Clarine Brandt Haslag Tells Her Story

I lived in Dudleyville with my two sons and taught school in Kearny and Winkelman until my husband got a job with AMARC here in Tucson. He's an accountant where they keep the old airplanes at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

I presently teach 6th grade math (hard-to-believe I know) and social studies at Gridley Middle School in the TUSD school district. I'm hoping to retire in about three years. With the way our economy and state legislature is going, I might have to work longer.

My oldest son, Bill, is coming home from China in August. He's been there for about three years. He was teaching English at the University of Beijing this past year. He plans to get a Masters in Urban Planning. Tom and I visited with him in China two years ago. I've attached a picture of my tour group with the Chinese military group in front of the Forbidden City (Imperial Palace). Can you find me? (In the red jacket) What a place!

My second son, Matt, is a graphic design artist with Betts Printing in Tucson. I am not a grandmother yet and probably won't be in the near future.

My sister Ellen lives in Winters, California near Sacramento. She is a teacher at a Christian school there where she teaches art and social studies. She is married to a nurse-practioner who she met at NAU (I met mine at NAU too! NAU is a great place to find your future spouse!). She has one daughter who is getting a Masters in theology in Eugene, Oregon and is expecting a baby in December.

Bob Kelahan Tells His Story

Bob, circa 1969

My dad's first job out of college was at the Asarco smelter just outside Salt Lake City that was later sold to Kennecott, so that's where I was born (in a hospital, not the smelter). Asarco transferred him every few years so I grew up in a few different places. That's a plus in that you get to see new places and make new friends, but on the downside it's difficult to make lasting friendships. We moved from Utah first to the Texas gulf coast, then to near Montreal, and then to El Paso. From all that a Texan French Canadian accent, y'all, ay?

Peggy, circa 1980

My dad was transferred to the Hayden smelter and we moved to Kearny in February of '68. So for my first day at RHS I'm wearing an oversized JV baseball letter jacket from my old high school in El Paso. I was certain it would be a perfect chick magnet. They wouldn't know I was nearly the last picked for the team and got to play in only two games. Sadly, I think they soon figured that out when instead of continuing with baseball I tried out for the golf team.

Tim

After graduating I went to Rensselaer, a technical college in upstate New York. Why? - Mostly wanderlust, plus they sent me a really neat looking college catalog. The Navy would be paying for it all, but that committed me to serving four years after college. By my sophomore year it was apparent that my becoming a Navy officer was not in our mutual best interest. I was also getting increasingly concerned about what a chemistry major would do in the Navy - analyze the water outside the ship? You would think I'd have thought all this through before starting down that path, but noooo. Fortunately the policy
allowed me to bail without penalty before starting my junior year. That immediately led to the next problem - how to pay for an expensive college. My parents had moved back to Texas and I had seen enough of New York by then, so the answer was simple - the University of Texas. At the same time my dad and my brother, both engineers, convinced me to switch to chemical engineering. Turned out to be good advice and a good fit for me. My mom's hope for attorney or physician was shot for good.

Dan

I had fond memories of childhood vacations to the St. Louis area to visit grandparents and cousins. So when I had the opportunity to start my career there I jumped at it. That's where I met my wife, Peggy. She was a Montessori kindergarden teacher. I don't recall the attraction - kind of skinny, not very tall, no sports car. Oh, towards her? - Well, she was really cute and her personality was a good contrast with mine (no wisecracks please). Amazingly, she even stayed with me as I went on a never ending search for the ideal job. This led me back to college, then to Chicago briefly, a little longer in eastern Kentucky, and then ten years in Houston. Along the way a few critters joined us. Peggy insisted we name them. So first there was Tim and then Dan while in Kentucky, and then Katie and Jenny while in Houston.

Katie

We had always thought we would someday move back to St. Louis, so when an opportunity eventually came we did just that. We've been back here nearly 20 years now. Monsanto, like many big companies, likes to periodically prune out older workers and my time came in 2005. They want to pay me to leave? Where do I sign?

Jenny

I'm not ready to fully retire yet and Peggy has too many undesirables in my job jar, so I continue to do some projects and consulting in process control and simulation. Lately it's been nearly full time developing training simulators for refineries and chemical plants. It's like developing a flight simulator except instead of getting the student to take off, fly steady, and land, all without crashing, the goal is to start up the plant, make good product, and shut it down, all without it blowing up. Good fun.

Bob

Peggy still teaches part time. All the critters are out of the house now. Fortunately they all live nearby so we get to see them often. Tim is an electrical engineer working in process control. Dan is a restaurant manager. Katie and Jenny are occupational therapists working with special needs children. A side interest with Jenny - she dragged us to Ireland three times to watch her dance with the best. Okay, we did go willingly. She doesn't dance competitively anymore but continues to teach Irish dance part time. And no, she did not get that from me. I can't walk and chew gum at the same time - just ask someone from the golf team…

Peggy

Hobbies: Irish festivals and hiking the national parks (no gum); Favorite sports team: St Louis Cardinals (duh!); Goal: climb Croagh Patrick at age 60; Chance RHS classmate encounter: running into Audrey Burnam on the UT campus (what are the odds of that?).

