Charles Waldron

I’m very sorry to hear about Pat’s passing. We have been friends since high school, we stayed in touch in college and for a good while when I was overseas and she lived in New Orleans. I moved to Houston in ‘93 and found that Pat lived only about a mile from me. We stayed friends during that period, went to dinner a couple times and saw each other at the grocery quite often.
She was managing editor for a fairly large local (north Houston) newspaper and wrote columns for several other local newspapers. She enjoyed that very much and was very good at it. She was down when the paper was sold and they brought somebody else to replace her.
I knew she was moving to Washington and we stayed in touch on Facebook after that. She had her an amazing breath of knowledge and had her own cute quirky ways about her. I also knew when she was diagnosed with her fatal disease but at the time they said that she had 3 to 6 years so I was surprised when she passed after or out three years. I always assumed they would find a cure.
She was a kind wonderful person and she will be missed.

Happy Birthday again my friend. I hope it’s the best ever.

Posted on: Apr 23, 2018 at 5:37 PM

Happy Birthday Chris. I hope it was a good one. Any plans to be in the South soon?

Joan, I asked and didn't find a reply, plus I forgot to ask you at the Reunion, so what did 'FI' stand for? I'm not letting this go!

Posted on: Oct 21, 2017 at 2:04 PM

And now, despite popular demand (who remembers the Smothers Brothers?), I am going to put forth my version of Tommy Sancton's famous TIME Magazine cover and the Great Bulletin Board Caper with Miss Luke.
As most will remember, as seniors we had to prepare and post a current events presentation on the bulletin board in Miss Luke's Economics/Sociology class. There were five, maybe six, perps in our group, with Tommy being the most talented, which is pretty redundant I guess. I believe Henry Waite was the third guy. There were at least two, maybe three gals... Maybe Martha Mc and maybe Joan Jackson or Bev Sparkman. If those that remember aren't too embarrassed, please identify yourselves. I apologize that my memory has taken vacation about this. So we decided to produce a story on the giant geodesic dome to be built over the Arizona desert, which was, of course, completely fictitious.
Tommy drew a fantastic TIME cover with an "artist's rendition" of the dome constructed of giant triangular building blocks, plausible because one that big had never been built before, right in the center. A "picture" of John Kenneth Galbraith, everyone's super-economist, was in the lower right, some mountains behind the dome and some cactus or desert-looking vegetation were in the foreground. The cover had the shiny red borders and a very authentic look to it.
We all wrote articles that were "copied" from the magazine and posted with it. Mine was about the projected decline in juvenile delinquency in the cities under the dome. I believe one dealt with the tremendous increase in farming productivity, natural since the climate inside could be completely controlled. There were graphs galore. I don't recall the other stories, but they were equally specious.
We put all of this faux information on the bulletin board and it became pretty popular. Ms. Luke became curious when some of her teacher colleagues wandered by and spent some time perusing the presentation. With her magnifying glass on the cover (maybe?) she was astonished to learn that it wasn't a real TIME magazine cover after all and called Tommy demanding an explanation. My recollection is that he, cool as ever, said something to the effect that "We just did that for effect, of course it's not real." Ms. Luke told him that he needed to put a note beside the cover to that effect, which he did. Tommy, jump in please and put us back on track if we've veered off here.
We got a pretty high grade for the project, at least that is my recollection, and if we didn't, we should have since we put a lot more effort into it than we would have had we pursued some boring true story.
At some graduation event for the class that followed us in '68, (and I really don't recall why I was there) I was chatting with the mother of one of the graduating students and ultimately introduced myself. She said "Oh, you were part of that group that did the bulletin board hoax in Ms. Luke's class last year. That was terrific, my son/daughter told us all about it. I have no idea who she was, but it did give me a bit of a tingle.
Then, several years later, I saw Fred Lawson, the best math teacher in the world, in the cafeteria/student union at UNO. He told me that he never got the chance to tell us, the perps, how much the other teachers enjoyed the Bulletin Board caper.
I regret that so many of the details, especially the names of those implicated, are kinda lost in the fog of years gone by. I hope that those involved will step up and flesh out the story since we are well past the statute of limitations.

George, I remember that about a year and a half after we graduated, I called you up and we went and got a sandwich somewhere off Claiborne Ave. You were going to Tulane (I think) and were a DJ on the campus radio. It was summertime, and you said that you used the exact same weather forecast every day for over a month, and no one said anything. I always chuckle when I think of that. I look forward to seeing you again.

Posted on: Jun 03, 2017 at 3:33 AM