NHS '85 40TH REUNION - SEPT 4 DEADLINE

The 40th Reunion of Class of 1985 at Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens NY now has a deadline of September 4, 2025.  That's one month ahead of the actual reunion date of October 4, 2025.  The event will be at the Marriott LaGuardia Airport, 7 P.M. to midnight.  Payment of $150 per person is to be done through BillHighway.com .  Contact me at linusly@mac.com to have your BillHighway account created.  I believe we already reached all interested parties and some are just waiting for a deadline to act, so now you have the deadline.  Event is open to all 1980s so bring friends and families!

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY

Planning for my high school reunion is proceeding well.  Initially, the Reunion Committee worried that not enough people will pay up front, that we may not have enough money to pay a deposit to the hotel where we rent the banquet hall and have dinner provided etc.  We did get enough people coughing up the dough, but there was another challenge.  In this day and age (the year 2025), you would think any bill-paying platform would automatically have online payment already included.  And you would be wrong.  The bill-paying platform that we use, which I choose not to remember, at the moment, has no such feature.  Or at least, it's not there until I asked for it.  We used the same platform in 2010, I probably was not a Treasurer for the Reunion Committee, or maybe my memory is really that bad, maybe we paid everything by paper checks?  Based on some old email communications, it seemed money was regularly transferred to a bank account, then somebody wrote checks to cover all the expenses - DJ deposit, photographer deposit, catering hall deposit, etc.  Back to the year 2025, or at least late 2024, when the Reunion Committee decided not to have a bank account.  How would payment be made then?  I can add a Vendor, but there seems to be no way to do online payment.  I had to open a ticket with tech support and somebody turned on some switches and voila I was able to send an email to request the hotel's bank info.  Earlier I went through my Committee contact with the hotel and got some info but none of that matched the form in the payment platform.  By going through the payment platform process, I can see that they had the same bank as me, but their account number is masked, I only see the last few digits, which is how it should be.  The due date arrived, I arranged for electronic payment, and money is scheduled to change hand, sort of.  Whew, a hurdle cleared, but it would be so much easier if it's a standard thing to start with.

 

NEWTOWN REUNIONS: YES, NO, MAYBE

The first title I thought for this blog post was "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" but thought better.  There is nothing bad or ugly about the subject at hand, so "Yes, No, Maybe" is a better choice.


High school reunions, like many volunteer works, take lots of dedication from a handful few.  Sometimes the dedication pays off, others times it just falls short of the goal.  Together with a group of similarly dedicated volunteers, I was able to pull off the Silver Reunion for Newtown High School (Elmhurst) Class of 1985, in 2010.  Right after the reunion, some people thought that since many people moved to Florida we should have another in 2012, in Florida, of course.  It did not work out that way.  Many people still live in New York and did not want to travel to Fort Lauderdale.  Others thought it was too soon to have another reunion.  Turn-over rate was high for the volunteers in the Reunion Committee.  Some time before the event date there was not enough people financially committed and the event had to be cancelled.  Everyone got their money back and I told myself not to ever get involved with reunions again.  They can be joyful but also consume much time, sometimes for little result.  Other brave souls have gone ahead with their own year's reunions and the result is a mix bag...


YES! Class of 1972
http://www.newtownhs40threunion.com/
It is on!  Just mere days away from the date of this blog post!


NO! Class of 1985
No need for a URL, it is already over.  I created a Facebook event for it, even a payvment store in Facebook, but in the end there was just not enough interest or financial commitment to keep the event alive.


MAYBE...  Class of 1983
http://www.facebook.com/events/266268740128549/
I would think a thirty-year reunion is a big deal, but for whatever reasons there is not enough people putting up the money to guarantee the event's survival.  The reunion committee needs money up front to pay deposits for the meeting place, perhaps for the D.J. and photographer.  For my year's Silver Reunion, the Committee and other good souls loaned itself some money to get things started but still we needed others' money to keep the process going.  I would hate to see Class of 1983's 30-year reunion cancelled, but that may happen soon unless people start paying for it in sufficient number.  I wish the '83 Committee much luck!

Friend Finder - Beyond Facebook

Facebook is a great place to find high school classmates but it should not be the only option.  Explore all the avenues.  One approach is to use the average search engines, be it Google or one of its contenders.  The trick is to enclose the full name in quotes.  Just typing "John" and "Smith" into Google's search box would give results like "John Wong" and "Peter Smith", among other   Things get better if you have the middle name or middle initial.  When searching with middle initial, be sure to use it with and without the period.  For example, search for "Joe M Wong" as well as "Joe M. Wong".  Always go for the more unique names although I did get lucky and found someone with a common first and last name thanks to his middle initial and a business photo.

