Category: Central High School

Jim Stone’s one of the few folks from the Class of 65 I’ve kept in touch with. Well, if you define him visiting Florida twice in 40 years and us stopping in to see him in Boston about 20 years ago as “keeping in touch.”

Well, we DO talk. About every ten years or so. Our conversations in the 70s were usually late-night calls, “So, Jim, we have this bet. If you are in a falling elevator, can you save yourself if you jump up at the last second?”

At the time, I think he was inside mountains in Italy and deep inside salt mines searching for subatomic particles that I don’t think he’s found yet. (I told him that they’re probably hiding out with that sock that always goes missing in the washing machine, but he didn’t take me seriously.)

Anyway, I got this message from him last week:

I am enjoying your daily blog.  I sense that you may be running short on material so I would like to send you some items that you may be able to use.  What’s your mailing address?

The State Department is certainly different than my usual routine.  I’m off to Asia tomorrow, just before you know who leaves later in the week. I’ll catch up with you at the reunion.

I will send you some negatives of many of our classmates.  If you still have a means to print them, they could be good handouts at the reunion.

James Stone
Professor of Physics, Boston University
Jefferson Science Fellow, U.S. Department of State

The box wasn’t marked Radioactive

True to his word, a box arrived in the mail a few days later. It contained a plain manila envelope with back copies of The Tiger and an 8×10  photographic paper box with some prints and negatives in it.

I haven’t scanned the negatives yet, but here are the prints. Most of them were from the yearbook. You’ll have to ask him why he held on to these, but not others.

I remember shooting the photo above, but editors being editors, decided to crop it into more of a vertical. Here’s my chance to make it up to the folks who were on the edges and cropped out of the original picture.

1963 Betty Folsom Home Room

I lifted these IDs straight from The Girardot, so don’t blame me if they’re wrong.

BOTTOM ROW: Joe McDaniel, Cheryl McClard, Marcia Maupin, Alice Lynn, Ronnie Mayberry.

SECOND ROW: Karen McKay, Marsha Marshall, David McLain, Charlene McNeil, Larry McElroy, Martha Mahy.

THIRD ROW: Dick Lueders, John Magill, Ronald Marshall, Larry McLaird.

FOURTH ROW: Sandra McLain, Carl Meyer, Kenneth McNeely.

1963 Girardot Pep Rally photo

The guy blowing the horn in front right is Albert Underwood.

1963 Helen Smith’s home room

BOTTOM ROW: Alberta O’Brien, Carol Mott, Cherie Pind, Gwendolyn Petty, Barbara
Oberbeck.

SECOND ROW: Randy Morse, Mike Miller, Mike Pind, Bob Norman, Carolyn Perr, Emma Penzel.

THIRD ROW: Jeanne Perry, Jo Ann Mills, Connie Nelson, Carolyn Penzel, Sandra Nance

FOURTH ROW: Alan Miller, Jerry O’Connell, Mike Murray, James Owens.

1963 Howard Bock’s home room

BOTTOM ROW: James Feldmeier, Ernie Foy, Peggy Estes, Anola Gill, Wayne Gohliher, John Finch.

SECOND ROW: Dennis Farrow, Louie Ervin, Michael Floyd, Kenneth Gore, Frederick Fox, Janice Fisher, Sharon Frazier.

THIRD ROW: Richard Fulton, Gary Gateley, Michael Gray, Norman Golden, Janice Gilbert.

FOURTH ROW: Donald Ford, James Fulbright, Dwayne Followell, Hal Goddard, Jerry Fowler.

1964 Quill and Scroll

BOTTOM ROW: B. Pinkerton, J. Davis, K. McE1reath, T. Spitzmiller, B. Hopkins, N. Nussbaum, V. Miller, P. Estes, J. House, P. Johnson, S. Smith, S. Neary, C. Klarsfeld, J. Snell.

SECOND ROW: S. Stiver, D. Kimmich, M. Seabaugh, B. Blue, J. Reynolds, A. Sudholt, L. Dahringer, V. Berry, L. Brennan, N. Jenkins, J. Brunton, D. Siemers, K. Steinhoff.

TOP ROW: S. Folsom, M. Seabaugh, R. Meinz, K. Fischer, J. Mueller, D. Stubbs, A. Spradling, P. Foster, S. Crowe, J. Stone, L. Moore, S. Wr1ght, W. Stafford, R. Marshall.

