...from Lynn Gallion (Hanke), Class of 1961: I just heard about the passing of one of my brother's h/s classmates back in MD. It made me think about how we get 'frozen in time' by people who only knew us at one stage of our life. Ray went on to live a rich, full life but in my mind he remains the tall, lanky hoopster taking the court for the game against Glen Burnie High. Wonder if heaven has a basketball team....maybe they just got a new center.
Sandy White Catterton, August 2, 1942-October 30, 2009
I'm still struggling with Sandy Catterton’s passing. When we met more than fifty years ago she was Sandy White, the daughter of the full colonel who commanded my father’s armored cavalry regiment at Fort Meade, MD. Most mornings our senior year I chauffeured her and Betsy Check to school. I’m positive my ‘53 Ford wasn’t the reason for their hitching a ride. On the color chart the paint job fell somewhere between plankton and pea soup, and the car radio was so tinny it could have been mistaken for Edison’s first telephone. Driving to school was great fun, loads of laughs about rollicking incidents in math class the day before, or over-drinking by party-loving classmates who shall remain nameless. (I usually blamed it on being over-served.)
Sandy’s still engraved in memory as the leggy auburn/brunette whom more than one male classmate used to look on with a romantic longing that’s still painful to recall. There was a lyricism in her gait, a natural athleticism, not to mention her radiant smile—wide, beaming, with candlepower enough to light up a limestone cavern. For the yearbook our graduation year we voted her the most flirtatious. But she really wasn’t a flirt. She was merely friendly, especially with the guys. I don’t know how she did it, but she could josh and tease them without becoming, well, a tease. And the way she inflected the simple phrases, “I know” and “I do,” varying the intonation to communicate resignation or elation, or a half a dozen other shades of meaning, was pretty remarkable. She and I reconnected about a decade ago following a thirty-year hiatus. Going home again is never easy. With Sandy it was a breeze. Our mothballed friendship resumed as smoothly as if we had hung up the phone three hours earlier. We would reminisce, fill in blanks that spanned decades. She would tell about her passion for golf, about what her daughters were doing or her grandkids were up to, about her next long-distance car trip, to Florida or Texas or California, to escape the cabin fever of never-ending Vermont winters. “She had an incredible zest for life,” her daughter Kim remarked at the funeral eulogy.
How Sandy died—her way, on her terms—will probably stay with me for quite a while. When we last talked long-distance she was unflinching about what lay ahead. By the time of her diagnosis in September, lung cancer had already ravaged her body, metastasizing to her brain and bones. “I don’t know how long I have to live,” she said. “I’m not going to take chemo and spend the rest of my time feeling nauseous.” Whatever the immediate future held in store, Sandy had no intention of letting it interfere with the two-week California vacation she had been taking yearly ever since her close friend Kathleen Kane had moved to Sonoma County in 1990s. It had become a fairly set routine: visits to the rugged northern California coastline and strolls among soaring Redwoods; time off to sample ethnic restaurants of a variety unavailable in Vermont; dips in a park lagoon. No trip was complete without a visit to Sandy’s favorite winery. The capstone was a massage at a local spa. This year Sandy was in no condition to travel cross-country on her own, so her friend Kathleen flew in from Santa Rosa to ride back with her on the plane.
The first full day in northern California Sandy spent watching NFL football with Kathleen’s husband. That evening, however, she started feeling poorly. On Monday morning the abdominal pain had gotten so bad she asked to be taken to the hospital, that she might have a CAT-scan done. The news wasn’t good. The results turned up a tumor above her pancreas that was hampering the adrenal gland and blocking her bile ducts. Sandy returned to her friend’s home. She hadn’t come all this distance to waste away in a hospital. But the following morning, a Tuesday, the pain had become overpowering. Straightaway Sandy phoned her three daughters. They should fly out to the West Coast as soon as possible.
The circumstances of Sandy’s return to the hospital later that afternoon precipitated one of those revealing details that often speak volumes about character. Kathleen and her husband were having difficulty helping Sandy reach the car. She couldn’t walk. The pain was too excruciating. They realized they needed to call an ambulance. Through some glitch in first-responder protocol, or simple miscommunication, three emergency vehicles pulled up outside almost simultaneously, an ambulance and two fire trucks, with eight paramedics in blue, “all very good looking, all very virile men,” says Kathleen. They surrounded Sandy’s bed. “Sandy perked up for all those cute guys.” She started joking with them. One paramedic asked, “Remind me, why did you call an ambulance?” Sandy wasn’t putting on a show so much as making a heroic effort to affirm deep down who she was before stabbing pain and numbing morphine got the better of what made her a world-class companion.
