I’m in the middle

I’ve always loved snow, but in general, I prefer it to be located on ski slopes.  While I was growing up on the plains of Oklahoma, snow was not that common.  My siblings and I loved it when it happened, but on that flat terrain, there wasn’t much to do with it except build snowmen or throw it at each other.  I had heard about kids in the hilly eastern part of the country going sledding, and I was very envious.  So one year when we had an unusually heavy snow, I was thrilled when Dad chained an old door behind the tractor and took us out on the road for a ride.  The door swerved back and forth and threw the three of us kids, laughing hysterically, into the ditch.  Good fun.

Snow didn’t play much of a role in my life until I graduated from college and finally had enough money to go skiing.  My then boyfriend, now husband, and I learned how to ski in New Hampshire in brutally cold weather and icy conditions.  Knowing how to navigate on blue glare ice and how to avoid frostbite were useful skills at the time. Over the Christmas holidays during grad school, we flew to California to go skiing at Mammoth Mountain.  We couldn’t understand why there was hardly anyone on the slopes during the holidays and asked a ski instructor why that was.  He looked surprised and replied, “Because the conditions are so bad!  It’s icy!”  We were astonished because the snow, hard-packed powder, was the best we had ever experienced and there was no shiny ice to be seen.  After that we vowed we would never ski in the East again.  It’s a promise we have kept.

In the early 1980s, we relocated from San Francisco to Incline Village, Nevada, on Lake Tahoe but drove back and forth to the Bay Area for business.  In order to do that, one must drive through Donner Pass on Interstate-80.  Not wanting to repeat the experience of the Donner Party, we kept rescue supplies in our four-wheel-drive vehicle – food, water, shovel, sleeping bags, boots and mittens, and cat litter for traction.  Our condo was equidistant from Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe) and Heavenly Valley resorts and we skied as often as possible.  Over January 4th and 5th of 1982, the Tahoe area received 67 inches of snow in 24 hours!  (Some entrepreneur later printed up bumper stickers saying “What’s for lunch – Donner Pass 1982”.) Both I-80 and Highway 50 were closed during that time, cutting off travel from the Bay Area, so we locals had the slopes to ourselves.  There were no lift lines at Heavenly and it was snowing so hard that we skied untracked powder, then rode the lift back up and skied untracked powder again.  Over and over.  It was heavenly indeed.  

Sadly, in March of that year after several days of very heavy snow, an avalanche at Alpine Meadows, another resort we liked, killed seven people.  The total snowfall that year was so great that when we drove on Mount Rose Highway from Incline Village to Reno on July 4th, there was still ten feet of snow on each side of the highway.  Work required us to move back East in 1986, and since then, my snow experiences have been limited to the occasional trip to some ski slopes, which is where snow belongs

Love to ski

I’m in the center with younger brother and sister

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Snow belongs on ski slopes.

It seems that reconnecting people is what I do.  For thirty years I’ve been the co-secretary of my college class (1971), and every five years I track down missing classmates and harass all classmates into writing an essay about their lives for the Reunion Red Book, the huge book we produce.  I also cajole them into attending the reunions.  Plus, on a continuing basis, I produce the Class Notes every other month where classmates send in news about themselves.  As another example, I was the chief instigator in reuniting twelve women who were freshwomen in the same small dorm, and as a result, every 18 months, at least until Covid-19 came along, we would rent a large house somewhere in the US or Canada for a long weekend of talking, laughing, support and good food.  We have become the closest of friends and have sustained each other through the many ups and downs of our lives.

I guess I’m just curious about people who have been important to me through different phases of my life.  I went to three high schools and always stayed in contact with people from my first school, but just recently, I searched for and found a girl I had known at my second high school.  We had not communicated since 1966, but she was delighted to hear from me.  I’m also one of the people who works to keep the kids from my third high school in touch with each other.  I help find people for the reunions, and I have an email group for close friends so that we can interact with each other frequently.  We even Zoom now.  Perhaps it is because I did not have a happy family that I seek to reestablish relationships with old friends.

Hands down, though, my best reconnecting project was, at age fifty, finding all the kids who were in my sixth grade class.  I grew up in Shawnee, OK, a small city with a stable population with the result that most of us went through grade school with the same group of kids.  In fact, a large proportion of the kids went on to middle school and high school together.  A number of them are still in Shawnee.

Sarah

The project got started because I tracked down Sarah, a girl who had been my good friend but who had moved away in middle school.  Back in those days, when someone moved away, all contact was lost unless the people were committed letter writers which most of us were not.  When I found Sarah in Little Rock, I happened to be planning a road trip across country, so we got together and reminisced and wondered what had happened to all those kids we had been so close to for so many years.  An idea popped into my head, and on my way home to Canada from that trip, I stopped at my mom’s house in Maryland and asked if she had saved anything from my grade school years.  She said she thought there were a few things in the crawl space beneath the house.  That was an understatement.  There were a bunch of boxes with every piece of paper that had my name on it plus tons of souvenirs of all kinds – all my crayon art, my chemistry set and microscope, my Visible Man and Woman, my clarinet, and my Blue Bird hat and Camp Fire Girl vest among many other things.  Even one of the wreaths we made out of dry cleaner bags was carefully preserved. Most important, the little PTA booklets that listed all the students and their father’s names, the things I had been hoping to find, were all there.  I took all the stuff home with me and set to work on finding people.

