TODAY'S NEWS - QUICKIES THAT CHANGE OFTEN

"I WILL NOT FOLLOW WHERE THE PATH MAY LEAD, BUT I WILL GO WHERE THERE IS NO PATH, AND I WILL LEAVE A TRAIL." Muriel Strode -KHS65 class motto.
"The good old days....when we weren't good and we weren't old" Barbara Schwarz Moss 2010
SEE WWW.KHS65.COM FOR 169 PIX FROM OUR 45TH REUNION - CLICK THE SMALL PHOTO FOR LARGER VERSION. See lots of NEW grade school pix!
CHECK THE LABELS, GO TO KIRKWOOD HISTORY ARTICLES & CLICK THE POST ABOUT FRANCIS SCHEIDEGGER'S PIX FOR A GLIMPSE OF A PLACE I BET EVERYONE REMEMBERS - and much more!


We seem to all be suffering a common problem these days, WHERE DID OUR LIVES GO? Our brains seem to still be 18, but our bodies are talking a different language. Sarah Orne Jewett puts it much more eloquently than do I:

“Neither of my companions was troubled by her burden of years. I hoped in my heart that I might be like them as I lived on into age, and then smiled to think that I too was no longer very young. So we always keep the same hearts, though our outer framework fails and shows the touch of time.”

FOR LATEST NEWS BE SURE TO CHECK OUT KHS65 AT FACEBOOK TOO!


Interactive news, reviews, gossip, musings, activities, photos, mysteries, histories, stories, truths, lies & video tapes from & for graduates of the Kirkwood (MO) High School fabulous class of 1965. Email us anything you would like to share to leslieatkhs65dotcom. See photos at www.khs65.com - comment here or on the website to make yourself heard! FIND US ~ www.khs65.com ~ www.khs65.org ~ FACEBOOK KHS65 ~ http://khs65blog.com ~ KHS65 MAKE IT A HABIT!

Thursday, September 30, 2010

October 1 - JOIN THE KHS CELEBRATION

TOMORROW NIGHT, OCTOBER 1, THE NEW TURF WILL BE INITIATED AS THE PIONEERS FACE THE PARKWAY CENTRAL COLTS AT 7:00 PM. Lots of activities are planned for the night, so click here for all the scoop on how to join in the fun! When the formal dedication of the track and new Chopin entrance takes place, you'll see it here!

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

MUSICIAN & GENTLEMAN, DOUG MCKELVY DIES AT 63

VISITATION: KUTIS - LEMAY FERRY & BUTLER HILL, SUNDAY 10/3 4 TO 8PM; FUNERAL NOON MONDAY FOLLOWED BY BURIAL AT JEFFERSON BARRACKS - JACK TOMAN WILL BE PERFORMING TAPS AT THE BURIAL. Please see my post of 10/19/10 with a tad more about Doug.

I appreciate Leslie Bright Wainwright's just now telling me of the death of our classmate Doug (real name Steven D.) McKelvy. He attended our KHS65 Reunion picnic last month and was looking frail, awaiting the results of recent tests. Doug was a musician and many of you might remember his sitting in with Jack at our reunion picnic last time, in 2005, at the Park. As a kid in grade school at Robinson he sat behind me, and when studying Morse Code for Scouts he'd tap out the various codes on his desk, and with his book in front of me, I'd shake my head sideways if he made an error, but he rarely did, he was a quick learner! We will miss Doug's friendly emails, his musical talent and his always calm, thoughtful demeanor.

So long old friend, rest in peace and love

I just reviewed some old emails from Doug and here is a cute quote he once sent:

As for the groundhog, if he sees his shadow, we'll have 6 more weeks of winter. If he doesn't see his shadow, it'll only be another month and a half.


