meanings throughout the years since we left Lee High School. Now people simply say “type” when they work on the computer. (“Compute” just doesn’t have that certain zing.) Mrs. Parks made us say “typewrite.” I don’t remember why, but I did it. It was enough that Mrs. Parks wanted it done that way. It may be similar to Tupperware not wanting their products to be referred to as Tupperware. They prefer “Tupperware-brand products.” Yeah, right! That really caught on, didn’t it? I remember my children saying, “No, duh!” which I think was the same as kids saying “Duh!” today. The “preppies” of today were called “candies” during my son’s high school days. What were they called when we were in school? You know, now that I mention it, there wasn’t a lot of stereotyping back then. People at Lee weren’t quick to group you because you were a cheerleader, you played in the band, or because you had an IQ the size of the national debt. Did you even know that you were a “Boomer” back then? Or that you’d strive to live in a house in a “nice nabe” today? It boggles the mind to think of the many things we use today which, during our high school days, we never even imagined would exist. Today the words email, Google, ipod, DVD, VCR, CD, cell phone, Direct TV, satellite dish, text-message, voice-mail, sunless tanning (with apologies to that old Coppertone self-tan stuff that turned you orange), Botox, Lasik, porcelain veneers, remote control, lap-top, Blackberry, yippies, yuppies, dude, rap, rad, bloggers, and bling-bling are words we all recognize, even if we have no idea what they’re all about. (Apparently, neither does Word. It’s underlining words in red like crazy as I type!)
So, now that I’m in the mood, I’ll just get back to thinking of those good old days, when I didn’t have to worry about which button on the remote to push to order a video-on-demand. Yes, I’m electronically challenged, but I’m looking forward to sharing and redefining some of those memories with ya’ll at the reunion. Heck, we might even come up with some new crunkery. I’m not sure that’s even a word, so I think I’ll pop a coke, and pop in a Billy Joel CD while I go “google” it. Until the reunion . . .
“ . . . Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah . . .
. . . keepin’ the faith.”
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Subject:Hotel Russel Erskine
Gilda Davis
Class of '64
The Hotel Russel Erskine is still opened and people are still living there. They are in the process of renovating it. They started on the top floor and working down.
I have an Aunt that lives there and has for several years. My parents lived there also until they came to stay with me in Nashville, TN. The apartment they had was actually large and nice. But the new reinovated rooms are really going to be nice and will include a dishwasher, full size stove and refrigerator which the old apartments do not.
I also believe that Lavon Cantrell's mother still lives there as I have seen her several time when I go to visit my Aunt.
Look forward to seeing everyone at the reunion.
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Subject:Russel Erskine Hotel
Dianne Hughey McClure
Class of 1964
I remember my first time in the Hotel was a wedding tea for my sister. I thought it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. I decided then and there that some day I would live in a place just like that. one that overlooked the city and I could watch it from the privacy of my window (of course I never did but it was a nice dream). My dad owned a restaurant and a very well to do lady that did live there came to his restaurant every night for dinner she was always acconpanied by her caregiver for like of a better word. My husband, Ronnie told me that his first job was as an elevator operator at the Russel Erskine. I have not been in it lately but I am sure if the walls could talk there would be many interesting tales to tell.
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Subject:Wallace Photo
Lois Ann Uptain Adams
Class of '66
You are right! It is me in the photo. I didn’t even recognize myself but I clearly remember getting the blue notebook signed and Gov Wallace’s visit. It was very unlike me to get an autograph and it was probably the only autograph of an important person I ever solicited. You are blessed with an incredible memory for details.
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Subject:Big John Article
Collins (CE) Wynn
Class of '64
Don, good job on John's article. I am sure he will enjoy it. I have a snapshot of the event somewhere and I'll try to find it. The distance is too great to pick out faces but it does have the aircraft, the 100' or so of line and two blobs on the end of it over the Tennessee River. One of the blobs was John and the other was my great lifelong military friend, brother and the rescueee in your article, Colonel Joe Sims. I'm going to drop Joe a note and suggest he read the article. Joe will enjoy this tremendously as will several other friends. By the way, the Jumpmaster on that mission was Lieutenant Colonel Ed Cancel (my favorite foreigner; a Hispanic and Puerto Rican and a "sure enough" hard rocker). Ed hung out the door of the A/C and directed the pilots on staying in position. from my jump log, the date was August 29th, 1987.
Man, I can't say enough about all those guys....................I was in good company. I miss them all.
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Who Are You?
(Who-hoo - who-hoo)
by Niles Prestage
Class of '65
Would you believe that at the Reunion there will be in attendance classmates who:
"Became a distance swimmer at the age of 48."
"Is the father of Mickey Mouse."