By the time she reached the emergency room, her inbred affability had been completely vanquished by the pain. “Sandy knew what was happening because she had been told the day before by the doctor who saw the CAT-scan,” says Kathleen. Sandy wanted morphine. Her heart was going wild. It took an hour for the physicians on duty to retrieve her records, get her properly medicated, and settled down in intensive care. Because of the blockage of her bile ducts, septicemia had set in. Her entire body was infected. The only thing left to do was to help her “do the work of dying,” as the hospital minister put it.
By this time Sandy’s three daughters had arrived on the scene. It is said that the last thing that goes is a dying person’s sense of hearing. Her daughters took advantage of that slightly ajar window to spend hours talking to their mom as she slipped in and out of a coma. They wanted to reassure her that everything would be all right. Every now and then they stole a few hours to retrace a vacation itinerary that had become well-rutted from their mom’s previous trips to northern California. (They wouldn’t complete it until after she died that Friday.) But, mostly, theirs was a powerful deathbed vigil. Here is what Kim wrote to an acquaintance the day after Sandy died, surrounded by her daughters and Kathleen. The end came at 9:36 in the evening.
“Her death was a beautiful experience. After three days in the hospital, slowly slipping away, it was time. She was ready and waiting for us to help her get there. We all were around her bed giving her permission to go, telling her not to be scared as her loved ones were waiting for her. We told her how much we loved her.
“Her eyes opened after days of being closed. She was looking at us the whole time and she slowly let herself die, taking short, quick breaths. There is something called a ‘death rattle,’ when the lungs fill with fluid and eventually you are unable to breath. This is what we saw. Her body was fighting to live, but her mind was ready to let go.
“I am so profoundly moved by the experience. It is haunting and beautiful all at the same time. Something I was not prepared for. How could you be? But we did it, together; now she is free.”
Sandy must have had forebodings when she walked down the jetway the previous Saturday that she might not be returning home. Internally, something didn’t feel right. There were aches in all the wrong places. Before leaving Vermont, she ruled out another CAT-scan. If the news was bad, there was nothing she could do to erase it. Nor was she about to cancel her plane reservation. This California trip had been on her radar for months. “Very strong-willed people can set goals and achieve them even when the deck seems stacked against them,” says Kathleen. “Sandy fell into that category.”
That’s how I like to remember her: all grit and determination set off by a fetching smile. If the only immortality humankind can ever be sure of is how we live on in the memory of friends and family, Sandy is going to enjoy a long afterlife. I already miss her dearly.
Before her daughters flew home they scattered some of her ashes along the northern California beach where Sandy always liked to walk and gaze, in view of the mammoth boulders that dot this stretch of coastline. The rest of her ashes were carried back to Vermont.
My darling Winnie passed away May 9, 2006 after a long struggle with breast cancer. The last several years of her life were brightened by the many friends she made on-line and in person, mostly because of the Dear Jane project. Since most of you live too far away to be able to attend her memorial service, I thought I would share some of the photographs of her we are going to use during the service.
Billy Reed had to have been the first person I met after our family moved into dependent quarters in Meade Heights near the flesh-pots of old Boomtown. I can’t remember exactly what brought us together.Probably packing bags and hustling tips at the old Fort Meade commissary after school.Billy hailed from a large family, with deep roots in Georgia. I had only one sibling, a brother; he had three, plus several sisters.The boys I remember best were all close in age.Chip Reed, younger than us by at least two years, but already equipped with that enterprising intelligence that took him far in both student government and in life, was third in the birth order. Billy was second; the oldest, Dennis, everyone in the family called “Monk.”Dennis never attended Arundel. An all-state basketball player in Alaska during one of his father’s tours of duty, he had even been drafted by a minor league baseball team.You might say he was the leader of the pack.But the whole family, if decaying memory serves, had a kind of gravitational attraction for several of Billy’s boyhood friends.I think it was because of the swiftness with which brotherly competitiveness, which could get quickly physical in pick-up basketball games, might suddenly erupt into the most sidesplitting laughter this side of slapstick.It was pretty infectious.
