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Tuesday, May 20, 2014
From The Struggle Against The American War Budget
Thursday, May 22, 11am-2pm
Thursday: Budget for All Lobby Day! Join us!
Thursday, May 22, 11am-2pm
*** Start time changed to
11 am! ***
Massachusetts State House
Meet in 4th floor
cafeteria
Supported
by 75% of voters in 91 cities and towns across the state, the Budget
for All resolutions, S.1750 and H.3211, are pending before the
Massachusetts House and Senate’s committees on Ways and Means.
Can
you help? With over 50 legislators to visit, we need YOU on
May 22 to make sure all of them know about the Budget
for All!
No
lobbying experience needed! We will start with updates and background
information on the Budget
for All, then divide up into groups. Each group will visit 8-10
offices during the day.
Please
let us know you're coming! Sign up online, call 617-354-2169, or
email info@budget4allmass.org.
Stop
the Cuts · Invest in Jobs · End Corporate Tax Breaks · Reduce
Military Spending
Budget
for All!
11
Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Budget4AllMass.org • (617) 354-2169 • info@Budget4AllMass.org
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United for
Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and
community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed
after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic
justice.
Help us continue to do this critical work! Make
a donation to UJP today.
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Upcoming Events:
From The Struggle Against War
The Teachers of Norway:
An Oratorio
Severyn
Bruyn
(The
libretto is based on Gene Sharp’s interviews with Norway Teachers and
official reports.)
Libretto
Oh. Here's my
husband He was sent to a concentration camp. (Oh) The police knocked on my door in March nineteen
forty two. He was shocked. (Oh) We did not know what to do.
One thousand teachers were arrested in Norway. They defied Quisling. They
refused to join the Nazis. Oh! What to do!
Quisling
said: "All teachers in Norway must sign an Oath to obey the Nazi State
You must sign an Oath of loyalty
to us!!
"Obey!" Who are
we? Will we stand here like trolls? No! No! Hail, Hail to Norway. We cannot let
them do this! The king and his family must escape. All Jews must leave this
country now. Hitler says we are part of the Aryan race. (My God) He will save us
from the British and from the Jews. He's mad He's insane. We will not (No) talk
with Germans. Not at all! We will not talk to Germans. Do not speak German. I am
not a pacifist. No, No!
Norway is
controlled by the Nazis. We refuse to speak. Norway is based on terror. We must
go underground. Norway is becoming destroyed. What can we do? Oh. Some of us are
terrified. Others filled with rage.
Let's
organize and go underground. No! No! No! No! NO! NO! We do not want a
dictatorship based on fear and force. We will not obey! We will fight! We will
fight them! We will wage war. We'll resist. We're going to
fight
The Nazis try
to control us. Quisling forced all citizens to give up their radios to the
government. Radios were seized. We hide them. We hide them. We wore badges to
identify ourselves. Then... Quisling then banned all badges of resistance. We
hide them. We hide them. Resistance.
We talked of
revolution. Dangerous. What could we do? We hold meetings. I was the “contact
man” for our school district. Quisling said: "Obey or go to prison." We want our
freedom. We want to be free again. Quisling created a Nazi union for teachers.
He ordered his portrait hung in each school. We said "No"! We said No! He made
plans for a Nazi Youth Movement. We said: No. No. We said No. This is our
country. Here we live or die.
We organized.
We put together our own movement underground. We wrote underground letters to
each other. My job is to support teachers who resisted. We fought Quisling
through our movement for freedom. (We will not join the Nazi movement.) We will
not teach Nazi textbooks.
I will not
teach. I will not teach. I will not teach. I will not teach. We will not teach.
We will not teach. We will not teach Nazi texts. We refuse. We will fight all
Nazis. We fight by not obeying them.
Ten thousand
teachers fought the German state. Ten thousand said NO. They said NO! NO! NO!
NO! We will not teach. We refuse to teach. Not us. It is a matter of Conscience.
It's our conscience. We will not teach. Resistance grows.
We Bishops say
"No." We parents say no! "No" Clergy resign. No. Professors quit. Quisling does
not know what to do. What could this dictator do? He can do nothing. What will
Quisling do?
Quisling shut
down all schools. He made it official. Oh. We live in a total state. Yes!
Quisling struck back and shut down all schools. Parents wrote thousands of
letters. Dangerous. (Angrily.) They took the risk of their lives in this step.
Woe to Quisling. We will stop him. “Open up our schools!" Or we will teach
without your schools. We will teach our children how to fight Nazis. We teach
now in private homes secretly in our own homes. Stop the Nazis. Quisling
threatens parents with prison. One thousand teachers are arrested today. What
can we (Oh) do now? We are helpless before Quisling.
