AHS Class of '68 35th Reunion

After graduating I entered the U.S. Navy for what to be a two year and out thing. I ended up on active duty for 7 years 8 months. I joined the reserves and stayed in a total of 21 years and 4 months. I enjoyed the travel but not the moving households.

Upon leaving the military, I settled back in Ames, then Huxley, Roland and back to Ames over the next 20 years. I presently live in the far west of Ames. I work for the City of Ames in the Finance Information Services department. My wife of 33 years, Deborah (Silverthorn '70) have enjoyed God's greatest gift of Grandchildren ages 8, 5 and 2 months. One boy and two girls. We have two sons, Chris, of Story City and Curt of Ames. We also have three step-grandchildren.

I enjoy fishing and the outdoors. We are currently planning the outdoor landscaping projects that will take the better part of the next 5 years to complete. The design came from our son, Curt, who is a licensed landscape architect. Needless to say, the design is pretty massive and will include my one desire of a water garden pond and water fall stream. I plan to do much of the work with my son's help and supervision.

I look forward to visits with classmates July 4th. For those who don't make it, I wish you well and hope to see you sometime in the future!

Hi to all. I guess if this Bio thing is going to happen, I'm going to have to be the first.

I have a daughter and son, who have both graduated from college with degrees in Marketing. (Not too bad for a single mom.)

My daughter, Nichol, was just married 3 weeks ago, so I had to put the reunion stuff on hold for a few weeks, while we worked on the wedding. All was beautiful!!!
Her husband is from Orange City,IA..a Dutchman

They currently live in that B-town...Boone. But are looking for an acreage to move onto. Nichol works as a manager for T-Galaxy in Campus town.

My son Tyler is in Tulsa. He works for Ernest and Jullio Gallo Wines. He seems to like the area, but is still looking for that special girl.

I have a couple of jobs. My main one is as a Mathematics Teacher at Valley High School in West Des Moines. I have been there 16 years and gone through many cars driving from Ames.

My second job is as an Image Consultant with BeautiControl Cosmetics. I help everyone look better. I enjoy the difference in working with adults once in a while.

Of course, then I teach some night classes for DMACC and Graceland U..., plus I do some tutoring..So I keep busy.

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at the reunion. Contact your friends and get them to be here. Last check there was about 75-80 people registered.

Hi! I am currently living in China, where I teach kindergarten in an International School. Most of my students are Korean - but we have a few European, other Asian, and American children as well. My husband, Terry, teaches English as a second language in an English center, connected with a local University.

We have two children. Rachel lives in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. She first went there to go to college - loved the area and so stayed.

Josh lives in Waterloo, Iowa - where we still call home. He has a 5 year old son, who is the "sunshine" of our lives.

Our intention is to continue to live in China. We have been there for almost 4 years now, and we have just signed another 2 year contract. We will be in the States during the summer months, but unfortunately, will not be able to attend the reunion.

McCain, Nancy Schloerke

It was a great reunion! It was the first one I could attend. Many of you have been in my thoughts for years. It was fantastic to re-meet and know how fine you are. Don't you think we all look better, and are much more interesting, now that we aren't children anymore?

After high school, I spent 4-years in Iowa City getting an Art Teaching degree. I never did teach, knowing how little I really knew and needing a break from classrooms. I moved back to Ames for a few years to work at the ISU Library and then the ISU Vet School art department.

While working in Ames, I lived in old farmhouses. It was my "Mother Earth" phase during the mid-seventies. Thinking I could winter alone near McCallsburg, I met Jeff McCain (Ft. Dodge, '70), who lived in a neighboring farmhouse. We decided to merge woodpiles and start a family, and moved to another little rural house in the Boone River Valley where our son Zeb was born.

The summer of '78, we set a tipi on a farm near Greenfield and lived there while Jeff built a dairy barn. We morphed into tipi dwellers and spent the next winter camping in the river valley near Dayton. The Iowa climate is too harsh for comfort in tipis so we moved to Colorado in 1979, soon after our daughter Starr was born.