Before most of us could drive, Billy’s friends (and there were a lot of them) would scheme to spend the night at his family’s apartment. Capehart, the dependent housing on the bluff overlooking NSA, where both our families eventually relocated, was still under construction.The Reeds, meanwhile, were temporarily domiciled in wooden barracks dating from the WWII era.But to our young eyes those converted quarters had one inestimable advantage:their convenience to the pinball heaven of Boomtown.As soon as Billy’s parents had dropped off to sleep, we’d scamper out the second floor window.The late 1950s were the heyday of coin-operated gambling machines in Maryland.Waldorf, on the southern shore, was the Mecca, but Boomtown was its own Promised Land.The GIs stationed across the road were easy converts, but so were the sons of their noncoms and occasional commanding officers. Every bar, bistro, and hamburger joint up and down the strip possessed two or three gambling machines, often in a variety that was frankly bewildering.The great thing for us, there was no age-limit.If you could reach the coin slot, you could gamble with your grandfather.We turned up our noses at the fruit-laden one-armed bandits.They were for suckers. Our hearts belonged to the bingo-pinball machines.They drew us in like moths to a flame. Glass-covered labyrinths of bright paint and garish lights, they were pocked with 25-numbered holes into which you tried to guide five steel balls. Coax three or more of them into the right alignment, and you won. Sometimes you won big.For the more nickels you fed into the machine, the higher you might drive up the odds.You might even luck out and bribe the machine into unlocking sections of the game board, which could then be rotated like some one-dimensional Rubik’s cube, creating new combinations for winning really, really big. We were drunk on our pinball wizardry, positive we could beat the machine’s tilt mechanism every time.All it really took was the subtle nudge, the gentle slap, and the careful hula.Master those fine-motor skills, and you could manipulate gravity itself, caroming the steel ball off pegs and springboards straight into the desired hole. But it was all self-deception. There wasn’t a slot on the planet capable of fattening racketeer bank accounts faster than the bingo-pinball machine. Its Chicago-based manufacturer had fixed the gears that set the odds and controlled the payout.Still, we stayed up all night emptying our commissary earnings into those cash-boxes, tethered to the forlorn hope one of us might score a bonanza and spot dejected onlookers to the consolation of hamburger with fries. The number of evenings this happened, I can’t precisely recall. But it must have been at least a dozen times, and maybe way more, if truth be told.
There are other warm memories—rolling on the rug in Billy’s Capehart home guffawing at the video staging of that nineteenth-century melodrama that today we call professional wrestling.Or car trips to the mega-bingo parlor with his mom and brothers.All remain as vivid as a Technicolor film retrieved from movie vaults of memory.
If Chip knew how to work the angles, and Dennis owned the pluperfect jump shot (he was later found dead under mysterious circumstances in NYC), Billy’s talent was attracting pretty girls.There was no question of his good looks.A compact build set off by dark wavy hair, and a half smile he must have filched from Elvis.But I suspect it was more than looks alone that gave him his Romeo advantage with women. He was, quite simply, a helluva nice guy, and the girls picked up on it.
Though we had drifted apart our senior year, the Eisenhower recession that put JFK in the White House in 1960 probably swayed us to join the army.I couldn’t land a job at the local plastic plant, Billy was probably running into the same employment roadblocks.In any event, we ended up enlisting on the buddy system in October 1960. We attended basic training together at Fort Jackson, SC.After that we went our separate ways, I to signal school in Fort Gordon, GA, and then Germany; Billy to finance school at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana.Following a year in Korea, he finished his three-year term at Fort Hood, TX.
When he returned to civilian life, Billy landed a position at NSA, but quit after four years when the agency moved him to the graveyard shift.Thereafter he worked as a letter carrier for the Post Office. That’s what he was doing when he died.Billy loved softball, both playing the game and managing teams, particularly ones on which his son, Billy, Jr., earned a reputation as one of the state’s truly outstanding players.He was a big fan of the ponies, too, visiting the track with a regularity that was almost religious.Chip and he were co-owners of several thoroughbreds in the 1980s and ‘90s.
