Wednesday, November 30, 2011

SET THE DATE NOTICE FOR 2013/45TH REUNION

Dear Classmate,

Your friends, our GHS 68 Reunion Committee, have had our first business meeting in three years, and started reunion planning. We ask you, first and foremost, to hold open the weekend of June 21-23, 2013, for our 45th Class Reunion. No, we’re not crazy. It’s just that when we announced the date for our 40th in 2008, about one year in advance, we already had some conflicts with classmates’ plans for their annual family reunion or children’s weddings. Now, those are very important events, so we didn’t expect anyone to move a wedding or cancel their other reunion. We are hoping, though, to announce our next GHS reunion in plenty of time to allow anyone inclined to do so, to gently steer those other events to dates around it. These remaining nineteen months will likely fly by!

If that strikes anyone as presumptuous or just plain silly, we apologize. It just reflects the strength of our desire to get as many classmates as possible together and to have as happy an event in 2013 as we did three years ago.

In that regard, we are contacting as many classmates as possible, first to be sure we can get in touch and also to ask for your help locating other classmates that we are not yet in touch with. If your contact information has changed, please let me know with your reply. We hope to add a Facebook page to our contact efforts as well as continue to use the Reunion Blog site at http://ghs68.blogspot.com (Jimmy continues to update it) and to periodically send out key information by first class mail. Before long, we’ll start planning and letting you know the reunion details. You’ll be hearing from us!

The Class of 1968 is still making an impact at GHS as well as in Gainesville and wherever else classmates are found around the country and the world. We are active seniors and seniors-to-be, hard-working professionals and business leaders, raising children and mostly grandchildren now, and loving life. Many have retired or see retirement right around the corner. We mourn our deceased classmates and plan to recognize them again with a memorial service at the reunion, and we grieve with other classmates as we lose parents and loved ones or struggle with health issues and aging. At GHS, our class continues to recognize a student and teacher each year with the Class of 1968 Senior Writing Prize. Jim and Bill presented our sixth annual award last June, this year to a young man who is already a published poet, and to his teacher, in honor of all the great teachers we had.

Time marches on! Soon we’ll be greeting you on Friday night at some large Gainesville hotspot to kickoff a fine weekend party like we haven’t seen for, well, the last three years. Please save the dates:

GHS Class of 1968 - 45th CLASS REUNION

JUNE 21-23, 2013

In Gainesville



We’d love to see you there! We’ll be in touch.



YOUR REUNION COMMITTEE:

Susan Hazen Balloon

Jim Conner

Robbie Davis ’77

Bill Harlan

Jackie Cooter Hoover

General Information and Schedule of Events

40th CLASS REUNION: June 20-22, 2008

The schedule for this past reunion has been posted on the Yahoo group/forum (see link with other links) for safe keeping.

We are discussing how long to maintain the blog and we are leaning towards doing so ad infinitum. The Yahoo group/forum will keep on keeping on so sign up and send in your thoughts, etc.

Also note that our reunion e-mail address is and will remain ghs68reunion@aol.com.


HOW TO ENJOY PRE-REUNION PHOTOS OF YOUR CLASSMATES (HELP FOR THE COMPUTER-CHALLENGED)! Go to the SLIDE SHOW at the top of the blog page to watch the photos. To control the slide show, place your cursor over the slide and use the pause, forward, and backward arrows that will appear. Double click the slide and you will be directed to the Picasa photo site. There you can see a larger version of the photo you clicked. Click VIEW ALBUM to enter the web album of all the pre-reunion photos we have placed in the blog. At that point, you may order any copies of the photos you would like to or watch, send photos to friends, or watch a full screen version of the slide show. Have fun.

When sending in electronic images, please identify who is in the picture and who is sending it. Many of us look exactly like we did in our youth, some of us do not so identification helps the blog maester. Some photo programs allow you to label or caption each shot to identify the people pictured. If you can do this before sending it in, it will save us time at this end.