I was among
the thousand that were taken. They took me too. I was among the thousand that
were taken to prison. Six hundred of us are sent to a concentration camp (where
they suffered). Some were tortured, and beaten to death. My friend died. Oh
God!
Children
watched as we moved in cattle cars. So a long the way... Children came to sing
songs to them at train stations. We were overwhelmed. They loved their teachers.
Germans stood in charge. I became the translator as they began to starve us. In
the morning, What? We got coffee that is all. In the afternoon we got some hot
water soup. Dinner was small slices of bread. No mattress to sleep upon. Hard
floors were for sleep and for collapsing. Each morning we do "torture
gymnastics." Guards would tie our hands behind our backs tightly and make us
crawl in deep snow. We were suffocating each day.
They are above
the Arctic Circle, It is freezing there and we are worried that they will die
there and no one will know what happened to them. Some are being tortured. (They
are being tortured and they may be killed at any time. I know they are
suf-'fring. What can we do? What can we do to help them? We know they are
freezing there in the Arctic.
We are freezing
here. Death is near. Some of us caught pneumonia and blacked out for days. (They
will die,) Thirty-two of us gave up but six hundred and eighty of us stayed and
lived through the wretchedness. (They lived through it. They lived to tell the
story of these camps of torture, pain, and torment.) We stayed. (Thank God. They
endured. They stayed to tell us the story. Some were maimed for life.) Some
experienced emotional breakdowns. Ten died from torture, others lived in agony.
(Tell us what happened!)
Torture and
breakdowns. It was cold. It was freezing. Cold. It was very cold, cold, cold.
(We worried. You would all die from the cold and be tortured to death,)
Friends lost their eyes in hard labor, Oh. We worked night and day for Germans.
(Were friends killed?) Yes, a friend of mine was killed loading supplies.
(Torture?) My friend broke his arms and one leg carrying loads. Straining,
pulling, carrying, laboring hard. We did not feel like heroes. We worked night
and day in the Arctic cold and darkness. We sang songs and gave lectures in some
spare time. We wrote our own songs and we strategized.
Some of us
were put in fox cages. Forty prisoners slept in a row so close, so tight; so
fixed that no one could turn without disturbing all. Contagious diseases swept
the camp Men became deadly sick. This was the "dark time" in the Arctic. No sun.
Just night all day and night; blackness (darkness). It was black cold. Pitch
cold.
And with
you?
The
government tried to test our stamina at home. We stood the test. (Good for you.)
Quisling tried to open the schools and then tried to make us members of the
state union. We refused Quisling knew not to take strong measures. We were
organized. Quisling stormed and raged. He came to our school and arrested me.
(What?) We said the Nazis should arrest us all. All of us. (All of you?) Put us
all in jail. The Nazis were powerless at home. Did we help?
Four hundred of
us were released. The Nazis lost. Oh. We won. Now we can come home to stay. Yes,
we won. What more can we say for others to know what happened? We stayed
together and built a "fund" for all those families left behind without fathers.
What did you do? What did we do?
(Singers all
in counterpoint.)
Well, We kept
track of the Nazis. They wanted to replace our Parliament with a total state. (I
tore out the pages of textbooks that were based on Nazi propaganda.) What did
you do? What did we do? Well, We all pledged to stay independent of them and hid
all our money and put away our treasures from view. Quisling wanted to get
control over all Norway in the eyes of the world. Well, Quisling wanted us in
high school to dress in uniforms like the Nazis but we said we would wear our
own clothes. You cannot stop us from wearing our own clothes in school. We would
not allow Nazification in our public schools. (My father was
arrested.)
The Nazis
said to me to me “Let’s have a Sports Day for all young people to join in a
cross-country ski race. But, we said “No!” No! No!” We will sing patriotic songs
to them and they could nothing to stop us from singing. The Red Cross tried to
give food to prisoners but the Nazis stole it. Oh. My father took notes on all
that happened and so I know I’m telling the truth about events in awful times.
Professors were arrested; Bishops dismissed. People were fired but we kept on
protesting everyday. Yes, to the end of those awful days before we got back our
freedom.
Quisling
admitted his defeat.
Now we can
dance. Now we can dance and sing together once again and celebrate our win over
Quisling. Quisling admitted his defeat and so now we can dance and sing together
about our victory. We won with the strength and power of our people to fight and
stand against the demands of a dictator who depends on us. We would not obey him
and this requires a faith. Yes, a lot of faith in our selves and with courage to
risk all lives for freedom and democracy for all our citizens. It requires
courage to die for your country. Thank God we also had faith in our selves and
that is how we won the war.