Hands down, though, my best reconnecting project was, at age fifty, finding all the kids who were in my sixth grade class. 

This was during the early years of the internet and there were free “people search” websites or “white pages,” so I started searching.  The reason I wanted the PTA booklets is because I thought many of the women would have married and changed their names.  Having the father’s name, and in some cases, brothers’ names, gave me a better chance of finding them.  I had luck at first because some people were still in Shawnee or in Texas which narrowed down the search.  In other cases, there were multiple people with the same name, so I sent postcards asking if they were indeed my classmate.  I made a lot of phone calls too.  Eventually I found all but two kids in my sixth grade class plus four of my teachers.

I sent everyone a questionnaire to fill out asking what were their best memories and worst memories of grade school.  That produced a lot of funny stories, but surprisingly only one really bad memory which had to do with a family situation, not anything to do with school or classmates.  I also asked them to send an essay on “What I have been doing since sixth grade” and noted that neatness would count.  Almost everyone responded enthusiastically and a few people sent souvenirs they had saved – a Junior Police badge, newspaper clippings – and everyone sent current photos.  I proceeded to scan or photograph all the souvenirs my mom had saved and sprinkled them throughout the book I produced.  Each person had an entry with their answers to the questionnaire, their 6th grade and current photos, their essay, and copies of the valentine they had sent me and the letter they had sent my mother thanking her for providing the punch and doughnuts for a class party.

I sent the book to everyone including our teachers.  I had been amazed to find them and surprised that three of the four remembered me.  (OK, I admit I was always the teachers’ pet). My first grade teacher, Miss Rainbolt, even called me from her nursing home, and one of the other teachers wrote to me.  All of my classmates were thrilled with the book, and one wrote to say “Thank you for giving me my childhood back.”  A number of us have stayed in touch and are friends on Facebook now.  It was a sweet project and brought back memories of a kinder, gentler time in our lives.   

The book I produced for my classmates.

I was sleeping late on September 11, 2001.  My sister and I had sent our aging mother off to my sister’s home in Pennsylvania, and she and I were cleaning up Mom’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, to get it ready to sell.  We were exhausted from our work the previous day.  I was sound asleep when my sister came into the room and told me I had better get up and see what was happening on TV.  To my horror, I saw that both of the Twin Towers had been hit.  I had lived close to New York City for many years and had eaten at Windows on the World and The Cellar in the Sky several times and attended corporate parties in those buildings.  I loved the whooshing feeling of going up the elevators, and seeing the view from the windows was spectacular.  It was devastating and heartbreaking to see them fall and to realize how many people had lost their lives.

Events were too close for comfort on that day.

As we sat glued to the TV, we heard lots of noise and went outside to see what was happening.  Military helicopters were going overhead, flying low.   There had been reports on the local TV stations about explosions at the National Mall and also at the Pentagon, so it was not unrealistic to think that something more than the attack on the towers was going on.  My sister and I were considering leaving Bethesda and driving to her home in Pennsylvania “where nothing ever happens” when a news bulletin came on to say that a plane had crashed near Somerset, PA which is right where my sister lives at Indian Lake.  We jumped on the phone instantly and called Mom.  She said she heard a big boom and the house shook.  She went outside to look around but couldn’t see anything.  It turned out that Flight 93 crashed a little over a mile away from my sister’s house, much too close for our comfort.  Now, every time I visit my family, I see the signs for the memorial and am reminded of the sorrow of that day.

Me, not airbrushed, with Miss March

It was a nice morning in March, 1967.  I walked in the front door of Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland, and heard someone say, “There she is.”  I looked up to see the stairs on each side of the entrance and the balcony above filled with boys, all grinning, laughing, nudging each other and all of them looking at me.  I glanced around to see if there was anyone else they could be looking at, but no, I was the only one there at the moment.  I had no idea what was going on so I just proceeded to homeroom feeling puzzled.  All morning long, boys were staring at me in the hallways and laughing, exchanging comments with each other, but no one would tell me what it was about.  Finally at lunch time, feeling totally perplexed and a bit angry, I cornered a friend of mine and demanded to know what the hell was going on.  He looked around cautiously and then pulled something out of his book bag.  It was a Playboy magazine.  Now I was really puzzled. I had no idea where this was going until he opened it to the centerfold and showed me the top part of it.  I gasped and my eyes bugged out.  I thought I was looking in a mirror.  Miss March was a dead ringer for me!  At the time I always wore glasses and Miss March was wearing glasses almost identical to mine.  How many centerfold models wore glasses???  I was completely stunned, but insisted on seeing the rest of the centerfold.  Poor Miss March had the BIGGEST pair of breasts I had ever seen, so big it is a wonder she could walk upright, and this was before silicone!  Just my luck. The absurdity of the whole thing hit me, and my friend and I sat on the floor laughing our heads off.

Fran

My time as a Playboy centerfold