Doug did his student teaching at KHS and North Middle, and taught for some amount of time at North. Here is a little ditty he sent when we were exploring the idea of a band appearance at a reunion:

On the other hand I have my ugly bari sax, my better tenor has been repaired (I'm still not ready for a lot of solo work with it :-[ ), I have a pretty good alto (I'm a little better on that than tenor), and I'm best on bass guitar (I have a Fender with a Bassman amp 8-) ). I also have flute and clarinet. I have an upright bass, but it needs some work, and my hands are woefully out of shape, so the Fender is a better option.

Now I don't know about you all, but I think a man with the ability to play all those is amazing! One more from Doug, the signature on an email I received from him in July:

Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.
Joshua 1:9


Doug's obituary from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
McKelvy, Steven D. (Doug) Sat., Sept. 25, 2010. Beloved husband of Deborah Ann McKelvy (Steiger); dearest brother of Kathy (the late Gene) Kosek; dear son of the late H. M. Mack and Mary McKelvy; dear brother-in-law of Bill and Pat Stevens; dear uncle of Lisa Cleary, Michael Stevens, Vince Kosek, David Kosek and Kevin Kosek; honorary grandfather of Ashley, Josh and Zach Spindler. Mr. McKelvy was a 20+ year employee of Ameren UE and was also a private electrical engineer consultant. His special interests included music. He played in the Jefferson College Band. He was a graduate of Kirkwood High School, Webster College and Washington University, with degrees in Music & Engineering; was a former member of Southside Assembly of God Church, attended Twin Rivers Worship Center and loved his Alabama football team Roll Tide. Services: Funeral at KUTIS SOUTH COUNTY Chapel, 5255 Lemay Ferry Rd. (at Butler Hill), Mon., Oct. 4, 12 noon. Interment J. B. National Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, memorials to the Jefferson County Rescue Mission appreciated. Visitation Sun., 4-8 p.m.

PAT MOISIO & BROTHER STORY, VIDEO & GREETING CARDS

MY CARDS ARRIVED AND THEY ARE WONDERFUL!!!! I HOPE MANY OF YOU WILL CHECK THEM OUT AND ORDER SOME TO SUPPORT PETER AND HIS EFFORTS, TO SAY NOTHING OF PAT'S EFFORTS TO SUPPORT PETER AND THE UNITED WAY AGENCY PARAQUAD, WHICH DOES SO MUCH TO HELP SO MANY! THANKS PAT & PETER! I've just ordered some greeting cards from Pat's brother Peter, about whom you've read before on this blog. Peter has started selling cards he designs himself, donating the profits back to Paraquad, a United Way organization which helps people in need of assistance. Peter is doing really well with Paraquad. You can go to the link below to see a short but great video featuring our pal Pat and Peter, and you can order Peter's cards, all fully illustrated on the website. Click their link to read more about Peter to see the video, send an email to order the cards. I got Poinsettia for Christmas cards (I'll probably order more, but I don't get into Christmas this early!) and Flag to send to my patriotic group pals...

Here is the link. ENJOY, say hi to Pat, get some nifty cards and feel great about helping all with one little click!!

Monday, September 27, 2010

TIME MAGAZINE - CATHOLIC WOMENPRIESTS - KHS65

In the TIME MAGAZINE of today, 9/27/10, there is an enlightening article about the Roman Catholic Womenpriests, a group which includes our stellar KHS65 classmate Jane Via. They have received PR, good and bad, in the past in local newspapers around the country and on TV, but this is the first mainstream publication of which I am aware that is hitting the subject of the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic Church head on. The link above now gives the full text of the article since that issue is no longer on news-stands. Thanks a bunch to Lou Gossett for alerting me to this great press for our great friend Jane Via, another member of KHS65 making our group look good as we barrel through our lives!