Colorado is sunny & dry, with lots of snow. We spent 12-years in South Park...YES, the same place as the Comedy Central cartoon! We had our third child there, a son named Ewan. I drove a bookmobile throughout South Park and loved sharing books with the mountain folk. Eventually a library branch opened in the historic mining town of Fairplay, in the old stone Court House on the town square. I ran a one-person library and traveled to Denver on weekends to get a Master's Degree in Library Science.

We moved to Leadville in 1992, where I became the director of Leadville's public library. I love to say "It's the highest public library in North America!" Denver is the "Mile High City" and Leadville is the "Two Mile High City." We own a little piece of land near timberline and also rent a house in town. We built a log cabin and keep a sled dog team on our land.

Life is great! I'm a grandma, with an empty nest, in a small mountain town, in the sanctuary of a library, under a deep blue sky, wrapped in a horseshoe of Rocky Mountains, hiking & reading, and happy.

I worked in telecommunications in New Jersey for seventeen years. I was at Bellcore (now Telcordia) in Piscataway and Morristown for ten years, starting in the mid-1980s, where I wrote software documentation (Bellcore maintained several million lines of code for the so-called Baby Bells back then), managed projects on the development end, did training, etc. Typical middle management, administrative B.S., mostly, but interesting work too, sometimes. My wife Laura and I bought a fixer-upper in Hunterdon County, and I put a lot of sweat equity into it. We traveled, we occasionally went into "The City," and we had our groups of friends. Pretty much the standard suburban NJ shtick.

Bellcore headed for the dumper in the mid-1990s, and a lot of us older employees were jettisoned. I took a job with Bell Labs (part of Lucent) in Whippany, where I again did training development, delivery, and documentation for access systems. (Your voice and your DSL connection may very well be coming through one of the application packs that our group developed. Blame me if you want for your snail’s-pace downloads.)

Lucent was a great place to be—the late 1990s were a real heyday there, with wireless markets going nuts—but as those of you holding high-tech portfolios know only too well, the company joined the general industry meltdown two years ago. Again, a lot of us were shown the door. I lasted through most of 2002, but right now, I’m one of thousands of NJ telecom employees "in transition," as the euphemism has it. Not much fun, but at least I’m in fairly respectable company, with lots of systems and software engineers, programmers, hardware specialists, systems administrators, and testers in the same boat. We keep in close touch. It makes for a uniquely bizarre kind of support group, although we don’t call it that. Interesting times . . .

I seem to remember getting divorced in the early 1990s. Ancient history, considering how rapidly things change anymore. Currently, I’m with Sarah, an absolutely terrific Vassar grad and certified Jersey Girl. (I still don’t quite understand Tom Waits’ lyrics on that subject; I’ll drop in on my neighbor Bruce Springsteen sometime and ask him.) She’s an attorney working in legal publishing out of Morristown. We’ve traveled to some fun places, Ireland most recently, where I traced the Scots side of my family (the Maceoghainns/Ewings) at the Ulster Historical Foundation in Belfast.

In the seventeen years I’ve been here, I’ve become very fond of West Jersey (don’t buy those idiot Sopranos stereotypes). Hard to believe how much of my life has taken place here. My folks are still in Ames and doing fine, living at Green Hills when they’re not traveling. My sister Nancy and her husband shuttle between homes in Seattle and Spokane, WA, and I visit them every Christmas, where I meet my folks. My sister’s eldest girl just graduated from college. At eighty-five, my father still likes to ski on Mt. Spokane. (Although I’m amazed at his energy, frankly I try not to let him get too close behind me on the steeper slopes. Fears, I guess, about literally going with one’s boots on—I’m talking about both him and myself.)

I’ll be in Ames for the reunion. I’ll try to disguise my codger’s pre-Cambrian appearance, or try to convince myself that the twisted, dried-out old husk look is fashionable.

