Class of 66 Reunion and Digital Communications Make 'Blue and Gold' Alumni Newsletter

The Class reunion in June and the subsequent efforts on Facebook, Blogger and email newsletters rated separate articles and photos in the Fall 2016 Central Alumni newsletter, the Blue and Gold. The paper arrived in alumni mailboxes this week.

The reunion story included a photographer of the classmates who were still at the Ramkota on Sunday, the last day of the reunion, along with a photo of the Three Amigos.

The separate article about the class digital efforts was on a page with the alumni news. It included a photo of the September newsletter and an article written by Tim Schreiner, the class journalist. See the text of that article below.

If you'd like to subscribe to the Blue and Gold, contact the Aberdeen Public Schools Foundation at 605-725-7118 or email Gretchen.Sharp@k12.sd.us.


Here's the article on the class digital work:

When the Class of 1966 was trying to drum up enthusiasm for its 50-year reunion in Aberdeen this summer, it decided that social media and the Internet offered some help. The effort resulted not only in a reunion attended by more than 150 people, it started a lasting way to communicate that will live far beyond the class reunion.

Its Facebook page (www.facebook.com/CHS1966reunion) has 234 followers who regular read news of classmates as well as reminiscences of businesses and buildings in Aberdeen and memories of musical bands, former teachers and events in the lives of the class.

Its weblog (aberdeenchsclassof1966reunion.blogspot.com), an online journal of stories written by the class members has already been viewed more than 27,000 times since it was launched in mid-2016.

The weblog is an ongoing archive of old and new photos of the class, personal stories featuring businesses such as Liem’s Sporting Goods and Webb Shoe Store, class members encounters with famous musicians such as Bobby Vee and Bob Dylan, and remembrances of classmates who have died recently.

Each month, an email newsletter is sent to the class alerting them to stories they might have missed. The newsletter, weblog and Facebook page have not only attracted members of the class of 1966, but also their children and others who attended Central during the 1960s.

The class also established a YouTube channel (CHS Class of 1966 Reunion), which has posted videos memorializing deceased classmates as well as honoring those who served in the armed forces. It also features creative videos that poke a little fun at the people behind the digital effort: Terry Rawstern, Robert Couser, Carole Tonigan, Rory King and Tim Schreiner.

Shameful Memories, a retrospective by L. Paul Schneider

Many people have avoided our class reunions. I often wonder why, but also in my heart know why for some. School days were not pleasant for some kids. As a Clinical Psychologist, I have heard many of the stories of folks whose lives as kids were hell. Today, we hear

L. Paul Schneider

these stories on the internet and mainstream media every day. But back in our school days, those things were not talked about.

How many of our classmates were beaten regularly by a parent? How many were sexually abused by family or friends? How many were told how worthless, ugly, stupid they were? How many were neglected?

My shame comes in when I recall kids that were bullied, called names, taunted. I tried not to participate; but I did not intervene, either. Those kids have never shown up for a reunion. And as I have learned, often the bullies were themselves abused at home. Many of those kids have not shown up, either. Yeah, I can rationalize that we were “just kids”, that I was a scrawny runt, that it was “none of my business”, and that I, too, had been bullied. But that regret, guilt, and shame for that lack of courage in not standing up for those oppressed kids does haunt me.

My dad and mom had a strong value for our family of “Do the right thing.” I did let them down at times. But I also have devoted my adult life to trying to do the right thing, standing up for the oppressed, the down-trodden, the poor, the mentally ill. In many ways, I am trying to make up for my cowardice as a kid. ( Hopefully, that will reduce my sentence in Purgatory!)

If any of you who were targets of the bullying in school read this, my sincerest regrets and apologies. I do remember you, and pray for you. If you can find it in your hearts to forgive those of us who bullied or were complicit in it, I would be most grateful.

And, I would encourage you to engage in our reunions and dialogues, such as this medium. I did talk to one of my bullies at one of our reunions, not in anger, but simply brought it up. That person sincerely apologized, heartfelt. That was very healing to me, and holds a special place in my memory today. Having put closure to that dark period, I can smile now when I think of him.

As a final note on this gloomy subject, I encourage all of you to stand up for those who don’t seem to matter. The invisible ones. The persecuted ones. The helpless ones. Those without a voice, or little voice. The marginalized ones. As Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

How To Talk Like a South Dakotian By Alice Laird Rapport

The next time you head across the crick to yer old stompin' grounds, lookin' for a hot dish and some pop fer supper, stop spittin' seeds, go to the biffy, warsh yer hands, say yer grace, fill yer white plate with white bread (slathered with salad dressing, never mayo), white potatoes, white cauliflower, and a white chicken breast — and don't call it dinner if yer at the neighbors who live kitty corner cuz they're feathers are pertnear ruffled already. 

If you go hog wild and bust up the place, leave a hunnert on the couch on yer way back to yer neck o' the woods. Ya sher, you betcha, that's the god's honest truth.

By Alice Laird Rapport

Not long after I started working in Washington, D.C., I announced to my coworkers that I was going to the snack bar for a "pop." 