And from National Catholic Review, comes this article, sent to me by Jane, it's long but if you are interested in the subject worth the time:

On Behalf Of NCRonline.org
'Claim Roman Catholic,' says woman priest
Sep. 21, 2010
By Tom Roberts




In a 2006 file photo, Jane Via of the Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community says Mass, assisted by Rod Stephens, a laicized Catholic priest. (Newscom/ZUMA Press/Jim Baird)

SAN DIEGO -- As a 5-year-old child of Presbyterian parents, Jane Via was deeply attracted to the 1950s Catholicism of her friends in her St. Louis neighborhood. That initial allure, however, was the start of a journey of faith that ultimately led her to a position of deep conflict with the authorities in the church she had grown to love.

The 62-year-old Via converted to Catholicism as a young adult. Decades later, she was ordained, first as a deacon in a 2004 ceremony on a boat in the Danube River, and then as a priest in 2006 on another boat, this time in Lake Constance, which has a shoreline shared by Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

Church authorities, of course, would say she is not ordained but rather self-excommunicated. She would reply otherwise, as she did in a July 19 interview here with NCR.

While the situation reaches the “either/or” stage rather quickly in conversation, the reality is something more complex and considered.

It is no little irony that the woman who now leads Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community of 150 members (she makes her living, by the way, as a lawyer with the San Diego district attorney’s office) was smitten with the “concrete” reality of the Catholicism of her childhood.

How did she get the inclination, at age 5, that she wanted to be Catholic?

She said she grew up on a block where there were a lot of little Catholic girls “who ran back and forth, up and down the street, a little pack of girls who all played together. In those days, Catholics couldn’t go to Protestant churches, but Protestants could go to Catholic churches. So if I spent the night at a friend’s house on Saturday night, I went to Mass on Sunday morning. That’s how I was exposed to Catholics, through my friends who went to Catholic schools, played on Catholic baseball teams in the summer, went to confession every Saturday.”

Catholicism’s balance

It sounds like a contemporary argument for renewed emphasis on Catholic identity. But the attraction back then for the budding scholar and daughter of two well-educated parents was a balance to what she perceived as the “very intellectual” approach of the Presbyterian church. “I need spirituality to balance out my kind of spontaneous, intellectual approach to religion,” she said. She found in Catholicism a “balance of symbol, ritual, gesture. ... So I don’t know if it was so much Catholic identity as it was that it filled a huge gap in my life.”

Asked if the 5-year-old on the same block today would feel the pull, she said she didn’t know. “I guess it would depend on the 5-year-old. ... The world has changed so much. I mean the Presbyterian church has changed a lot, too.” She believes that the future of the church will be “not just ecumenical but much more transdenominational. There’s going to be a lot of moving in between -- people will tend to worship perhaps out of their historical tradition or out of a tradition that they choose.”

Her early fascination with Catholicism never went away. In a reversal of the usual go-to-college-and-leave-the-church routine, she went to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and became a Catholic. She didn’t tell her parents until she graduated and by then, she said, “I was 21, I was off to graduate school, I was leaving home.” Her parents weren’t happy, she said, but her father, “really the person of faith in our family,” wrote her a letter saying he honored her choice even if he wasn’t happy with it.

Having earned an undergraduate degree in Spanish language and literature, she went off to Marquette University in Milwaukee for a five-year program for a doctorate in theology.

But a turning point occurred before that, during her junior year of college, when she spent a semester in Spain studying theology with Jesuits and living in an Opus Dei household. While one can hardly expect Opus Dei to cheer the direction she’s taken, she said she found “many wonderful things about the structure of Opus Dei,” while simultaneously gaining new and progressive theological insights from the Jesuits who taught the theology courses at the college she attended.

Following Marquette she got a teaching job at Mercy College in Detroit, at a point when she also decided she wanted to be a lawyer. But she couldn’t afford the tuition on her teaching salary.

She taught there for three years before taking a job at the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution, teaching religious studies. One of the attractions that sealed the deal was when she learned that she could attend the university’s law school for free, and she did.