It must have been in the ‘80s when I visited Billy for a late night beer at his apartment in Bowie, MD. Catching up after too many years apart was grand. Our last contact was in 2002.I dialed him up regarding the 40th reunion of the class of 1962.They wanted us to attend.Billy really wasn’t interested, especially after I related a recent conversation with another army brat sidekick, Casey Conard.Casey used to run with us before his father got transferred to the Midwest.When I reached him by phone he was living in the Los Angeles area. Casey started the conversation by stressing how the Lord had had other plans for him.There had been four years in the Marines after high school, he told me, a stint in Vietnam, and a post-discharge career in the warehousing and lumber sales business.Casey had been a superb athlete in high school.When he moved to the West Coast, bodysurfing in the frigid Pacific became his passion. It ended with a crash after powerful waves one morning slammed him to the ocean floor, breaking his spine. Casey has been a paraplegic ever since. Billy reacted sharply to the melancholy news.“That’s why I don’t like to go back to those times,” he said.I dropped the subject. Only recently has it dawned on me what must have been racing through Billy’s mind when we were reminiscing about Casey. In his early forties Billy had suffered a heart attack. The doctor told him to expect a short life if he didn’t give up drinking and smoking. Billy quit both habits straightaway, only to resume heavy smoking six months later. Tobacco was one vice he couldn’t vanquish. “It is probably what killed him,” Chip allows.
The end started when Billy entered the hospital for routine angioplasty a trifling more than five years ago.The stint-inserting procedure went terribly wrong.Billy’s kidneys shut down. For the next six months he was on dialysis.A few days before he died, the pain had become so bad he could barely walk. His son had to help him to the car.In the hospital it became quickly obvious death was not far off.Twelve hours after slipping into a coma, Billy passed away.
Ever since learning of his death, I've been recalling Billy with a frequency that's almost become habitual. One recollection still has the power to sting: his BS meter. It was a delicately-tuned instrument where I was concerned. I can't remember ever slipping anything by him, though it was not for want of trying. Yet, one memory above all others keeps welling up unbidden. I know Billy shared it.It resounded in a refrain he often repeated to Chip as to how the best job he ever had, from the standpoint of easy money and minimal hassle, was chasing tips in the Fort Meade commissary.If Billy forgot to mention the agony of watching pocketfuls of hard-earned change disappear into Boomtown's arcade wasteland, it was probably due to innocent oversight. Those losses thread the fabric of my fond memories, as I'm sure they did for him.
Billy Reed was one of those guys you regret not saying goodbye to.It still troubles me.
The son of a colonel then stationed at Fort Meade, Max joined the U.S. Army two months after graduating from Arundel (22 August 1960, to be precise).How long he served isn’t exactly clear. It must have been beyond his three-year term, since he saw service in Vietnam.In any event, he left the Army as a Spec. 4. The rest of his life story is hard to piece together.Marriage records indicate he married in El Paso in 1967.In 1985 he married for a second time in Denver, Colorado.As of 1992 Max was living in Houston, Texas. The following year he was domiciled in Denver, where he died in January 2002. What he did for a living, whether he left any children—all the data points of a life spanning six decades—these things remain a mystery.He is buried in the National Cemetery in Fort Bliss, Texas, where his father is interred.
Joseph Hawes was born on October 3, 1941. He died at University Hospital in Baltimore. I will try and find out the date, if needed. He quit school and joined the Navy in1958. As a Navy Corpman at the Naval Academy he continued his education and received his GED.
Bethel Ann “Betsy” Check (Dorr)—b. May 2, 1942, Mineral Wells TX; d. January 15, 1997, Winchester VA.