Well, that got me several questioning looks. So, that was the start of my learning to speak in East coast terms, albeit begrudgingly. I found that sometimes it's the words themselves and sometimes it's the pronunciation. And, sometimes it's a phrase or expression.

Carole Tonigan and I have been having fun compiling the following examples of some of the very local-Aberdeen words and expressions that we all grew up saying.

Please add to our list in the comments section and please keep talking the South Dakota way, wherever you may be.

Our Words

Pop, not soda

Filling station, not gas station

Hot dish, not casserole

Kitty corner, not catty corner

Supper, not dinner? When is supper, anyway?

You betcha, just because we say it — and sometimes after, Yah, shur.
Okey-dokey, not just okay

Drouth, not drought

Pertnear, not pretty near

Couch, not sofa

Biffy (where did this come from?), rather than restroom

Yeah and/or ya--another just because we say it

Our Pronunciations

Creek, pronounced "crick"

Roof and root, we say them with a "short u," not a "long u"

For, sounds like fer, as in, We bought that bike fer about a hunnert bucks.
Hundred, pronounced hunnert

Wash, usually has an "r", as in warsh

Coyote, any USD person knows the e on the end is silent

Our Expressions
My old stomping grounds

Our neck of the woods

In a jiffy

If I had my druthers

Slow as molasses in January

Knee high to a grasshopper

Ruffle your feathers

Come with

Hog wild

Spittin' seeds, as in sunflower seeds

Our Class of '66 Blog Reached 25,000 Views: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

 Your stories about life at Central in 1963-1966 and what's happened to you since then has been a smashing success.  We have reached 25,000 viewings of our blog.

In celebration of the milestone, we've put together a video making a little fun of some of the people behind the scenes at the blog.  You have never seen these candid shots of what fun our blog masters have in keeping on at the Central Class of 1966 Blog.

You must watch this video to the end, because like dessert at a dinner party, the really good stuff comes at the end.  

See Carole Tonigan dance on the bar. Watch Rory King shake his marimbas. And marvel at Terry Rawstern, Bob Couser and Tim Schreiner doing the shimmy-shimmy-shake.  

The candid shots of the blog masters at work (and play) might just get us another 25,000 views by itself.

Let’s celebrate with a shot of tequila (or a milk of magnesia, if you prefer).

The Highs and Lows of Central: Ferrell Greene on Casketball and A Cappella

By Ferrell Greene

When my family moved to Aberdeen in the fall of 1964 I wondered what kind of high school Central would be. It was my third high school in a year.

I was pleasantly surprised at Old Central as it was a very impressive school plant. The two things that impressed me the most were the Civic Arena and the Civic Theater. Basketball and theater were never the priority in the South, so this edifice was indeed a pleasant surprise. Couldn’t believe how large they both were. 

Well so much for the pleasantries!

Since I wasn’t involved in any extra curricular activities during our junior year, I finished that year with two outstanding memories of both places — neither one very good, or at least I thought so.

The only thing that I really remember about the theater was the many all-school lectures by Mr. Ellis on the proper etiquette of a Central High School student. And of course, being the young impressionable teens that we were, we were never guilty of any indiscretions! Ha. 

Now for the arena. This place for us in gym class could have easily been called the house of pain. I think the coaches stayed up at night trying to figure out so-called games or exercises that would come as close to killing us as the law would allow.

At the reunion, the minute I looked up and saw those steps, both of my knees started hurting. What about that tepid little game of “Casketball.” On the days that we played that, we kept the hospital busy, as many of you know.

And who could forget “king of the free throw lane”? Fifty kids crammed into that thing and the winner was the last one left standing without anything broken — like bones. It wasn’t good being very skinny and weighing only about 125 pounds. I thought that I had joined the circus as I flew through the air with greatest of ease, until I hit the floor.

I can still remember looking over and seeing the coaches laughing their heads off. So much for Midwestern hospitality!

Things got much better in our senior year, at least for me. Although the lectures from Mr. Ellis continued and that cursed gym class still was there, probably my favorite memories of high school were in that theater/music room complex and even the arena.

Ferrell Greene, second from the left in the second row from the top, in the dark-rimmed glasses.

My whole world would change about the second week of school in our senior year when Mr. Aman had a case of selective tone deafness and let me fill the “100th seat” in the A Cappella chorus. I’ve always loved music and being in that chorus with Mr. Aman was a dream come true for me. What a sound that was.

Ferrell Greene with Jean Losacker in CHS Radio Club.

Terry’s blog about the building of the complex brought back such happy times spent there. The A Cappella chorus opened a door that I probably would never have gone through: that was getting shanghaied by Mrs. Pratt to be in the musical “Wonderful Town.” I learned then that even some of our beloved teachers didn’t exactly tell the truth. We were told that she just needed some people to sing and that we wouldn’t have to stay at practice very long.

That theater became home for about three months or so, including most every weeknight and Saturday mornings. Though most of us that were “drafted" into that play from the chorus weren’t the stars, Mrs. Pratt, in her infinite wisdom, had some kind of delusion that we were actors and dancers. None of us tried out for that play, but we were captured, so the adventure carried on.

The lovely Evenson sisters in "Wonderful Town."

