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PROFILE UPDATES


•   Penn Black  3/18
•   James Louis Jackson  2/23
•   Robert Rohn  1/22
•   Arnie Vandermolen  1/14
•   Victoria Lynn Cratte (Shoopman)  9/18
•   Willie Collings  9/18
•   Jeff Willer  9/15
•   Patrick Charles Maher  2/21
•   Clyde Church  1/9
•   David Jeffrey Long  1/8
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WHERE WE LIVE


Who lives where - select from the dropdown to find out.

UPCOMING BIRTHDAYS



•   Victoria Lynn Cratte (Shoopman)  4/1
•   Peter W Volkmar  4/3
•   Fred Baker  4/6
•   Brian (Bingo) Eaton  4/7
•   Daniel Roger Sherinian  4/9
•   David Charles Goad  4/10
•   Michael W. Stajduhar  4/11
•   Randall Claybourn  4/12
•   Nancy McGahey  4/13
•   Laurel Ann Osterberg  4/14
•   Danny L. Downs  4/16
•   Bruce D. Rains  4/19
•   Larry Eugene Sullivan  4/21
•   Pamela Suchy (Fowler)  4/27
•   Sharon Wagner (Cortez)  4/27

MISSING CLASSMATES


Know the email address of a missing Classmate? Click here to contact them!

It is with great sadness that I inform you of yesterday's passing of Jeff McDonald, Scottsdale '68.

I received an e-mail today from his twin brother Greg.

Greg's new e-mail is  Bearlyrockin@gmail.com

Bruce Iacobelli

 

SCOTTSDALE HIGH SCHOOL ALUMNI:  All year reunion for 2020

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Friday, February 7, 2020 at 6 PM – 11 PM
Elks Lodge No. 2148 -  6398 E.Oak Street, Scottsdale, AZ  85257

 

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SCOTTSDALE-SAGUARO CLASS OF 1968 REUNION

For those of you who couldn’t or didn’t come – it was awesome. Almost 200 people from both schools, wonderful group of people, magnificent buffet, beautiful venue, and 50 years of memories. Great 60s music with a Rockin’ DJ. Memorabilia, videos and Memory Book.  Hot mamas from Cheer, Pom lines and a Majorette still dancin’ for us, showing us all that you’re as young as you think!  We will be posting photos and hopefully videos soon. Keep in touch. Let us know what you thought if you were there!   We are keeping the website up for five more years in anticipation of another joint reunion in 2023. Stay with us, there is more to come

 

GO TO THE GALLERY -

PHOTOS: SCOTTSDALE - SAGUARO 1968 TO SEE ALL PICTURES!  

They are also on Facebook at "Scottsdale-Saguaro Class of 1968 Reunion"

Meantime...check out these Hot Mamas @ the Reunion:    https://www.facebook.com/paula.bandura/videos/10215169233803352/

Scottsdale Progress: 10/28/18 Article on Susan Falk Segal, Scottsdale '68: (See Also "Looking Back" in this edition - about the Reunion.) https://issuu.com/timespub/docs/sp_102818/1?e=8633901/65400715

Scottsdale Progress: 10/14/18 Article on Marsha Posner Williams, Scottsdale '68: https://issuu.com/timespub/docs/1_sp_101418/1?e=8633901/65122194

 

Fifty Years Ago: High School in Scottsdale

Melissa Crowfoot Keane ~ Scottsdale High School, Class of 1968

“I have never gotten over that game. We dominated the first half. Second half, you started throwing the ball and we had no answer.”  That’s how Sabercat Gary Goldie remembers the first varsity football game between the Saguaro High School Sabercats and the Scottsdale High School Beavers in September 1967. The two teams were well acquainted—Tommy Campbell had coached them as sophomores at Scottsdale High before the student body was split down the middle to create two high schools where there had been only one. The local Scottsdale Progress hyped the anticipation with a week-long series of articles; even the big city paper, the Arizona Republic, covered the upcoming battle. Student enthusiasm at the Friday afternoon pep assembly was wilder and louder than usual.

At game time, the sun was just disappearing behind Camelback Mountain easing 95-degree heat as students and locals arrived at the Scottsdale football field. “It seemed like the whole town showed up! People stood around the outlying field area and the stands were packed!” was the view through Scottsdale quarterback Kevin Woudenberg’s football helmet. Going into the fourth quarter, the Cats had the Beavers down 26-14. While the defense held the Cats scoreless, Kevin Woudenberg ran a one-yard quarterback sneak to narrow the game to 26-21, and, in the last minute of the game, tossed a bullet to Don Palmer who ran 34 yards to clinch the game for the Beavers. Bruce Iacobelli nailed all four Scottsdale point-after conversions for the final score, 28-26. The rival teams met sixteen more times before Scottsdale High was closed in 1983, but this first match was, “the greatest game ever played between the two schools!” in Woudenberg’s estimation.

