Brain Candy #84 - Show Me Memories

My past caught up with me this month. I just got back from my 30th high school reunion in St. Joseph, Missouri. We are definitely getting older - the difference in people since the 25th reunion seems quite pronounced. But I was thinking about places I've lived even before the trip back.

Over the past few years, I've mused about the quality of recent famous Missourians. Rush Limbaugh, Kenneth Lay, John Ashcroft - I'm quite liberal in my politics, so you can imagine my dismay at the nature of this list. I don't think of the Missouri of my past as a bastion of such types, but they seem to be the type that thrives of late. I can look to more enlightened Missourians of course - Harry Truman, Walter Cronkite, Omar Bradley, John Pershing, George Washington Carver, Edwin Hubbell, Robert Heinlein, T. S. Elliott, Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker, Burt Bacharach, Sheryl Crow, Yogi Berra, Vincent Price, Dick Van Dyke, Emmett Kelly - and feel better about the state of my birth.

Most everyone who showed up for the reunion seemed to be fairly comfortable, although only about 100 of more than 500 in my graduating class were in attendance. There weren't many of the locals that showed up; those of us who moved elsewhere were quite over-represented. That isn't hard to understand of course, since they have the opportunity to see each other more often than those of us who live elsewhere.

A few of the group are extremely well-traveled, a few seemed quite affluent, a few have made a splash in the world, and sadly, a few are no longer with us. I was a bit surprised at how many of us spent time in the Phoenix, Arizona area. Phoenix is a place that has grown dramatically, but other growth areas in the US were unrepresented. Arizona is another place I've thought about lately.

Northeast Ohio, my current home, is quite a contrast to most of Arizona. The big urban areas, Phoenix and Tucson, are crowded, of course, although Akron seems more crowded than Phoenix did. I actually lived in Tempe, which is a suburb, but I lived less than a mile from one of the largest universities in the US, Arizona State University. It never seemed very crowded to me. Then again, I think Akron feels a lot more crowded than it did when I moved here in the mid-1980s. When you get out of the urban areas, Arizona is quite unpopulated. I remember flying into Phoenix at night once in the early 1980s. We spent several hours flying over terrain which was almost completely dark. Then, as we passed over one of the mountain ranges that ringed the Phoenix metropolitian area, there were lights everywhere. I'm sure that urban sprawl has made that experience a thing of the past, but it was memorable.

Another reason I'm musing on geography is my work on the Wikipedia Dot Project. Quite simply, what the cartographers of the Dot Project are doing is creating a map for every city, town and village in the United States. I've completed Missouri (just shy of 1000 maps), Arizona (about 250 maps) and I've just started working on Ohio (over 1000 maps). I may do Kansas after that, but that will probably be it for me. I like the idea of some sort of personal link to the states I do, and since Oklahoma is already done, I don't think I'll have much enthusiasm for any of the other states. If you want to find out more, the coordinators' Wikipedia users' page can be accessed at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Seth_Ilys. Seth is an interesting 21-year-old who is one of the most active editors on the English Wikipedia. He's working on a lot more than the Dot Project.

One final observation: one of the people from my class that I saw for the first time since graduating was Tony Glise. I hadn't known that he has become an internationally renowned classical guitarist, although I remember that he did play for a school assembly when we were seniors, and he was very impressive. He has a website at www.AnthonyGlise.com if you're interested. As I toured his site, I noticed that he has collaborated with Mike Fuson, a rock musician who was also from my class, but not at the reunion. His web site is www.michaelfuson.com. Both Tony and Mike appear to be avid guitar collectors, although they collect different types of guitars.

If you've got a reunion coming up, I would recommend that you attend, based on my experiences with my 25th and 30th reunions. People build interesting lives on top of the experiences of their youth.