Lee High School - Huntsville Alabama Alumni

Subject:Heat

Charlie Hancock

Class of '66

I was sure surprised to see my name in print! We're at this moment (10am Sunday) 63F and 78% humidity. It feels SOOOOO humid. We had a marine air push come through overnight with mostly overcast. As the day progresses, the temperature rises and the humidity falls. A couple days ago it was 25% humidity during the evening news.

We drove around Mt Rainier Wednesday. Would you like to see a few snapshots? "Our Mountain" is so beautiful in August. Buy Sept 1, the glaciers are a bit "dusty" looking from air pollution. By October, fresh snow will leave it virgin white again.

I wish I could attend the reunions in August. I've gone soft. I'm a non-hacker. I can't take it no more! It really is too hot for this fatboy. It's too hot here for me in August.

Today is the conclusion of SEAFAIR. They've had parades and celebrations. Today is the conclusion of the Chevrolet Cup Hydroplane Races. Watching the races live used to be like attending Woodstock. Now it is calmed down some. I don't enjoy partying with 250,000 other people. In fact, I don't watch the races anymore. Usually Miss Budweiser wins. They have the biggest budget.

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Subject:Visiting and Reunion Question

Joyce Grimstead Burke

Class of '67

Hi, I was just browsing and was interested to see if there was anyone I remembered on the list. There were a few names that I remembered. Is there going to be another reunion soon? Thanks, Joyce

Email: jadelb@windstream.com

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Subject:Steve Northway

Paula Spencer Kephart

Class of '65

Does anyone have any info about the death of Steve Northway '65? He and his wife and we were all good card playing friends, also golf. Would be so nice to be able to get in touch with his wife Arlene, if he was still married to her at that time. She was from Pass Christian, Ms. Don't remember her maiden name. If you have an email address, I would so appreciate it.

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Subject:Job Announcement

Judy Fedrowisch Kincaid

Class of ‘66

There is a job opening in the Cash Office at the Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville that would be great for an “early” retiree or an empty-nester. Could or would you like to mention it in the newsletter or maybe send out a note to all the e-mail addresses that you send the weekly reminder to?

If anyone was interested, they could e-mail or call me for a job description and other details.

I was able to fill a position (with a classmate’s spouse) two years ago using the reunion committee addresses I had at the time. But my computer crashed and I lost a lot of contact info.

njkincaid@hotmail.com

(256) 656-3667

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Subject:Larry Byrom

Eddie Burton

Class of 66

Bob Wray, a great Session Player in Nashville said that Larry Byrom had a stroke back in the spring and he is recovering nicely. He has actually played guitar on some recording sessions lately and Bob says everything seems to be working fine. Larry is one of our classmates and former guitar great from Steppenwolf and Nashville studio musician.

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Learning to Write

In the Ninth Grade

by Tommy Towery

Class of '64

Several issues ago we discussed the idea of writing letters to friends. It was mentioned that to truly be personal, the letter should be hand written and not done on a computer. I tried to think back to how long it has been since I wrote an entire letter by longhand – and I could not remember. I am one of those who has gone to the dark side and now rely upon the computer for most of my correspondence. I do still write personal letters to folks and mail them, I just don’t hand write them anymore. It seems that over the years the more I used the computer, the more I became dependent upon it, and the more my own handwriting skills have deteriorated.

I never had a “beautiful” handwriting, but I had a pretty good one. A large number of you learned to write the same way that I did, and that didn’t happen until I entered the ninth grade. In 1960, my first year to attend Lee, I found myself in an English class with a bunch of you. After about two or three weeks of schooling, the English teacher made a startling announcement to the class. She said that she could not read most of the papers that we were turning in to her for grades. That being said, she declared to the class that “handwriting” was about to be added to the curriculum and we would all learn how to write correctly and would be graded upon our skills. We were all shocked. Most of us thought we knew how to write. How could we have made it to the ninth grade and not know how to write a paper or a letter. I vividly remember sitting in classes in East Clinton and having the handwriting charts that went around the room like a wallpaper border, showing all the nice letters of the English alphabet. Obviously I didn’t look at them enough, or study them enough, or practice them enough. Nor, did it seem did any of my classmates.

That being said, the handwriting section was added to the scheduled studies for the ninth grade English class to which I was assigned. It would not happen today. It could not happen today in a world where every minute of the day a teacher is required to stick to a properly planned syllabus. But as we all know, things were different when we went to school. Thus began my class’s introduction to the Palmer Method of Handwriting.