During the (sweaty) post-game dance in the gym, we roared until we were hoarse, “G-L-O-R-I-A,” “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and, “We gotta get outta this place! Girl, there’s a better life for me and you.” We got out. In the fifty-plus years since that warm desert night, we have followed separate paths.

The first big split had been, of course, the rupture of Scottsdale High into two schools due to extensive development in “north” Scottsdale (now “central” Scottsdale). On the first day of the new school, August 30, 1966, heavy rainfall flooded the parking lot and several classrooms; city garbage trucks evacuated the students to higher ground. The school was closed for a few days until the water subsided. “I wasn’t that thrilled about going to Saguaro in the first place (I was still a Beaver at heart!), and this was justification for my teenage mind,” remembers Jody Burke Bartel.

We lost track of friends left behind at Scottsdale or trundled way off north to Saguaro. Later years scattered us more widely as we created our adult lives in college, military service or maybe grad school, with a spouse, a job, maybe a couple of kids. Then came that divorce, a job change, a move, another job change, another divorce, illness. You name it, at least one of us has experienced it in the last fifty years. Our experiences have been spread all over the map, up and down the corporate ladder, in and out of joy and difficulty.

But think about what we shared, those years in Scottsdale. Our teenage years spanned that awful Friday afternoon of JFK’s assassination to the end of the Vietnam War in 1973. We lived in a world that is unknowable to our children and grandchildren. We rode horses bareback on Scottsdale’s many unpaved, agricultural roads. We knew both Howdy Doody and the Howdy Dudettes. Sgt. Bilko and Sgt. Pepper. Barbarella and Aretha Franklin. Perry Como and Bob Dylan. How the West was Won and West Side Story. The Animals, The Monkees, The Kinks, The Doors, “The Letter.”

Although we may have felt alone during our teenage years, we were not alone. We spent all kinds of time with each other, in and out of school. We walked everywhere before we had driver’s licenses. We hung out at each other’s homes and swimming pools; we knew our friends’ parents and siblings. We rode bicycles to Sky Harbor Airport to play the pinball machines, and all the way to Chris-Town for the heck of it. We bagged groceries (and the occasional contraband hooch) at Bashas’ grocery store, waitressed at the Sugar Bowl, and hand-set pins at the bowling alley. We bought 5/$1.00 burgers from Gladys and Essie at the Ranch House. We threw honest-to-goodness tire tubes in the back of a pick-up and floated down the Verde River. Those were the years of discovery, of “firsts.” Not just that first dance, first date, first kiss, but also the first recognition of our strengths and shortcomings. Our first glimpses of who we were and who we might become.

Now it is time to re-discover our roots and celebrate our shared past. Our joint Scottsdale-Saguaro reunion is November 2-3, 2018. As Jacqueline Norton expressed it so beautifully, “It will be a treat to acknowledge and thank so many people who helped, encouraged, inspired, and amused me along the way.” Join us. There will be name tags. It’ll be fun.

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FUN STUFF:  Click on the link go back to the 60's ~~ The sixties

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SHS-SHS Class of 1968 Joint 50th Reunion

That Was Then, This Is Now:

Why You Should Attend Your 50th High School Reunion

Melissa Crowfoot Keane ~ Scottsdale High School, Class of 1968

Once upon a time—fifty years ago or so—dirt lots stretched along Scottsdale Road from McDowell north to Main Street. McCormick Ranch and Gainey Ranch were ranches. Los Olivos was the “fancy” restaurant in town; the Sugar Bowl served “Gosh Awful Gooey” sundaes. The Kiva Theater showed kiddie cartoons on Saturday mornings; the Kachina Theater projected 2001: A Space Odyssey in Cinerama.

We were in high school. Girls could not wear pants to school, and boys were forbidden to wear sandals. We struggled to process the daily incoming barrage of facts and emotions: Shakespeare, Geometry, Driver’s Ed, Viet Nam, assassinations, riots, that cute new boy in class. Our high school years were full of national uncertainty and personal anxiety. Not to mention pimples. Tough times.

The 1968 graduating classes of Scottsdale and Saguaro spent freshman and sophomore years together on the Scottsdale High campus while Saguaro was being built. Connections made in those years led to the two classes celebrating high school reunions jointly. Now it is time to come together to celebrate our fiftieth high school reunion this November. Check out the reunion website at http://www.shs-shs68reunion.com/.

Whoa, there. I can hear you grumbling. “Why should I go to the reunion? I have nothing in common with those people. I’m not the same person I was in high school. There’s no one I want to see. No one will recognize me.” I hear all your objections, but here’s the deal. First, you have more in common with us than you think you do. Second, we have all changed. Thank goodness. Third, the fiftieth reunion is a golden chance to find out how all our stories turned out. And, we really want to see you, even if we wouldn’t be able recognize you without that 1968 photo on your name tag.