That turned out to be a good decision because, as she tells it, she was an early casualty of the political culture wars. In 1984 she signed a New York Times ad supporting vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who had drawn fire from the late Cardinal John O’Connor because of her support for legalized abortion. “There were priests who were threatened and nuns who were threatened” for signing the ad, she said, “but I was the only academic who was told, ‘Either retract your name or you’re done.’ ”

By then she was practicing law and teaching part-time and she told the school, “I’m really sorry, but I can’t take my name off.”

‘Radicalizing’ research

The stint at the University of San Diego, however, contributed to her future in ways other than a law degree. When she took the job she was told that she had to teach scripture because her emphasis had been in New Testament studies. “Little did I know how it would radicalize my life, because the contrast between what I learned in graduate school in a Catholic context and what I learned when I had to teach myself how to teach the New Testament was radicalizing.”

She was becoming increasingly aware of women’s issues and recalled that at Marquette, at one point, she had been introduced to a group of people as “This is Jane Via. She’s the ornament in our department.” She said she was probably the youngest female in the department.

The comment was made by “one of the Jesuit guys who I went to school with and liked very much, but that’s how they perceived my place there. I was not really perceived as someone who could probably go on to become a great scholar, and I carried that with me.”

When she began teaching the New Testament, she said, she realized that “what we’re taught as dogma does not come from the New Testament in many, many cases. Specifically with regard to women.” She said what she discovered was “that Jesus was essentially a feminist in his own time, that he traveled with women, he supported himself from their possessions, he ministered to women, he taught women. It was just mind-blowing.”

In 1982, she earned her law degree and was married that same year to Philip J. Faker, a financial planner and investment advisor and “Jane’s biggest fan.” Faker has his own Catholic story. Via describes him as “a driven-away Catholic,” largely because of an incident of deep betrayal of one of his family members by a priest when he was a child.

He missed all of the Second Vatican Council era in the 1960s and refers to his membership in a parish as a child as “kind of a community forced upon me by my parents” until he dropped out. He said his involvement with the Mary Magdalene Apostle Community began by helping Jane set up the church. He said he enjoys the people “and I’m into it for reform. Jane has the talent and the ability and the skills to move the reform movement forward and to actually accomplish some things. I don’t have those skills, but I have the skills that she needs to help her do these things, so when it came time to start the church, I did the legal and the tax and the financial and all that stuff.”

If the church of the ’50s lured Via, she no longer has any nostalgia for those days. The future, she hopes, holds the possibility of “more parishes like the one that I am part of, where Catholics can find, as I like to say, worship with integrity.”

She won’t shrink from the Catholic tag. “Be Catholic,” she says. “Claim Roman Catholic, say, ‘We are Roman Catholic.’ You can say that we’re schismatic, you can say that we’re criminals, you can say that we’re heretics, you can call us anything you want, but we’re not going away. We claim Catholic, and we claim Roman Catholic, and yet we do it differently.”

She said her congregation strives to live Catholicism in a way “that allows us to have integrity about social justice, about equality, about gays and lesbians and their place in human culture, about our connection as Americans to the reality of our impact on the rest of the world.”

The difference, she would say, stems from the discoveries she made when she was preparing those New Testament courses. The central difference from institutional Catholicism as most of the world knows it is the direction in which “we think the Gospel of Jesus demands that [we] go” -- a direction that is “radically inclusive.”

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

JOHNNIE BE GOOD JOHNSON - A Movie and your participation


Those of you who attended KHS65's 25th Silver Anniversary Celebration will no doubt remember that Johnnie "Be Good" Johnson played for our entertainment and enjoyment that night, through the efforts and courtesy of our own Jack Toman Kent. It was a memorable night for that and other reasons.