It must have been right after discovering seven years ago of Betsy Check’s death from ovarian cancer that I hauled from the closet a yearbook I had scarcely glanced at since graduating. The Panorama, as it was called in 1960, and probably still is, for all I know, had become a tad weathered. But the text and photos had held up well. And just as I had remembered, Betsy had inked a note inside one of its dark blue covers thanking me for all the free rides and adding, “I hope to see you in Hawaii.” Most mornings our senior year I had driven her and Sandy White from our homes in Fort Meade to Arundel High School. But I had completely forgotten Betsy had followed her parents to Honolulu after graduation. Colonel Gilbert Check had just been assigned to the military and civil affairs staff of CINCPAC (the acronym for the Commander-in-chief, US Pacific Command). It was a plum assignment, but hardly surprising. Betsy’s father had been a legendary battalion commander during the Korean War. His heroism probably holds a clue to who she was.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that Colonel Check was retracing the footsteps of his heavily decorated brothers from North Dakota. The older one, a double ace Navy pilot (ten kills) and squadron commander during World War Two, died in a mid-air collision over the China Sea late in the war. The younger brother, also a pilot, was killed instantly in 1943 when the cockpit of his B-17 caught a shell during what was supposed to have been his last bombing run into German-occupied France. (Andy Rooney wrote about this brother in his war correspondent memoir, My War.) Betsy’s father also served in World War Two, as an infantry officer in the Pacific theater. But he saw scant combat, seldom firing a shot in anger. When the military learned he had a law degree from George Washington University, it detailed him on assorted special assignments. After the war Colonel Check was sent to Japan to work with the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. But then, in the summer of 1950, North Korea invaded the south; and the famed regiment in which he was now a battalion commander was rushed from Japan to prevent UN forces from being hurled into the sea. In quick order Colonel Check earned the Distinguished Service Cross, at least two Silver Stars, and several Bronze Stars. There was also a battlefield promotion to full Colonel, a very rare thing at the time. “I never knew of one in Vietnam,” his son-in-law says. The unusual advancement was not solely for leadership ability but for grace under fire. The regimental officer whose command he inherited—himself an equally bemedalled war hero—called Betsy’s father the “bravest schoolteacher that ever existed.” (Colonel Check had taught ROTC at the University of North Dakota, his alma mater, between the wars.)
Betsy never spoke of these things to me—or to anyone else, so far as I know. Of course, teenagers back then, as now, seldom bragged on their parents’s accomplishments. But I can’t help suspecting Betsy’s taciturnity was partly due to her penchant for keeping some things to herself. There was a resolute privacy beneath the sunny disposition most of her classmates still recall.
Betsy enrolled at the University of Hawaii right after high school, living at home until the start of her senior year, when Colonel Check returned to Fort Meade to become base commander. Her mother Thelma has a vague memory of Betsy majoring in history and political science. Betsy’s husband believes it must have been English. “I know it wasn’t political science. She wasn’t very political.” Betsy ran with a group of college girls who dated men in the Coast Guard. She dated them, too, but it is hard to imagine her marrying into any branch of the service but the Army. A likely beau showed up her junior year—a 1961 graduate of the Point named Jack Dorr. A butcher’s son from Ridgefield, NJ, he had landed a scholarship at Lafayette College before receiving a belated congressional appointment to the academy. An Army career wasn't in his long-range plans, however. “I went to West Point with the idea that I’ll probably get drafted some time, so why not get a good education and serve my country for a few years and get on with my life.”
The two met on Waikiki Beach, at a small Army base in Honolulu that is now home to a large highrise R&R hotel for military personnel. There were a few living quarters bunched together at one end of the grounds, and an officer’s club at the other, on the beach side of which stood a snack bar and a paved boardwalk. The beach was narrow, but the greensward sprawled 200 feet deep under the shade of towering palm trees. Every weekend a bunch of college kids or recent graduates would gather there “to play in the water, drink beer, that sort of thing,” Jack recalls. Also, to play bridge. There were always two or three games taking place at once, usually on blankets spread over the grass. Whenever a player had to leave, or wanted to cool off in the surf, one of the several onlookers hovering about would immediately sit in. Jack was an avid bridge player, and still is, Betsy less so, but she played a lot all the same, and soon became a regular at the impromptu weekend matches. They started dating a short while later. In the fall of 1963 they got engaged. The marriage took place at Fort Meade in July 1964, a month following Betsy’s graduation.
The itinerancy of military life was old hat to Betsy. “When I had to relocate, she was ready to move. She was used to it,” Jack remembers. That may have been the case, but there was still a lot of uprooting and relocating to get used to. The first year of marriage the couple spent in Hawaii, where her first daughter was born. After that they were more or less constantly on the go. In 1965 they lived in Urbana-Champaign while Jack earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and Betsy gave birth to their second child. Next came his assignment to Fort Lewis, Washington, and then another cross-country move, this time to Laurel, Maryland, where Betsy and the kids stayed during the first of Jack’s two tours of duty in Vietnam. There was a brief stay in Fairfax, Virginia, followed by a trek to Fort Greeley, Alaska (where their third daughter was born). Then it was back to Fairfax for a longer spell, where they bought a two-story, brick façade house, ample enough for a growing family. From 1979 to 1983, the Dorrs lived in Europe, the first two of them in Aschaffenberg, Germany, where Jack had assumed command of a combat engineering battalion, the next two in Mons, Belgium, during Jack’s assignment to SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe). Then it was back to the states—the Army War College in Carlyle, Pennsylvania, in 1983 and ’84. Jack’s last tour of duty was with the Corps of Engineers in Winchester, Virginia, where he retired in 1988. If anyone is counting, that’s eleven moves in twenty-four years.