In my research on the web, I found out the following information about the background and fundamentals of the Palmer Method.

Vintage Palmer. When Mr. A. N. Palmer invented his now-famous Palmer Method of Business Handwriting, he implemented a very smooth-flowing cursive style. The Method stressed loose, free-flowing repetition. (Current grandparents can sometimes be seen doodling long lines of circles that look like very compressed slinkies: that is Palmer Method practice.)

He also introduced some unusual treatments in his classic style. The height of small letters was one-third the height of the caps. The ending letter "t," as in the word "that," is one of the most unusual variations. Another variation is that the letter "r" connects to the next letter from the top, like a letter b or o. Look at the word "arrow." When ending a sentence with a lower loop letter (g, j, y, or z), the normal upstroke to finish the letter is omitted. An example is "grinding."

Not only did small letters connect, in many cases his examples showed that capital letters connected! We could not implement that - it was just too complex. But many of the capital letters connect to the next small letter:

Look at the difference between the capitals F and T, unique in this font.

Sitting in our ninth grade English class at Lee Junior High School, my classmates and I repeatedly practiced putting the English alphabet on paper. In the same manner in which multiplication tables and typewriting skills are learned, our teacher had us write words and paragraphs over and over. We had to learn to loop the letter and connect and end them in the proper manner. We wrote stories and tests using Mr. Palmer’s idea of how a font should look. By the end of the year, most of us had improved our handwriting skills greatly, and at least for the next three years the other teachers at Lee reaped the benefits of our late-life (relatively) basic education.

Ironically, at the same time I was being taught to write beautiful words in longhand, I was also being taught to create much more readable words using a typewriter. Each day would see me writing some sentence in the morning using lined paper, and in the afternoon typing “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy old dog.” on typing paper.

The irony comes, in the fact that both of these skills – the classic and the innovative- were being taught to me by the same person. This was the person who not only taught me to “write” but taught me to “write.” I learned not only what to put down on paper, but also how to put it there in two different ways.

Yes, Mrs. Jane R. Parks, my mentor was both the “light” and the “dark side” of my writing abilities. In the long run, the typing skills have proven to be much more valuable to me in life, but I do not regret the time I spent trying to learn to write in a legible manner.

I would be a little disappointed if the fact that I remember this was not a shock to Mrs. Parks, who is still a weekly reader of The Traveller. But surely if I can remember that "a preposition is a word that shows a relationship between a noun or pronoun and some other word in a sentence" it should be no surprise that I can remember this as well. Llike so many other things that seem trivial to others, I remember not only the exercise, but the name of the system used to teach it. Mr. Palmer would be a little upset with me in my daily activities today, but “Mr. Underwood” or “Mr. Remington” or “Mr. Royal” would be proud of my learned skills. And even though it has been 47 years since that ninth grade discovery, I still hope that Mrs. Parks is proud of me as well.

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Hot August

Linda Kinkle Cianci, Class of '66 - I laugh as I say this, and hope the "faces" will....I think I recognize a couple of those faces, but if there were a closeup of me like that, I wouldn't want my name recognized. I know now why I like distant shots.

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Jim Bannister, Class of '66 - I don't know the other photos, but #3 looks like an older version of me. I never complain about the heat of Alabama summers because I can handle the heat better than I can handle the cold of winter. I'm a shorts, flip-flops, & T-shirt (optional) type of guy anyway. August in Alabama every 5 years with great friends and great music is great fun. Especially if you keep yourself "Liquidated". It is worth enduring the August heat just to witness Dr. Drummond doing the alligator. We'll do it again in 2010!!!

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Skip Cook, Class of ‘64 - Seeing Butch Adcock in the photo brought back all of the great memories from the 2005 reunion. Again, many thanks to those who made it happen. It was truly a treat to see old friends. Never blessed with good eye sight and suffering from a poor memory, I can only guess at the sweaty faces.

1.Tommy Towery

2. Skip Cook

3. Not a clue

4. Bobby Cochran – I’d bet money on this one.

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An Elephant Never Forgets

submitted by Gary Kinkle

Class of '64

I don't usually like these heartwarming stories, but this one is truly interesting...In 1986, Mkele Mbembe was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Mbembe approached it very carefully.

He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant's foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Mbembe worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot.

The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Mbembe stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Mbembe never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Mbembe was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Mbembe and his son Tapu were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Mbembe, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man. Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mbembe couldn't help wondering if this was the same elephant.

Mbembe summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Mbembe' s legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn't the same elephant