Now Johnnie's considerably interesting and often controversial story is being made into a movie by St. Louis newscaster and film-maker Art Holliday.
Please read the article and go to the bottom to learn about a fund-raiser to help with money for the film, to be held here in St. Louis SOON - September 19th 7pm at The Sheldon! Tickes are $20 to $30 and can be purchased through MetroTix 314 534 1111 or metrotix.com. Also check out http://www.johnniebegoodthemovie.com/

Thursday, September 9, 2010

FRED LYON FOUNDER OF KATY RAILROAD HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Who knew? Awhile back [sorry for being so slow Alan!] Alan Yount sent me a most interesting and timely article about an aspect of Fred Lyon's activities that few of us probably knew about, well maybe you runners and train buffs did! Seems like coincidences just keep popping up in my world all the time! How about yours? Heck, there are no 6 degrees of separation in MY life, maybe two! Anyway, here's from Alan, then be sure to go to the article link:

"Here are a couple of small world stories. I joined the Katy RR Historical Society & just a couple of days after our lunch [in Jeff City, see post] I got my first newsletter. I was very surprised that Fred Lyon was the founder of the Society & very active in it. It has been so long since college [no kidding Alan] but when I saw Fred's picture & read he grew up in Sedalia, I remembered something. Fred & my mother's only brother, H. W. Harris, not only graduated from Smith Cotton High School the same year, but were very close & best friends. In the late 1960s "H.W." came over to Central Methodist University & Fred, H.W. and I had lunch at the Student Union. How about that for a small world story." This is a timely story, as this year is the 20th anniversary of the Katy Trail, and of course, just last year Maxine Lyons Henty was in our midst at the KHS Athletic HOF induction [see earlier post on this]. THANKS Alan for sharing this -
read the article about Fred here.

UNITED WAY St. Louis 2010 Kick-Off Features OUR OWN!

This just in - our own Pat Moisio Ciapciak and her brother Peter help the St. Louis United Way kick off this year's annual giving drive. In this economy their goal is a hefty one, but with cheerleaders like Pat & Pete they have a chance. Check out the pix of our pals Pat and her brother Peter! You GO guys!!! And GO United Way of Greater St. Louis! Well, the link I had here went to 4 darling photos on the St. Louis United Way Flicker photo album, but each time more were added the older ones were pushed down, so difficult to find and no way to identify them other than the page number, which kept changing. I tried lifting the pix but they are gif files...so if I can figure out how to get them back here I will! Needless to say Peter and Pat were at the United Way Kick Off for this year's campaign and it was obviously a fun party! Pat has been working with the United Way to publicize their efforts and helping her brother Peter publicize Paraquad. Stellar KHS65 member once again contributing to her family and her community in a big way!

You can still go here to see the pix, you just have to go thru the pages to find Pat with her great smile and Peter in a red shirt with thin white stripes. If I can find a way to capture the pix I will!

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

DEATHS IN OUR COMMUNITY & one bright note

I am sorry to report that Frank Rodman died yesterday. There will not be an obituary at Frank's request, gone and in the ground was his wish according to Jim Day. Frank was well-known to many of our classmates as the owner of the Geyer Inn on Geyer Road right across from Kirkwood Park as well as the notorious restaurant The Fireplace. Some of you may remember we had one of our Christmas parties at The Fireplace in the late 80s if memory serves. The Geyer Inn is notorious just for being The Geyer Inn! Their beer kegs watered us at several KHS65 reunion picnics, but I KNOW there are many more interesting stories resting in that bar! Thank you Jim Day for telling me about Frank's passing. THERE WILL BE A PARTY TO REMEMER FRANK ON SATURDAY, 9/11 FROM 2:00 PM AT THE FIREPLACE RESTAURANT.

Also I have learned that the father of Cathy Graf Leonard (Bob Leonard's wife who is also a KHS alum) has recently passed away as well as the mother of Rich Rychlewski. You can see those obits on www.stltoday.com. Our sincerest condolences to the families of our classmates.

On a bright note I just learned that the DVDs of all 4 of The Beatles Ed Sullivan Show appearances are on the market starting today! I want 'em all!!!

All of the Reunion Pictures are now posted at www.khs65.com - if anyone has any more to send I'm happy to get them.