There are many other social networks that you should explore.  One big hassle with the web is the need to open accounts as you come across new sites.  Luckily, some of the popular social networks, such as Plaxo, readily accepts accounts from the popular sites, like Google.  Even if you have to create a new account with a site, take the plunge.  Some sites have school networks so there may be someone you know from high school waiting to be found.  I must say my own venture into Friendster, Gather, etc got me only messages from scantily clad women and no new leads.

In this day and age, the ideal contact would have an email address but you don't always get that.  There are many web sites that cull info from the white pages etc to give you info on phone numbers and addresses.  I used ZabaSearch, WhitePages, SwitchBoard, etc. and actually found a few people through those phone directories.  Again, unique names help, although in general these phone directories also list the members of the household.  If you happen to know the names of someone's siblings, high school sweetheart, or a parent, the extra info can help narrow down the results.  With free weekends and weeknights, it may not be so bad, cost-wise, to call people in series until you are done with the results list, but it is better to go with the more likely names first.

With the philosophy of leaving no stones left unturned, find high school friends outside of Facebook means using search engines, coupled with using quotes to keep the first name and last name, or even middle initial, together. Join other social networks and look around.  Every person found can potentially lead to another person, or more. Lastly, while email is ideal phone contacts should not be overlooked.

Find High School Friends On Facebook

I recently had a 25-year reunion with my high school classmates.  Some people liked the event so much they wanted to have another soon, like for the 27th or 30th anniversary.  A committee was quickly formed but it was decided that they will use a professional organizer for help with the locale, hotel, air travel, etc.  I don't know what they will do about finding more classmates.  We had about one hundred classmates for the recent reunion, with perhaps 200 to 300 on Facebook.  Like sending out resumes, the number of people actually going to a reunion will be a percent of the people located, so it helps to find as many people as possible.  Here's what I and other members of my reunion committee did to find people.

Recall that we already had a Google Doc with all the student names from the yearbook and the commencement roster.  The next thing we did was to search for people in Facebook, the definitive social network of the day.  I discovered that there are a few high schools named Newtown around the world.  There was one in Australia, another in Pennsylvania (albeit that one was Marple Newtown High School), one named exactly the same as mine, right nearby in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.  My Newtown was in Elmhurst, Queens, New York.  Facebook is smart enough to offer the choices but people still make mistakes so not everyone who indicated that they graduated from Newtown High in Elmhurst really belong there.

With about 300 people indicating they are Class of 1985 from Elmhurst's Newtown High, the search is almost over, right?  Even if you subtract 5% for those stumblers from the other Newtown, you still have about 280 people to put together a party with, yes?  Unfortunately, some of those people may be just placebooks, i.e. inactive people on Facebook, like those fake books that take up space on a shelf just to show what a full shelf looks like.  Take away another 5% or so.  It's time to tap into the general population on Facebook.

In these days and age, some people think it is easy to find people on the Internet.  Those Classmates.com ads make it sound easy, but it is far from it.  Especially if you don't want to spend any money.  Still, everyone is on Facebook, right?  All you need to do is type in the person's first name and last name then your old friend would be a Friend Request away.  In reality, many of the people we tried to locate had common names that when searched by names alone returned too many hits.  "John Smith" is understandably too common a name, but names in other ethnic groups that may sound uncommon to us turned out to be extremely popular for those cultures.

The clever idea my search partner, M.P., in the Reunion Committee came up with was to search for unique names.  Sure there are some names that we were mistaken about their uniqueness but there are some that are truly unique.  Remember that I mentioned before about the commencement roster listing middle initials?  Combined with the unique names, the middle initials can really help pinpoint a person.  There are many people to find and some people keep in touch with a small circle of friends years after graduation.  Always hope that those people with less common names are still friends with those with common names.  Sometimes we get lucky and the person has a photo that is recognizable.  One of the fun in locating high school classmates was seeing how people change yet certain traits remain.  Find 'em, Friend 'em, let's party!  M.P. was so good at it that she triggered FB's spam detector and got her account suspended.  The lesson here is to go easy with the friending on FB.  Spread the work out among the other board members.

Life is not always so rosy.  There were cases where we found the people, confirmed their identity, maybe even befriended them, only to have them, for whatever reason, drop off FB altogether.  Whenever possible, grab your friends' regular email address and keep it somewhere safe.  Someday FB may start charging money for its use and people may leave it en mass, like some of those groups that sometimes proclaim.