1964 varsity football players

Left to right: Charlie Duncan, Jim Owens, Randy Stahly, Lee Roll

Carol Klarsfeld

Carol Klarsfeld was Jim’s on-again, off-again girlfriend most of the time we were in high school.

Carol was a tiny little thing who was always up for an adventure. There was a tale that she put more miles on her mother’s car than she was supposed to. Having a logical mind, she thought, “The speedometer counts up when the car is going forward, so it should count backward if the car is going in reverse.”

The prospect of driving many miles in reverse didn’t seem practical, so she jacked up the rear of the car, put it in gear and gunned it. Her logical skills far surpassed her mechanical skills unfortunately. In the story I heard, the jack slipped and the car took off at high speed in reverse.

I found out at the last reunion that Carol had joined the ever-increasing number of our class to die. I miss her.

Debaters

I’m not sure what this photo was taken for, but it appears to have been the Debate Club. I recognize everyone except the woman seated at the right. I’d like to deny the ID of the guy with his shirt buttoned all the way up to his chin on the right, but I’m gonna have to say that’s me.

Seated: Shari Stiver, Sally Wright, Vicky Roth, Unidentified.

Standing: Pat Sommers, Mike Seabaugh, Mike Daniels, Bill Wilson, Advisor Calvin Chapman (his eyes are closed so he could say he saw no evil with this group), Rick Meinz, Steve Folsom and Ken Steinhoff.

1964 Football Queen

1964 Football Queen Donna Sides

Cheerleader Norma Wagoner

Jim was wrong about one thing, I’m a long way from running out of material, but I still appreciate his contribution. I’m looking forward to scanning the negatives he has of Barry Goldwater’s campaign stop in Cairo in 1964. I’ve been holding off running the ones I shot, so the combination will make a nice package.

 

The students in the 1962 Girardot photo would feel right at home in today’s cafeteria.

The cafeteria has grown

The room has been expanded. The addition is where the floor tiles change from the checkerboard pattern to plain at the column line.

Cafeteria addition from the outside

The one-story addition on the west side of the school is the enlarged cafeteria.

Girl Power comes to CHS cafeteria lobby

A Girl Power poster and a purified water drink dispenser grace the cafeteria lobby.

Healthy food choices available

I’d love to know how they’ve kept the floors and tile walls this shiny in a school that’s half a century old. Looks like fruit is available in addition to normal cafeteria fare.

School promotes recycling

Don’t look too closely at the kids to see if you recognize anyone. One of the promises I had to make to be able to shoot in the school was that I couldn’t show any identifiable faces.

I ran into one of my former photographers last summer. He told me that he had just about stopped shooting candid shots of kids. “It’s not worth the hassle. Either the kids run away as soon as I approach them for their names or I keep waiting for a cop to haul me off as a kidnapper.”

I’m sure glad I worked in more innocent times.

The unsung cafeteria workers

Once the hubbub in the cafeteria dies down, these are the folks who have to get ready to do it all over again.

Yesterday’s post showed the Freshman class of ’66 in the Tiger Den. Today, we’ll look at some pictures of the Class of 1965 at its Sophomore party.

I see a bunch of familiar faces at this table. There’s Steve Crowe, Ron Dost, Phil Vinyard, Della Heise, Chuck Dockins, Lonnie Blackwood and Vicki Berry. [Note: Ms. Berry’s name is spelled Vickey, Vicki and Vicky in various Girardots. She signed one mine as “Vicky,” so that’s probably the right variation.]

I keep looking at the guy on the right side of the table with glasses and wondering if that’s me. The only thing that makes me think it’s not is (a) I’m usually the one SHOOTING the pictures and (b) I don’t play board games.  (I call them bored games.)

That might be Jim Stone

The guy dancing on the far left might be Jim Stone.

Is that Irvin Beard on the left?

I think that might be Irvin Beard, Class of 63, on the left. He was on the school photo staff. The girl in the middle, facing the camera, looks like Joan Amlingmeyer. Of course, since I’m not even sure of what I looked like, it’s hard to take any of my guesses seriously.

Dancing as a no-contact sport

Larry Points commented on my photos of the Capaha Park Pool Party, “My immediate observation would be that this was before corn fructose was put in everything…were we really all that thin back then? Dance moves also seem tentative, like the era of never making jitterbug contact again had just begun.”

He may have been onto something.