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KANSAS CITY, MO. - For those of you who woke up on Sunday morning expecting to find this week's Traveller waiting for you - surprise! I find it amazing that a major hotel in a major convention city does not have enough internet power to allow the guests to connect to the web - especially when charging $10 a day. On Saturday I paid my toll to get aboard the Information Superhighway to find that it was closed. I guess with 2,300 college students and who knows how many business people staying in a hotel and each of them having an iPhone, Blackberry, laptop or all three it just puts sugar in the gas tank. Try as I may, I could not make a connection to update the Traveller. So, I am now sitting in the airport terminal at Kansas City and using their free wifi connection to do what I could not pay to do at the hotel. I complained enough that I got the charge taken off my bill anyway.Please include your class year with your e-mails.
"Who but a couple of high school students on a trip to…."That was the opening phrase to a story that I started writing about my trip to the 1961 Alabama High School Press Association (AHSPA) conference at the University of Alabama. It is odd that I can’t even remember for sure if the story ever was finished, much less printed in Lee’s Traveller, so many years ago but can still remember the opening words of the story. Perhaps it is because we went to writing seminars on our trip, and I was trying hard to use the newly acquired skills to write the perfect story. It was going to be a story about how we strung up coat hangers to make a burglar alarm all over the door of the dormitory room in which we were staying on that trip. We did not have a key to the door and there were lots of college kids staying in the same dorm and they were running up and down the halls in an all-night revelry of drinking and loud screaming.Last week I touched on those trips when I was writing about Stuckey’s. They were the most fun trips I ever took while I was in high school. Each fall for three years of my teenage life I got to go spend a little time on a college campus and enjoy the fun and fellowship of my fellow Traveller staff – both male and female. That first trip was the only one of the three that we stayed in the dorm. For the next two of them, we stayed in a motor coach type motel near the campus – the name of which escapes me now, but was very familiar many years ago.The idea of writing about this came easy to me this week for obvious reasons. Since Tuesday I have been staying in a hotel in Kansas City, Missouri with a few hundred college journalism students. This is the setting for the fall meeting of the College Media Advisors and it is very similar to the same theme that the high school journalism students shared back in those good old days. There have been all sorts of writing seminars and critiques of stories and publications. The fact that Halloween occurred during the event only added to the craziness that has been going on.The fact that many of this group are of drinking age, and of course alcohol buying age for the others, makes the craziness a lot more prevalent than it was for us, but it is still fun to remember those days. I wrote about the last trip in my book, “A Million Tomorrows – Memories of the Class of ‘64” so I won’t dwell on that trip. On the other ones we were happy to be there and there were many activities scheduled for us. There was always a dance and late night get-togethers and newspaper competitions. We were happy to do well in the competitions since we were just becoming a full-fledged high school, even though we had to be sneaky about some of it. If you ever wondered why the gossip sheet in the paper was a half sheet, I’ll give away the answer. The AHSPA did not approve of gossip sections in high school papers, but the students who bought the papers wanted them. So, to solve the problem, we put the half-sheets in the papers we sold to you at Lee, and we pulled them out of the ones we sent in for the contests. That filled the bill for both parties.College papers are different, but students will be students, since some of these just graduated from high school this year and are away, and on their own, perhaps for the first time.We’ve also read in the past about the band trip to the Orange Bowl sent in by several of you. What I would like to hear now is stories from other groups who went on trips. I know there must have been other Lee High School organizations that went on overnight trips to other places that we have never heard about. Please help me out and send in some of your own memories of some of those memorable trips that you may remember. 
Lee High School