"Seriously considered attending Union Theological Seminary to study Christian ethics"
"Had Tricia Nixon (yes, the President’s daughter) turn me down for a date."
"Was a Hickory Records recording artist with the band named the "IN."
"Crossed the Atlantic Ocean 92 times in the seven years between 1983 and 1990 (a steady 13 crossings or so a year)."
"Did Belly dancing for charities and private parties" (Actually we have 2 Belly Dancing Classmates who will be in attendance at Reunion 2005, maybe we could have them do a demonstration!)
More to follow next week!!! Be sure to e-mail me with your responses so you can join this illustrious group of classmates when we ask "Who are you"!
When Barbara sent in this week's story on slang terms, songs, etc., it reminded me of something that happened only a couple of weeks ago. I was watching a TV show and in the dialog was the explination to a term that I have been searching for since 1965! In Sam the Sham's famous song "Wooly Bully", one part of the lyrics had a term that I did not understand.
Now this part of the lyrics was not like "Louie, Louie" in that you could not understand the words. Most of us heard the words, and even though we did not know what they meant, we sang along with them - especially the Class of '65. Here's the verse in question:
Hatty told Mattie,
Let's don't take no chance.
Let's not be L-Seven,
Come and learn to dance.
Wooly Bully, Wooly Bully - Wooly Bully
Now I may have had my head burried in the sand, but I never heard the term "L-Seven" when I was at Lee. Several years ago when the World Wide Web came into being I did searches several times a year and never found the answer. And then the other night..."Pow - out of nowhere someone on the TV show gave me the answer. Was I alone in my ignorance or do any of you know what "L-Seven" means?
Click on the link below then scroll down to the music samples and click on Wooly Bully to hear where it is used.
Reunion time is drawing near. The members of the Reunion Committee can't wait to see you. This is a list of lost classmates that we have found:
Baughman, Joe
Bennett, Steven
Blair, Ginger
Brantley, Judy Dodson
Bushard, John
Cantrell Dick
Cope, Jane Ann
Drummond, John
Duncan, Gene Paul
Faust, Patty Pagano
Ireland, Ingrid Reilman
McQuay, Darlene
Miller, Christine Lemberg
Murphy, James Donald (DECEASED)
Pierce, Carole Bradshaw
Redford,Ann Wilson
Schrimsher, Max
Hibbert, Delinda Yvonne
Shelton, Wayne
Simpson, Phillip J.
Wilbourn, Jed
Unfortunately, we found a lot more that weren't even on our list that should have been. These are those names:
Andrew, Robert James
Bell, Gary
Berry, Janie
Black, Peggy Brown
Charles, John Frederick
Craig, Barbara Ann
Davidson, Ronald Steven
Davis, Daryl Alan
Dornbos, Robert Allen
Dyke, Ray
Hanson, Tommy
Hooper, James Edger
Hughes, Jerome
King, Judy
Leech, Stewart
McCain, Patricia
McPeters, Jimmy Lee
Petry, Sandra
Sharman, Ronald
Sims, Miriam Annell
Sanders, Karo Taylor
Towery, Rose Sharon
Voelkl, Eric Conrad
Wiggins, James Larry
Wilder, Lynda Ann
Wilson, Connie Ruth
Yeager, William Bratton
Don't know how these were left off of our classmate's list. Sarajane and I went back and checked our list with the annual for l965 and found all of these. If you have a chance, please ask if anyone knows any of these last classmates that we finally realize are missing.
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Aging?
submitted by Bobby Cochran
Class of '64
Any woman can have the body of a 21-year-old, as long as she buys him a few drinks first.
My memory's not as sharp as it used to be. Also, my memory's not as sharp as it used to be.
Know how to prevent sagging? Just eat till the wrinkles fill out.
I've still got it, but nobody wants to see it.
I'm getting into swing dancing. Not on purpose. Some parts of my body are just prone to swinging.
It's scary when you start making the same noises as your coffeemaker.
I think I've reached my sexpiration date.
People our age can still enjoy an active, passionate sex life! Provided we get cable or that dish thing.
The good news is that even as we get older, guys still look at our boobs! The bad news is they have to squat down first.
These days about half the stuff in my shopping cart says, "For fast relief."
I've tried to find a suitable exercise video for women my age, but they haven't made one called "Buns of Putty."
Don't think of it as getting hot flashes. Think of it as your inner child playing with matches.
Don't let aging get you down. It's too hard to get back up.
Remember: You don't stop laughing because you grow old, You grow old because you stop laughing.
THE SENILITY PRAYER
Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.
Now, I think you're supposed to send this to 5 or 6, maybe 10 . Oh heck, send it to a bunch of your friends if you can remember who they are.
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Next Reunion Committee meeting is Tuesday, August 9, at 5:15. A lot of final details need to be completed--like the program.