And what red blooded teenage boy was going to turn down an opportunity to sit in a dimly lit auditorium with some good looking girls? It would have really been great if any of you had liked me, other than being a friend, but getting to spend so much time with many of you made that theater an absolute place of joy for me.

Faye Smith, chemistry teacher

When you throw in practicing for the all-state chorus, being on the “Voice of Central Radio staff, practicing with Rick and Rochelle for the Eaglean Follies, what delightful memories that place holds for me. And since the choir room, theater and arena have changed very little since then, the only thing that had really changed was us. My closing memory of the arena was the A Capella Chorus singing at the graduation “I believe” and “Climb every mountain” and from some of what I’ve learned from many of you, you did believe and tried to climb every mountain. 

But all that fun, at least for me, came at a price. I had time for everything but studying! I came very close to being a proud member of the class of ’67! I still believe that Mr. Smith, in chemistry, just wanted to get rid of me and fudged the scores a few points. It was that close. However, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart, I wouldn’t have changed a thing in our senior year. Thanks to Terry for calling me and seeking out my memories, as a kind of a foreigner, of what the Aberdeen Civic Center and Theater meant to me. I hope that many of you will share your memories for all to enjoy. We can’t live in the past, but we can surely look back with great fondness of what it was like to be a member of the Central High School class of 1966.

Ferrell Greene

Here's Looking at You, Kids: The Fluoroscope Was a Shoe Salesman's Best Friend

By Carole Tonigan

When my brother, Butch, and I were in elementary school, my father was manager of the Sears department store in downtown Aberdeen. On Sundays when the store was closed, he frequently would take my brother and me to the store to give Mom a break. 

We always had some type of adventure exploring the store while there were no employees or customers there. In the shoe department there was an X-ray machine. 

It was about four feet high with viewers at the top and a slot at the bottom where your foot was inserted to assess the fit of your foot in a shoe. We witnessed the machine at work on customers many times during a regular business day. On some of these Sundays, we had the shoe department to ourselves while Dad was upstairs doing paperwork. 

We loved this futuristic machine. Since we could not "view" our own feet because we were not tall enough, we would take turns viewing each other's hand or foot. We thought it was such fun to wiggle our toes and fingers for the other one to see. 

I can’t recall how long the machines were at the store or whether other stores had them, but apparently it became evident later that they were not safe and our Sunday toys were removed from the store — and other shoe stores around the country. 

Oh, the things we did that we didn't know were risky at the time.

And then there were thermometers with mercury ...

Editor's Note: Following is a story in Smithsonian magazine about the kind of machines Carole is talking about.

                          —————————————————————

By Karen Larkins, Smithsonian Magazine

If you were born anywhere between 1920 and about 1950, you probably recall an odd-looking cabinet that once lured customers into shoe stores across the country. 

The shoe-fitting fluoroscope used cutting-edge technology—the x-ray—to reveal the bones and soft tissue of the foot inside the shoe, ostensibly for a better fit. For three decades beginning in the mid-1920s, millions of children and adults in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world peered into the machines for an inside view of their usually wiggling toes. 

Pedoscope

In 1986, the National Museum of American History acquired a fluoroscope, one of perhaps only a handful extant, from a shoe store in northern Ohio. The mid-1930s vintage, walnut-cabinet machine was one of thousands produced by the Adrian X-Ray Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a leading manufacturer of the devices.

From the start, the fluoroscope, invoking the authority of modern science and technology to sell more shoes, functioned more as sales gimmick than fitting aid. O. C. Hartridge, who founded the other major fluoroscope manufacturer, England’s Pedoscope Company, understood the power of this marketing ploy. The machines, he wrote in 1937, proved a "valuable ally of the retailer. By enabling him to demonstrate the correctness of his fitting, it permits him to impress customers with the reliability of his service; and in those rare instances where people insist on having shoes that are wrong, it puts the onus on them." 

Children, in particular, loved the quirky machines.

Fluoroscopes proved "as attractive and exciting to little customers as ‘free balloons and all-day suckers,’" wrote Jacalyn Duffin and Charles R.R. Hayter, in their journal article "Baring the Sole: The Rise and Fall of the Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope." Paul Frame, a health physicist with Oak Ridge Associated Universities, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, recalls his friends in Toronto, where he grew up, going into shoe stores just to stick their feet in the machines: "Seeing the greenish yellow image of your bones was great fun."

The device reached its peak of popularity in the early 1950s, with some 10,000 in use in shoe stores in the United States. Then, as concerns about the

potentially damaging effects of radiation grew, the machines began to disappear. (Researchers have yet to determine whether the machine was responsible for any ill effects.) Smithsonian curator Ramunas Kondratas says the fluoroscope represents "the triumph of salesmanship

over common sense and a lack of knowledge about the health consequences of certain technologies." In 1957, Pennsylvania became the first state to ban the machines. By the mid-1960s, they were history.

How do people react today when they encounter a fluoroscope? It’s mostly a matter of age. Jim Connor, a curator at the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where one is on display, says that "visitors over 50 have a flashback experience as they recognize the device. These things are real memory triggers."