Here is our
new Anthem. We defeated our invaders without killing them. We suffered but
carried on to win a nonviolent war. We won back our freedom. We’re proud of our
work. We saved a lot of lives by civilian defense. We have a lot more to learn
but let us teach our children and all future generations.
__._,_.___
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.gif)
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
VI: Disaffection in the Army
For our second piece, we are grateful to Julian Putkowski for permission to publish his interview with Dave Wallis, a Young Communist League activist, who carried on the class struggle while serving with the British army in Egypt. The interview reveals details of the methods of political organisation and covert activities in the British army in Egypt during the Second World War. This piece is supplemented by Ian Birchall’s interview with Duncan Hallas, concentrating on dissent amongst the British forces in Egypt in 1946.
Disaffection amongst the ranks of the British army in the Second World War is dealt with in two publications by Raymond Challinor, The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War, Bewick Press, Whitely Bay 1995, pp. 79–86; Military Discipline and Working Class Resistance in World War II, What Next?, no. 17, 2000, pp. 34–7.
Also of interest are Class War on the Home Front, Wildcat, 1986, which contains Socialists and the Army, reprinted from Solidarity, August/September 1942, reviewed by Martin Durham, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Volume 54, part 1, Spring 1989. Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India’s Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942–1945, Michigan 1994, deals partly with the mutinies in the Indian army, reviewed by Tariq Ali, The Third Man, Guardian, 24 May 1994; David Duncan, Mutiny in the RAF: The Air Force Strikes of 1946, with a Foreword by John Saville, Socialist History Society Occasional Papers Series, no. 8. Noel Crusz, The Cocos Islands Mutiny, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, WA 2001, describes the mutiny of gunners in the Ceylon Garrison Artillery on 8–9 May 1942, which resulted in three Ceylonese mutineers being executed.
For further information on the Cairo Forces’ Parliament, see Murray Armstrong, The Cairo Commons, Guardian, 27 May 1989; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, War and the International, London 1986, pp. 88–9 (the forces’ parliaments in Cairo and Cyrenaica where Workers International League member Arthur Ledbetter was Prime Minister and Home Secretary); Tony Aitman, The War Within the War, Militant, 15 September 1989; The Eighth Army Defends Workers’ Right to Strike (an excerpt from Labor Action quoting the Eighth Army News), Workers Liberty, no. 22, June 1995, p. 11; Harry Ratner, Reluctant Revolutionary, Socialist Platform, London 1994, pp. 49ff. Gerry R. Rubin’s Durban 1942: A British Troopship Revolt (Hambledon Press, London 1992) investigates, especially from a legal perspective, events on 13 January 1942 when hundreds of army and air force servicemen refused to board an eastwards-bound British troopship, the City of Canterbury. Albert Meltzer’s I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels (AK Press, Edinburgh 1996) has a section in Chapter 5 on the strikes for demobilisation in Egypt and the Cairo Parliament. Vote for Them, a television play about the Cairo Forces Parliament, was screened on BBC2 on 2 June 1989. Of related interest is Evangelos Spyropoulos, The Greek Military (1909-–1941) and the Greek Mutinies in the Middle East (1941–1944), Eastern European Monographs, Boulder, CO 1993.
David Renton, Bread and Freedom
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
VI: Disaffection in the Army
in the Second World War
The first piece in this section is an article by David Renton on Trotskyists in Egypt during and immediately after the Second World War. The article is particularly concerned with relationships between the British Trotskyists and the Egyptian Trotskyist organisation Bread and Freedom. The article draws on David Renton’s wider researches into Egyptian Trotskyism, and comes replete with many footnotes pointing out guides for further reading, as well as to the whereabouts of source materials. Bread and Freedom is an under-researched organisation. A few articles did appear in the contemporary left press, including J. Damien, Social and Political Conditions In Egypt Today, Fourth International, Volume 7, no. 7, July 1946; Egypte: Un Manifeste Programmatique Des Trotskystes Égyptiens, Quatrième Internationale, July–August 1947; and Egypt, Fourth International, Volume 8, no. 7, July–August 1947.
David Renton has recently tried to correct this omission, publishing a full-length history of the Egyptian group: Soldats britanniques et trotskysme égyptien: Pain et Liberté, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 68, 2000, pp. 95–120. He has also published an article on the web, Egypt: A People’s History, Voice of the Turtle (at http://voiceoftheturtle.org/), July 2001. In addition he is co-author (with Anne Alexander) of a chapter in a book that will appear this year, Imperialism and Resistance in Egypt 1890–1990 in L. Zeilig, Marxism and Africa, New Clarion Press, Bristol 2002.For our second piece, we are grateful to Julian Putkowski for permission to publish his interview with Dave Wallis, a Young Communist League activist, who carried on the class struggle while serving with the British army in Egypt. The interview reveals details of the methods of political organisation and covert activities in the British army in Egypt during the Second World War. This piece is supplemented by Ian Birchall’s interview with Duncan Hallas, concentrating on dissent amongst the British forces in Egypt in 1946.
