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Ken Ortiz
Hello all,
I went Kayaking (my first time ever) on August 4th, with 3 other friends of mine. It was at Nippersink creek, which is located in Richmond, Illinois (a bit northwest of Fox Lake). What fun that was, well....except for the sunburn on my legs (on only one side of them too), and we all had some kayaking “fails", especially when my bro flipped over his kayak. But during that outing, I had a “Sighting", but a kind of indirect one. Would “indirect" be good definition for this one? You be the judge.
We get to the Pioneer point landing area on Saturday morning, which is actually where we will finish our kayaking run, as there will be a shuttle that will take us to the starting point where they will give us rookie kayakers some instruction and then launch us on our way. Along with us 4, we were joined by 6 others who also signed up for this start time. Our shuttle van (one of 2 vans) had 6 of us, the 4 in my group and then another couple. As we are headed for the launch point (several miles away), we start having conversations with our guide/van driver. He is late teens, maybe early 20's, and local to the area which is very rural. So rural, in fact that he said there were only 20 something students in his high school graduation class. I then chimed in and said that our graduation class had over 1000. So he asked where I went to High School and I said “Lane Tech, Chicago, Illinois, class of 1976". After I said that, one of the other passengers in our van said he went to Gordon Tech in 1975 and 1976, but transferred to another school (maybe Taft) and graduated in 1978. By that time the van arrived at our launch point so we could not have a lengthy and detailed conversation about those times. Plus we did not have any cell phones to take pictures or pens to write things down (because you cannot bring certain things with you, because there is a good chance that they and you will get soaked during this kayaking trip, which was true, ask my bro), so this is by memory only.
He said his name was Tim Worster. He lived in Jefferson Park during that time, but now he lives in the Fox Lake area. He talked about how Lane and Gordon students would harass each other on the Addison bus (I took the Western bus, so I never saw firsthand those shenanigans). I told him that I get down to Chicago pretty often and that Gordon Tech is now De Paul academy and that was news to him. He then mentioned a Lane Student he was friends with (I think they lived close to each other and went to the same grade school, etc.) and his name was Rich Wiederer or something like that. But Tim called him “Weeds or Weedy" for short. So after I got home I looked for his name in our 1976 yearbook and there is a Rich Wiederer – division 875 (class of 1978). And he played Frosh-Soph football in 76. So if anybody knows Rich, tell him I met his friend Tim Worster while kayaking the Nippersink creek in Richmond, Illinois on 8/4/2018.
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