James Lehman D.D.S.

I have been lucky to have grown up in Kenosha when I did. Not only did I get a chance to experience many good friendships but also learned about life during a time when honesty was the best policy. I believe that the morals and values instilled in me are a direct result of those experiences. As I go forward in my life, I only hope that I can be a part of a society that values those same ideals.
My best memories of Kenosha and Tremper revolve around sports. Golf and swimming were my favorites. I still do both of them today.
I have been married almost 25 years to Kathy who is from Glenview, IL. We have 4 beautiful children and our last one will be going to college in the fall. I have been a dentist for 28 years and now practice in Libertyville, IL where we live. I have patented a new type of manual toothbrush and have a website tlcbrush.com. I have produced them and hand them out to my patients but I am not actively marketing it so I guess I will be keeping my day job.

Recently I have been disturbed by the discourse in our National government and have embarked on an ambitious misssion to Save our Republic. Politics can be confusing and ambiguous. To make things perfectly clear, everyone is entitled to their own political view. All points of view are valid. What is abhorrent and unacceptable is the absurd places where politics are allowed to be played out. Our founders never wanted us exposed to the dangers of testing public policy on the national stage. Thats why the states were given the power to appoint US Senators and control the National government. At least until the 17th Amendment was passed in 1913 under Woodrow Wilson. Let me be even more clear, both parties have abused their privelege in Washington DC. So if we are to save the republic, both parties are to take responsibility and resign themselves to playing out their aspirations and policies on the state level and the local level. What I am talking about is motivating our States to call for a US Constitutional convention to repeal the 17th Amendment. This would return power back to the States and the National government would return to performing their 18 enumerated duties as described in Article 1 Section 8 of our US Constitution. We still would have a mess to clean up but at least our kids will have a future in our country. My facebook group "Saving our Republic" is just getting started and I invite anyone to join. I have a website under construction, "Savingourrepublic.com" that will serve several purposes. It will give people a place to blog and share ideas on how to accomplish this monumental task. It will track movement in the individual states on this legislation and it will educate patriots on this very important issue. The website should be up by August 2010.

It was 3 days before our senior banquet which was held downtown at the Eagles Club I think. We were planning the banquet and we needed some entertainment. Geoff Welch came up with the idea of making a class movie. We brainstormed and came up with many funny skits. One skit was having boys coming out of their bathroom... followed by Mr Kranen (with the assumption that they were caught for smoking) then having girls coming out of the their bathroom.... followed by Mr Kranen. Then we had boys and girls coming out of a door labelled COED bathroom... followed by Mr Kranen. Then there was a scene in Mr Feldman's alternative English class (where he conducted class on comfy living room furniture). We panned across the room and students were actively discussing the topic of the day. When we panned back across the room, the once active students were sound asleep, including Mr Feldman! Another scene was in Mr Gemmel's chemistry class where he has some "cold fire" chemical that would burn on the top of the liquid but keep the rest of the liquid cool. I cupped my hands and held onto the liquid and he lit it. Everything was cool (literally and figuratively) until the fire burned down enough to make things a little too hot. At that point, I got rid of the liquid as quickly as possible and the next thing we knew the counter was on fire. It was lucky we had an extinguisher handy. Lastly we had Mr Kobishop don a pair of mickey mouse ears and pretend to be hard at work coloring in a coloring book. He was quite the sport for doing that. After conceiving of these ideas, I had to get a super 8 film camera from the football department (because video cameras had not been invented yet). Stage and film all the scenes. Get the film developed in 1 day in Milwaukee, splice the scenes by Wednsday night. I had alot of help but we made it just in time. Lesson learned never say it can never be done. Mr Cass that Monday morning told me just that. He came up to me after the Senior banquet and said he would not have believed it if he didn't see it with his own eyes.