Growing up in Ames, my preconceptions of my future adult life were vague and expectations even vaguer. Life has certainly been different from what idealized images were presented me by the prevailing reality of Ames in the ‘50s and ‘60s, educational environments and the media of the era.

Shortly after graduation I signed on for a two-year enlistment in the Marine Corps. I was awarded the deluxe travel package: an all-expense paid tour in Vietnam. Looking back on that year it seemed as long as the entire decade of the ‘90s. With American involvement winding down in 1970, I was made a civilian on arrival in the states while still 19. A year at University of Iowa and four more years studying graphic design and illustration at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis sent me stumbling into the “real world”, student portfolio in hand in search of a job.

Change makes me as uncomfortable as it does the next person, but change has been the one constant in my career (the “impermanence” the Buddha spoke of, he must have been in advertising.) Following eleven years as an art director at various advertising agencies, I started my own design studio in 1986. Graphic design went digital about 1990 and I went along, trading in pencils and technical pens for graphics software, their steep learning curves and frequent upgrades.

While I still art direct print campaigns, illustrate and occasionally write copy (certainly a disturbing thought to any of my AHS English teachers), increasingly the Internet is my primary medium, as much “market demand” as interest. A collection of fellow misfits: illustrators, photographers and film/video people serve in lieu of a company. Samples of what I do are at: www.mcmillen-design.com
A site for my illustration is at: www.mcmillen-design.com/illustration.html

I met Susan (Rock Island Class of ‘70) in January1971 on a frozen streetcorner in downtown Davenport, Iowa (not exactly springtime in Paris but it had to do.) We were married the following November and still are after 32 years. She suffered through the lean school years and has held on for the rollercoaster ride since. Living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for the last half of the 70s, we moved to Minneapolis in 1981 where we still reside. Susan works at a Minneapolis law firm, enjoying the downtown amenities and the variety of people. A nice feature of the Twin Cities is almost everyone here is from somewhere else.

Our son Tom was born the week I graduated from art school in 1975. Fascinated with history and proficient with digital graphics, he’s still not sure what he wants to do with his life, career-wise. Putting his “Gen-X starter marriage” behind him, he now lives with his girlfriend in North Minneapolis.

My spare time is spent biking in the summer, location photography, and involvement with my Scottish clan (that’s a “C” not a “K”) initiating a midwestern branch. I spent considerable time in recent years researching both sides of my family to the pre-Revolutionary American colonies and earlier.

WOW! What a great reunion! Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make it happen! It was so much fun visiting with everyone and catching up on your lives. Thanks to the spouses for putting up with all our stories and I was so glad I got to chit-chat with a lot of you. What a wonderful bunch of friends I have! I thought I better get my bio done and hope that everyone will too as at my age, I can't remember exactly where everyone was and I would like to read yours to keep it all straight!

I'm still in Beulah, CO where I've been since 1976 and still teaching children with special needs. When I'm not battling for that cause, I enjoy cranking up the blues, digging in the dirt, sitting around a campfire, and watching the stars when I can stay up that late. My husband Dan of 27 years is a brick mason and keeps busy year around. He recently won an award for the best craftsmanship in the state of Colorado...cool! I keep him busy building more brick patios and flower beds around the house, but I give him lots of breaks! Honest, I do! We are lucky to have two great sons, Chad 24 and Matt 20. Last August, during our drought, Matt married his high school sweetheart and lives in Colorado City, CO. Chad was glad to get out of the small town life and lives in Denver. After hearing about some of your grand children at the reunion, I think I could handle being called grandma, but hope it's not for a few more years! I've had a great life and can't wait to see what the next 35 years will bring! The lotto would be nice!