Kearny memory: The smell of a desert rain. The evening I arrived in Kearny it was after dark and either had just rained or was about to. Our apartment was half way up the hill. Looking down at the lights below I could hear a small group practicing music. The smell in the air was unmistakable and unforgettable. I think you can distinguish that of central Arizona from other desert areas. I am reminded of that smell very vividly whenever passing through central Arizona and a storm is nearby.

Alex and Becky Manriquez Say, "Hi."

Alex '69 and Becky (Foster) '70 Manriquez send their greetings, along with a link to their blog. It has pictures of kids and grandkids and dogs and everything! Check it out here.

Russ Cooper Tells His Story

Except for a stint in the army, my dad was a lifelong Kennecott guy. He and Mom were both only children who grew up in Hurley, New Mexico, where both of their dads also worked for Kennecott. My brother (Paul '72) and I were both born in Salt Lake City (more Kennecott) a few years before we all moved to Hayden. When the house we lived in there found itself in the way of the long conveyor belt that now runs between the crusher and the mill, we moved to Kearny to avoid being bulldozed off the hill. That was in either late 1958 or early 1959.

Kearny (a planned community!) was brand new then, with streets of mud, no fences separating the lots, and a hopeful little mulberry tree in each front yard for landscaping. A bunch of us went to third grade in a portable building that also served as a Baptist church. A real school, paved streets, chain link fences, and many acres of bermuda grass all followed soon enough.

One of my more interesting high school memories is from the very first week or two of my freshman year. That was the first year that the kids from Dudleyville and the other communities south of Hayden were bussed over to Kearny to go to school. So suddenly, instead of everybody already knowing everybody on day one because we had all grown up together, there was this odd "us" (the Kearny kids) and "them" (the Hayden kids) thing going on that none of us had ever experienced before. Obviously, "they" were going through exactly the same thing, except that they must certainly have had "us" and "them" totally backwards!

This whole thing was especially strange for me because I had gone through first and second grade in Hayden with some of some of "them." So a handful of these foreign invaders were actually my friends from a few years earlier. Audrey Burnam, Clarine Brandt, and Art Young come to mind. Long after any notion of "us" and "them" had been forgotten completely, Art and I wound up in the same chemistry class at the university in Tucson. I also remember running into Audrey at some sort of farewell shindig when we were all about to graduate. That was kind of cool.

I learned enough vocabulary at U of A to get an engineering job with Honeywell in Phoenix. Then I learned enough engineering at Honeywell to eventually set myself up as a freelance nerd for hire. That kept me about 110% busy writing embedded microcontroller firmware and PC programs right up until 9/11. Things kind of slacked off starting on 9/12 (literally), and I've been exploring the distinctions between semi-retired, retired, and just plain unemployed ever since. I like "semi-retired" the best. Fortunately, that's the way it's been going for the past few years.

In mid 1978 I bought a brand new Ford Mustang II. It was bright orange with a white top, black interior carpet, and black, orange, and yellow plaid upholstery on the seats. Whoa! Talk about your understated style and grace. That car was it. Well, far too soon after I got this fine vehicle, the girlfriend got somewhat more friendly and we wound up getting married later that year. That very strongly reinforced my great theory that you gotta have great wheels if you want to get the girl. Mysteriously, though, she continued to hang around even after we got rid of that car. Imagine that. I guess either my great theory was completely wrong, or else the Mustang wasn't so hot after all and what she really liked was my boat.

Carol was a music teacher when we met. Then she got a computer science degree and worked for Intel for a while. Then she got enough credentials to be a pastor for a while. Now (2009) she's just finished up a program to learn ASL interpreting. I don't know what she wants to be when she grows up.

Progeny: None. Hobbies: Flying (no longer) and woodworking (more and more). Ridiculous websites: http://www.ibab.org. Residence: Phoenix.

Steve Kuykendall Says, "Hi."

Steve Kuykendall '66 sends his greetings and a picture. Here's what Steve has to say:

I graduated from Ray in 1966. My father (same name) taught at Ray and then at Kearny (Jr High) from 1955 through 1967. My brother Danny and sister Janet (known in the family as Twink) moved to Tucson before they graduated but had many friends in their age group. Danny was in the class of '69 and Janet in '71 or '72.

The Kuykendall kids at San Carlos, Mexico, Christmas 2008: Danny '69, Janet, Steve '66.

Jim Porcher Says, "Hi."

Jim Porcher '69 sends his greetings, along with this picture of himself and a horse named Boomer. That's just so much less confusing than a horse with no name.

Jim has a website, too, where you'll find full contact information in case you want him to make up a cool name for your horse. Or, if you prefer, Jim can even set you up with a new horse that already has a name. That might be better.