The stake-pulling fazed Betsy hardly at all. “She was more Army than I was,” Jack says. When he was away, Betsy ran the household, paying bills, chauffeuring the girls around, even mowing the lawn. “I wish I could remember how she handled three kids under six and a single family home while my dad went back to Vietnam for the second time,” says Mary Jo Dorr, her firstborn. “But I can assure you everything was well under control.” The family of five was tight-knit. Betsy and Jack had each been only children, so during holidays there was no sprawling clan of cousins for their own children to get together with. The isolation fostered the kind of closeness that can turn parent-child bonds into friendships. Remembers Michele Kelly, Betsy’s middle daughter: “My mom was my best friend. She was always there for us, always just a phone call away once we left the house. She always made us feel special and loved. We knew we were her first priority.”
And maybe her second and third priorities, as well, says Mary Jo. “When I went to college at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the rest of the family lived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a five hour drive away, there were multiple times that she would drive down to get me and take me home for a weekend only to turn around and repeat the 10-hour round-trip again two or three days later. That is just an example of how she always was.”
Betsy made time for herself, of course. She loved the water, especially swimming pools, doing water aerobics when she wasn’t lounging poolside. This revelation comes as a bit of a surprise: She became a rabid sports fan, especially of UNC basketball, but also of the Redskins and the Orioles.
Then there was her affection for Army life, which may have been more deeply ingrained than she herself may have realized. When Jack said early in their marriage he wanted to leave the service, the news upset her something awful. “I was very discouraged after my first tour of duty in Vietnam and was ready to get out. She wrote me a heartfelt letter saying don’t do it. Wait until you come home. If anything she kept me in the Army.”
The first inkling anything was wrong with her health was in the summer of 1996. Michele had just been married, and one day after putting her on a plane for Japan, Betsy said she had to go to the emergency room. She was in terrible pain. Doctors found a tumor on her ovaries that was blocking her intestines. It was too large to remove. They tried shrinking it with various protocols. They gave her repeated blood transfusions. The rest of the year she was in and out of the hospital. “Betsy was a very private person,” Jack says. “She internalized a lot. She didn’t give up when she got sick. But she didn’t want people to do things for her, either, like feed her through a tube.” The day after Christmas, 1996, she went into the hospital for the last time. Betsy died there on January 15, 1997. She was only 54 years of age.
It’s a curious thing, but for all the times that I drove her and Sandy White to school, stopping at Whitmore’s Restaurant most mornings, where many of our classmates used to gather before dragging ourselves to class, I can’t remember Betsy ever once losing her temper or uttering a cross word. With her it was always a smile and a laugh. It wasn’t a tame laugh either. It was big guffaw, so hearty in fact that you sometimes wondered how her sparrow-like frame held up against its quakes.
Hearing talk of her even temper today draws chuckles from Jack. “Well, Betsy got angry at me more than once.” It was usually over long hours he had to spend at the Pentagon, or the heavy demands of commanding a battalion. “That was not the Army life Betsy had been used to. Her father was always in a senior command for as long as she could remember. His hours were more flexible. She was frustrated that I wasn’t spending enough time with the family, and I reminded her that I was only in the Army because she wanted me to be.”
“But she was a great wife, and a great mom, and it’s unfortunate that she never lived to see her six grandchildren.”
“It is hard,” Michele says. “The most vivid memories I have are of the last six months of her life when I moved back home to help my dad care for my mom. And then my thoughts most often go to wondering what type of grandmother she would have been and I’m saddened by the fact my children never experienced that relationship.”
Or the friendships that Betsy’s grandmotherhood would assuredly have ripened into. That’s what Betsy’s youngest daugher, Julie Masters, still misses: “My mother was my best friend until the day she died.”
Betsy is survived by her mother Thelma Check (who at age 96 still travels from Laurel to Hawaii every year to spend the winter); by her husband; and by her three daughters: Mary Jo Dorr, Potomac Falls, Virginia; Michele Kelly, Hinsdale, Illinois; and Julie Masters, Powell Ohio.
