Update 4-1-03


All right,

7 days till Jerry Bittman's birthday.  Send him mail at crazygeronimo@yahoo.com  We're planning to rename a certain Midwestern state in his honor.

33 days till the (possibly) annual re-enactment of the 37th reunion, or the 38th annual celebration of the last time we all saw J. James Bergen.  Contact Paul DeMartino for details at PINA_1@msn.com

Business:  I finally rejoined Classmates.com and wrote letters to:  Ellen Brody, Alan Feldman, Gary Gray, Roberta Grodin, James Karl, Carole LaDuca, Michael Stellato, Linda Muhlbauer, Dick Magee, Kathleen Adamo, Janice Muller, George Smith, Robert Smith, Deborah Sack, Rosemary Tadler, Diane Varricchio, Cathryn Reynolds, Lee Yu, Robert Zelin, and Linda Ziegler.  Some of these names didn't turn up on our South '65 graduation list, but I figured these people must have some reason for checking the Classmates' listing for our year.  Often, it's a married name.  Sometimes, it's someone in our class using a friend's computer, incognito, to see who's also poking around.
      In any case, the way Classmates now works is you still send blind e-mail -- which means you never get the address of the people you're writing -- then Classmates notifies you when your e-mail's been sent and when it's been read.  Of the 20 people I wrote, only 8 opened their messages:  Ellen Brody, Roberta Grodin, Dick Magee, Kathleen Adamo, Robert Smith, Deborah Sack, Cathryn Reynolds, and Robert Zelin.  The note I sent them generally mentioned that there was a free South '65 homepage for them to explore, at hometown.aol.com/falcons1965a, and to please contact me at reunionclass65@aol.com if they'd like to be listed.  So far, I've heard back from none of then, and it's been a week.
      I also haven't gotten a message back that Frank Bonlarron had opened his e-mail, and -- if you're following this saga -- contacting Frank, then, in turn, his brother Ed, was the reason I'd re-upped on Classmates to start with.  So, until Frank opens his mail, there's no way he can know that we're looking for Ed, and no way for that branch of the search to continue.
      For a while there, Barbara Blitfield Pech was writing me, almost moment-by-moment, to say she'd found Ed Bonlarron with just a few simple keystrokes in a search engine.  But it turned out that any information she uncovered had already been forwarded by other people to Ed Albrecht, who's spearheading the Bonlarron search, or, at least, is the reason for it.  Barbara did forward this information, for keepers of Bonlarron lore:  "Found Todd Bonlarron, in West Palm Beach, an elected house or senate member.  And I know I've already told you that when I moved here in 1979, I met Gay Bonlarron, Frank's former wife, who was unwilling to talk.  But there is a chance that Todd is Frank's son.  Also found John, the youngest brother, at CMB Components, 630 Broadway, Holbrook, New York.  And, further down the line,  I caught Eddie Bonlarron!  He seems to be a member of a local sports team, 'The Gladiators,' but I didn't have a chance to follow that up.  There were several other Bonlarron listings as well, but they were all in French."
      On a related matter, I've never heard back from the temple in Oakland, to see if their Herta Apfel was our Herta Apfel.  I've contacted them again recently, but maybe I should have written in German.

Also, three hours ago, from Barbara:  My goodness!  Where is my weekly lifeline to news of my world?  If this is your April Fools' joke, you got me.
      (Not a joke:  I just got busy.)

Random national commentary:  From Janet Maslin's book review in The New York Times, March 27th -- "And she [the American-born Queen Noor of Jordan] would continue to be shocked, throughout a life of extensive travel and diplomacy, by the dismissive and indiscriminate ways in which Arabs were described abroad.  At the time of the first gulf war, she was amazed when President George Bush told her husband, speaking of Saddam Hussein: 'I will not allow this little dictator to control 25 percent of the civilized world's oil.'  The key words here, for the Jordanians who would later describe this meeting in Kennebunkport, Maine, as 'quite a raw experience,' were of course 'civilized world.' "

Also from the Times, March 29th:  "Only once, near the end of City Center's encore of The New Moon, did the action emerge.  The organizer Robert proclaimed, 'A man may love his country, and forswear its rulers,' and the audience erupted in a huge, crashing long ovation."

From Newsweek, March 31st:  "Sometimes a few words are worth a thousand pictures.  Last Friday, Tom Brokaw sat talking to a group of retired military officers when the voice of a woman came on the air.  Amid all the astonishing satellite gadgetry, she was using a 125-year-old technology called a telephone.  Nancy Chamberlin's son, Marine Major Jay Aubin, had been killed in action in southern Iraq.  Now the grieving mother had a wrenching message for the media.  'I truly admire what all the new technology can do,' she said politely.  'But for the mothers and wives out there watching, it is murder.  It is heartbreaking.  We can't leave the television for a moment because we might see our sons ... or husbands.  The technology is great, but there are moms, there are wives -- and they are suffering.' "

Finally, in the New Yorker, March 31st, from a review of William Taubman's new biography of Khrushchev:  "On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev went before a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress and delivered a speech that proved to be his most lasting legacy.  He denounced Stalin's 'personality cult,' his 'capricious and despotic character,' and the 'brutal violence' with which he ruled the country.  The 'secret speech,' which was soon leaked to the Western media ... began the long process of exposing and, eventually, undermining Communist authority in the Soviet Union and abroad.  It sparked rebellion in Poland and the Hungarian Revolution ... When Gorbachev resumed the Khrushchev initiative, thirty years later, he, too, began hesitantly, fearful of attacking Lenin, lest it lead to the immediate collapse of the entire Bolshevik project.  But that would come."

The home page:   http://hometown.aol.com/falcons1965a


Rich