If you ever get out this way, stop by! The door is always opened and a cold Corona will be in the frig waiting for you! Hope to see you all again in 2008, if not before! God bless you all! Love as always, Marlene


	Engelhardt, Rich After graduating I entered the U.S. Navy for what to be a two year and out thing. I ended up on active duty for 7 years 8 months. I joined the reserves and stayed in a total of 21 years and 4 months. I enjoyed the travel but not the moving households. Upon leaving the military, I settled back in Ames, then Huxley, Roland and back to Ames over the next 20 years. I presently live in the far west of Ames. I work for the City of Ames in the Finance Information Services department. My wife of 33 years, Deborah (Silverthorn '70) have enjoyed God's greatest gift of Grandchildren ages 8, 5 and 2 months. One boy and two girls. We have two sons, Chris, of Story City and Curt of Ames. We also have three step-grandchildren. I enjoy fishing and the outdoors. We are currently planning the outdoor landscaping projects that will take the better part of the next 5 years to complete. The design came from our son, Curt, who is a licensed landscape architect. Needless to say, the design is pretty massive and will include my one desire of a water garden pond and water fall stream. I plan to do much of the work with my son's help and supervision. I look forward to visits with classmates July 4th. For those who don't make it, I wish you well and hope to see you sometime in the future! Fraser, Susan Bunce Hi to all. I guess if this Bio thing is going to happen, I'm going to have to be the first. My life is alway busy, but not too monumental. I have a daughter and son, who have both graduated from college with degrees in Marketing. (Not too bad for a single mom.) My daughter, Nichol, was just married 3 weeks ago, so I had to put the reunion stuff on hold for a few weeks, while we worked on the wedding. All was beautiful!!! Her husband is from Orange City,IA..a Dutchman (We are growing tulips now.) They currently live in that B-town...Boone. But are looking for an acreage to move onto. Nichol works as a manager for T-Galaxy in Campus town. My son Tyler is in Tulsa. He works for Ernest and Jullio Gallo Wines. He seems to like the area, but is still looking for that special girl. I have a couple of jobs. My main one is as a Mathematics Teacher at Valley High School in West Des Moines. I have been there 16 years and gone through many cars driving from Ames. My second job is as an Image Consultant with BeautiControl Cosmetics. I help everyone look better. I enjoy the difference in working with adults once in a while. Of course, then I teach some night classes for DMACC and Graceland U..., plus I do some tutoring..So I keep busy. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at the reunion. Contact your friends and get them to be here. Last check there was about 75-80 people registered. See you July 4th !!! Susan Bunce Fraser Koeneke, Karen Taylor Hi! I am currently living in China, where I teach kindergarten in an International School. Most of my students are Korean - but we have a few European, other Asian, and American children as well. My husband, Terry, teaches English as a second language in an English center, connected with a local University. We have two children. Rachel lives in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. She first went there to go to college - loved the area and so stayed. Josh lives in Waterloo, Iowa - where we still call home. He has a 5 year old son, who is the "sunshine" of our lives. Our intention is to continue to live in China. We have been there for almost 4 years now, and we have just signed another 2 year contract. We will be in the States during the summer months, but unfortunately, will not be able to attend the reunion. We wish everyone the best! Karen Taylor Koeneke McCain, Nancy Schloerke It was a great reunion! It was the first one I could attend. Many of you have been in my thoughts for years. It was fantastic to re-meet and know how fine you are. Don't you think we all look better, and are much more interesting, now that we aren't children anymore? After high school, I spent 4-years in Iowa City getting an Art Teaching degree. I never did teach, knowing how little I really knew and needing a break from classrooms. I moved back to Ames for a few years to work at the ISU Library and then the ISU Vet School art department. While working in Ames, I lived in old farmhouses. It was my "Mother Earth" phase during the mid-seventies. Thinking I could winter alone near McCallsburg, I met Jeff McCain (Ft. Dodge, '70), who lived in a neighboring farmhouse. We decided to merge woodpiles and start a family, and moved to another little rural house in the Boone River Valley where our son Zeb was born. The summer of '78, we set a tipi on a farm near Greenfield and lived there