Thinking of Harry I remember a person who was comfortable to be around and easy to talk to. And he was funny. Does anyone else remember how he sat at his desk? It drove teachers crazy that he slouched down so much his legs went down the aisle and his very large feet in blue suede shoes were in front of the person who sat in front of him. He stood out in every crowd with his taste in clothes - remember the bright red slacks and shirts with metallic trim and fringe--he was years ahead of his time!
In Senior year He, Dixie, and myself were put together as the only seniors who needed one more Science credit to graduate. It was us three, 20-plus sophomores, and painfully shy Mr. Zook. Harry would remove papers from the bulletin board and turn them in for extra credit. But it was Dixie's idea that we should "hook" school, something we had never done. We saved our lunch money and planned the logistic for weeks.
On a cold winter's day we drove in Harry's car to Washington D.C. It was agreed that each of us could choose an activity. Dixie spotted an Ice Rink andmade her selection. We negotiated a price for a one hour skate rental. Dixie was a regular Sonja Henie (remember that name?) and Harry and I held onto each other and just tried for "The Old Smoothies" (remember that routine?) The hour passed blessedly fast. We all decided on The Smithsonian for the afternoon, then Harry chose the Naval Medical Museum. I'll never forget the displays; the world's largest intestine, contorted skeletons and samples of every disease.
We vowed to take better care of ourselves.
The next day in school we handed in phony excuse notes, and in Science class, Harry handed in Smithsonian brochures for extra credit. Dixie and I just looked at each other and wished we had thought of it.
Harry was kind, generous and fun. I wish I could look forward to seeing him at the reunion.
While I did not know Bill in the ninth grade, I know he was around because according to the October 1956 issue of the Shamrock, he was elected Homeroom President of 9-E and served along with Bob Edenfield, VP, Joy Gebhart, Sec and Ann Eggerl, Treasurer.He continued to display his leadership, being president of his Senior Class at Fayetteville High in Ft. Bragg, NC and elected president of his sophomore class at ECU.
He didn’t come onto my radar until the 10th grade when we shared a lab table in Biology.He was such a charismatic person that to this day when I mentioned his name at a recent committee meeting several members related stories about their memories of him.Dale and I had just started dating that year and Bill told me of his latest conquests and gave me his tips on keeping Dale happy.I guess he did a good job – we have been married for over 48 years!
Bill’s father got transferred to Ft. Bragg, NC the summer after our sophomore year and we corresponded intermittently for a while and he told me about his exploits at Fayetteville High (and we all agree that he loved to toot his own horn!) and I wrote back to him my relatively mundane adventures in high school and then on to Strayer for a Legal Secretarial Degree.After graduating from high school, Bill attended East Carolina University.Somewhere along the line he met Judy and they were married in 1965.They were married for 43 years and had three children – a boy and two girls.
We lost contact and our paths didn’t cross for many years until I moved to Raleigh, NC and was at a client’s office one day doing a field audit and he worked there.We talked briefly and he asked how Dale was doing, said he had been married for many years and we said the old “we have to get together some day for lunch”.I know Bill felt a connection with his friends at Arundel High, even though it had been so many years later.I was reminded of a PS in a letter of July, 1961, 3 years after he had moved away:“Have you heard anything from the ‘old gang.... Kathy, Anne, Janet & Ace … ?
I was shocked some months later to hear from the CPA that I was working with that Bill had passed away on June 3rd, 2006 from complications of cancer.Bill was only 64 years old!
I know we say it all the time, but if I could do it over again, I would have leapt at the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with Bill and his family after so many years, and. . . I thought I had all the time in the world to do so.My new motto:Carpe Diem!
Ralph Smith and I met at a sock hop at Arundel High and dated for the three years after I graduated from Arundel until he was killed in an automobile accident in "Boomtown" (Fort Meade) on January 19, 1963. The circumstances of the wreck were never fully understood--some thought that he was drag racing (which he was fond of doing) and was forced off the road and into a tree on a curve. He drove a turquoise 1954 Chevy convertible, inscribed "Little Lonesome". We spend many hours at The Ritchie Hwy drive-in theater, Ameche's Drive Inn munching "Powerhouse Double Burgers", taking little day trips around Maryland, visiting his family in Crownsville, (his mother made the most delicious crab cakes I have ever eaten.) His life was tragically short and his death such a shock to everyone. I think of him still and have music that I play that reminds me of him such as Roy Orbison's "Only the Lonely" which was popular in the years before he died.
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