We share a common history. We were all born within about eighteen months of each other. Whether or not we were friends in high school, we went to school in the same buildings, in the same town, in the same state, in the same year, in the same era. Despite (or perhaps due to) those painful divisions we imagined as teenagers, we shared much of the fabric of our lives. The fiftieth is a chance to re-discover our common experiences, and to connect our pasts with our present. How fun it will be to walk up to that certain somebody and say, “I had such a crush on you!”

We have all changed. In 1960, the population of Scottsdale hovered around 10,000 residents; it’s now twenty times bigger. We may have gained weight, but we’re not twenty times bigger than we were in high school! Each of us has ridden life’s roller coaster: love/loss, richer/poorer, health/sickness, start-ups/shut-downs, awards/fines, acne/wrinkles, student loans/Medicare. Five decades have given us the opportunity to grow beyond our adolescent fears, cattiness and made-up divisions. We have mellowed into humility and compassion. We can now meet each other with more open minds and forgiving hearts. We will all be taxing our brains to remember names and faces while we squint to read name tags. Leave that teenage angst behind and celebrate life’s changes with us.

As our classmate, you are part of our stories, and we are a part of yours. The fiftieth gives us the chance to find out how everybody’s stories turned out. I’m looking forward to exploring how people do/don’t change (including myself), and to appreciating how my high school prejudices convinced me to overrate charisma and blinded me to potential. So far, check-ins on the SHS-SHS 1968 reunion website have told stories of several Silicon Valley tech successes, a few Protestant ministers and at least one rabbi, a university psychology professor, a high school math teacher and a grade school counselor, a sheriff, two archaeologists, and a winner of multiple Emmys. If you can’t make it to the reunion in person, please consider visiting the website to upload your story. We want to hear it.

Most of all, we want to see you! The reunion will be better for your presence. Reading stories on the website can never be as concrete an experience as chatting with each other in person. Meeting up with you after decades of separation will offer us a chance to understand each other’s lives, and perhaps, to better understand our own. This fiftieth reunion presents a unique opportunity to observe how our particular cross-section of humanity has evolved over a lifetime. Those of you who make it in person to the reunion gathering will generate a unique chemistry and will create unique memories. Just like high school, it will be meaningful.

Even if it was not the “best time” of your life, high school was important. And so is our fiftieth high school reunion. Be there. There will be name tags. And no one will blink an eye if you rent a luxury car for the weekend.

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SHS-SHS Class of 1968 Joint 50th Reunion

IF YOU SEE CLASSMATES FOR WHOM WE HAVE ONLY NAMES, but you know where they are, their e-mail address and/or phone - LET US KNOW!  We'd like to reach as many as possible.  Let us know also of any classmates we've lost but who are not listed on the "In Memory" page.  Thanks ~

The Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch ~ 7700 E. McCormick Parkway

Here are the REUNION details ~ it was a great time!  Sorry if you missed it...

Friday, Nov. 2, 2018Casual get-together in Scottsdale, Social Tap, 4312 N. Brown Ave. 4-7 PM

Saturday, Nov. 3, 2018:  AM - Golf at McCormick Ranch, $75/each participant.  Contact: Bingo Eaton (Saguaro) 602-284-7102bingo.eaton@cox.net 

Saturday, Nov. 3, 2018:

          6 PM to 7 PM - Cocktail Hour, Bennie's Court, The Scottsdale Resort - no host bar.

          7 PM to 11 PM - Dinner/Dance/Entertainment at the beautiful Coronado Ballroom, Scottsdale Conference Center at McCormick Ranch.  $100 per person reservation includes dinner, dancing, entertainment, and a great time for reminiscing with classmates. There will be a no-host bar.  ~  Many of you were at Scottsdale all four years; about half were there two years and then on to Saguaro when it was new!  We are also welcoming friends/guests who would have gone to Scottsdale/Saguaro from schools like Kaibab, Paiute, Loloma, Hopi, Kiva, etc.

FIFTY YEARS, friends ~ It was a special evening

 

Committee: Dan Madison/Saguaro (dan@danmadisonco.net), Ava Jones Genung/Saguaro (ava.genung@aol.com), Bruce Iacobelli/Scottsdale (aotravel@aol.com), Linda Covington Barnett/Saguaro (lindabarnett10@gmail.com), Pam Turbeville/Scottsdale (pamelaturbeville@aol.com), Jack Black (jablack067@gmail.com), Pat Lydiard Barga/Scottsdale (patbarga@gmail.com), Golf: Bingo Eaton(bingo.eaton@cox.net

Anticipating a GREAT Reunion in 2023!

SHS-SHS Wood Carvings by Greg McDonald (See Scottsdale-Saguaro '68 Reunion Store under Home Page)