while Jeff built a dairy barn. We morphed into tipi dwellers and spent the next winter camping in the river valley near Dayton. The Iowa climate is too harsh for comfort in tipis so we moved to Colorado in 1979, soon after our daughter Starr was born. Colorado is sunny & dry, with lots of snow. We spent 12-years in South Park...YES, the same place as the Comedy Central cartoon! We had our third child there, a son named Ewan. I drove a bookmobile throughout South Park and loved sharing books with the mountain folk. Eventually a library branch opened in the historic mining town of Fairplay, in the old stone Court House on the town square. I ran a one-person library and traveled to Denver on weekends to get a Master's Degree in Library Science. We moved to Leadville in 1992, where I became the director of Leadville's public library. I love to say "It's the highest public library in North America!" Denver is the "Mile High City" and Leadville is the "Two Mile High City." We own a little piece of land near timberline and also rent a house in town. We built a log cabin and keep a sled dog team on our land. Life is great! I'm a grandma, with an empty nest, in a small mountain town, in the sanctuary of a library, under a deep blue sky, wrapped in a horseshoe of Rocky Mountains, hiking & reading, and happy. McKeown, Roger So what’s new with me (besides my having grown insufferably long-winded)? I worked in telecommunications in New Jersey for seventeen years. I was at Bellcore (now Telcordia) in Piscataway and Morristown for ten years, starting in the mid-1980s, where I wrote software documentation (Bellcore maintained several million lines of code for the so-called Baby Bells back then), managed projects on the development end, did training, etc. Typical middle management, administrative B.S., mostly, but interesting work too, sometimes. My wife Laura and I bought a fixer-upper in Hunterdon County, and I put a lot of sweat equity into it. We traveled, we occasionally went into "The City," and we had our groups of friends. Pretty much the standard suburban NJ shtick. Bellcore headed for the dumper in the mid-1990s, and a lot of us older employees were jettisoned. I took a job with Bell Labs (part of Lucent) in Whippany, where I again did training development, delivery, and documentation for access systems. (Your voice and your DSL connection may very well be coming through one of the application packs that our group developed. Blame me if you want for your snail’s-pace downloads.) Lucent was a great place to be—the late 1990s were a real heyday there, with wireless markets going nuts—but as those of you holding high-tech portfolios know only too well, the company joined the general industry meltdown two years ago. Again, a lot of us were shown the door. I lasted through most of 2002, but right now, I’m one of thousands of NJ telecom employees "in transition," as the euphemism has it. Not much fun, but at least I’m in fairly respectable company, with lots of systems and software engineers, programmers, hardware specialists, systems administrators, and testers in the same boat. We keep in close touch. It makes for a uniquely bizarre kind of support group, although we don’t call it that. Interesting times . . . I seem to remember getting divorced in the early 1990s. Ancient history, considering how rapidly things change anymore. Currently, I’m with Sarah, an absolutely terrific Vassar grad and certified Jersey Girl. (I still don’t quite understand Tom Waits’ lyrics on that subject; I’ll drop in on my neighbor Bruce Springsteen sometime and ask him.) She’s an attorney working in legal publishing out of Morristown. We’ve traveled to some fun places, Ireland most recently, where I traced the Scots side of my family (the Maceoghainns/Ewings) at the Ulster Historical Foundation in Belfast. In the seventeen years I’ve been here, I’ve become very fond of West Jersey (don’t buy those idiot Sopranos stereotypes). Hard to believe how much of my life has taken place here. My folks are still in Ames and doing fine, living at Green Hills when they’re not traveling. My sister Nancy and her husband shuttle between homes in Seattle and Spokane, WA, and I visit them every Christmas, where I meet my folks. My sister’s eldest girl just graduated from college. At eighty-five, my father still likes to ski on Mt. Spokane. (Although I’m amazed at his energy, frankly I try not to let him get too close behind me on the steeper slopes. Fears, I guess, about literally going with one’s boots on—I’m talking about both him and myself.) I’ll be in Ames for the reunion. I’ll try to disguise my codger’s pre-Cambrian appearance, or try to convince myself that the twisted, dried-out old husk look is fashionable. McMillen, Mike Growing up in Ames, my preconceptions of my future adult life were vague and expectations even vaguer. Life has certainly been different from what idealized images were presented me by the prevailing reality of Ames in the ‘50s and ‘60s, educational environments and the media of the era. Shortly after graduation I signed on for a two-year enlistment in the Marine Corps. I was awarded the deluxe travel package: an all-expense paid tour in Vietnam. Looking back on that year it seemed as long as the entire decade of the ‘90s. With American involvement winding down in 1970, I was made a civilian on arrival in the states while still 19. A year at University of Iowa and four more years studying graphic design and illustration at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis sent me stumbling into the “real world”, student portfolio in hand in search of a job. Change makes me as uncomfortable as it does the next person, but change has been the one constant in my career (the “impermanence” the Buddha spoke of, he must have been in advertising.) Following eleven years as an art director at various advertising agencies, I started my own design studio in 1986. Graphic design went digital about 1990 and I went along, trading in pencils and technical pens for graphics software, their steep learning curves and frequent upgrades. While I still art direct print campaigns, illustrate and occasionally write copy (certainly a disturbing thought to any of my AHS English teachers), increasingly the Internet is my primary medium, as much “market demand” as interest. A collection of fellow misfits: illustrators, photographers and film/video people serve in lieu of a company. Samples of what I do are at: www.mcmillen-design.com A site for my illustration is at: www.mcmillen-design.com/illustration.html I met Susan (Rock Island Class of ‘70) in January1971 on a frozen streetcorner in downtown Davenport, Iowa (not exactly springtime in Paris but it had to do.) We were married the following November and still are after 32 years. She suffered through the lean school years and has held on for the rollercoaster ride since. Living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for the last half of the 70s, we moved to Minneapolis in 1981 where we still reside. Susan works at a Minneapolis law firm, enjoying the downtown amenities and the variety of people. A nice feature of the Twin Cities is almost everyone here is from somewhere else. Our son Tom was born the week I graduated from art school in 1975. Fascinated with history and proficient with digital graphics, he’s still not sure what he wants to do with his life, career-wise. Putting his “Gen-X starter marriage” behind him, he now lives with his girlfriend in North Minneapolis. My spare time is spent biking in the summer, location photography, and involvement with my Scottish clan (that’s a “C” not a “K”) initiating a midwestern branch. I spent considerable time in recent years researching both sides of my family to the pre-Revolutionary American colonies and earlier. It was good seeing all those who attended the reunion again. Quillen, Marlene Daley WOW! What a great reunion! Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make it happen! It was so much fun visiting with everyone and catching up on your lives. Thanks to the spouses for putting up with all our stories and I was so glad I got to chit-chat with a lot of you. What a wonderful bunch of friends I have! I thought I better get my bio done and hope that everyone will too as at my age, I can't remember exactly where everyone was and I would like to read yours to keep it all straight! I'm still in Beulah, CO where I've been since 1976 and still teaching children with special needs. When I'm not battling for that cause, I enjoy cranking up the blues, digging in the dirt, sitting around a campfire, and watching the stars when I can stay up that late. My husband Dan of 27 years is a brick mason and keeps busy year around. He recently won an award for the best craftsmanship in the state of Colorado...cool! I keep him busy building more brick patios and flower beds around the house, but I give him lots of breaks! Honest, I do! We are lucky to have two great sons, Chad 24 and Matt 20. Last August, during our drought, Matt married his high school sweetheart and lives in Colorado City, CO. Chad was glad to get out of the small town life and lives in Denver. After hearing about some of your grand children at the reunion, I think I could handle being called grandma, but hope it's not for a few more years! I've had a great life and can't wait to see what the next 35 years will bring! The lotto would be nice! If you ever get out this way, stop by! The door is always opened and a cold Corona will be in the frig waiting for you! Hope to see you all again in 2008, if not before! God bless you all! Love as always, Marlene Homepage \| E-mail Directory \| Tour the School \| Reunions Past & Future \| Biography Submission Revised 14 March 2004 \| Maintained by McMillen Design