Disaffection amongst the ranks of the British army in the Second World War is dealt with in two publications by Raymond Challinor, The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War, Bewick Press, Whitely Bay 1995, pp. 79–86; Military Discipline and Working Class Resistance in World War II, What Next?, no. 17, 2000, pp. 34–7.
Also of interest are Class War on the Home Front, Wildcat, 1986, which contains Socialists and the Army, reprinted from Solidarity, August/September 1942, reviewed by Martin Durham, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Volume 54, part 1, Spring 1989. Peter Ward Fay, The Forgotten Army: India’s Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942–1945, Michigan 1994, deals partly with the mutinies in the Indian army, reviewed by Tariq Ali, The Third Man, Guardian, 24 May 1994; David Duncan, Mutiny in the RAF: The Air Force Strikes of 1946, with a Foreword by John Saville, Socialist History Society Occasional Papers Series, no. 8. Noel Crusz, The Cocos Islands Mutiny, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, WA 2001, describes the mutiny of gunners in the Ceylon Garrison Artillery on 8–9 May 1942, which resulted in three Ceylonese mutineers being executed.
For further information on the Cairo Forces’ Parliament, see Murray Armstrong, The Cairo Commons, Guardian, 27 May 1989; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, War and the International, London 1986, pp. 88–9 (the forces’ parliaments in Cairo and Cyrenaica where Workers International League member Arthur Ledbetter was Prime Minister and Home Secretary); Tony Aitman, The War Within the War, Militant, 15 September 1989; The Eighth Army Defends Workers’ Right to Strike (an excerpt from Labor Action quoting the Eighth Army News), Workers Liberty, no. 22, June 1995, p. 11; Harry Ratner, Reluctant Revolutionary, Socialist Platform, London 1994, pp. 49ff. Gerry R. Rubin’s Durban 1942: A British Troopship Revolt (Hambledon Press, London 1992) investigates, especially from a legal perspective, events on 13 January 1942 when hundreds of army and air force servicemen refused to board an eastwards-bound British troopship, the City of Canterbury. Albert Meltzer’s I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels (AK Press, Edinburgh 1996) has a section in Chapter 5 on the strikes for demobilisation in Egypt and the Cairo Parliament. Vote for Them, a television play about the Cairo Forces Parliament, was screened on BBC2 on 2 June 1989. Of related interest is Evangelos Spyropoulos, The Greek Military (1909-–1941) and the Greek Mutinies in the Middle East (1941–1944), Eastern European Monographs, Boulder, CO 1993.
David Renton, Bread and Freedom
Julian Putkowski interviews Dave Wallis:
Backwards from Wivenhoe to Cairo
Swimming Against the Tide:
Duncan Hallas on his Experiences in Egypt
Monday, May 19, 2014
***Of This And That In
The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In
Search Of……Lost Classmates
From The Pen Of Frank
Jackman
I have spent
not a little time lately touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and
the members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the
remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies to
communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later on a class
website recently set up to gather in classmates for our 50th
anniversary reunion (some will never be found by choice or by being excluded
from the “information super-highway” that they have not been able to navigate).
I had noted in earlier sketches my own successes with this website in being
able to tout a guy whose photos of my old childhood neighborhood send me
spinning down memory lane, another about an old corner boy and our Adventure
car hop misadventures looking for the heart of Saturday night, writing a
tribute to our classmates fallen in Vietnam, and in answering a perplexing
question about what I saw as my role as a commentator on the site. I admitted I
had to marvel at some of the communications technology that makes our work a
lot easier than back in the day. The Internet was only maybe a dream, a mad
monk scientist far-fetched science fiction dream then as we struggled with
three by five cards and archaic Dewey Decimal systems.
I also admitted
in one of those sketches that for most of these fifty years since graduation I
had studiously avoided returning to the old town for any past class reunions
but this one I had wanted to attend, the reasons which not need detain us here.
Or I should say rather wanted to attend once the reunion committee was able to
track me down and invite me to attend. Or a better “rather” to join a NA64.com
website run by a wizard webmaster, Donna, who was also our class Vice-President
to keep up to date on progress for that reunion.
Part of the
reason I did join the class site was to keep informed about upcoming events but
also as is my wont to make commentary about various aspects of the old hometown,
the high school then, and any other tidbit that my esteemed fellow classmates
might want to ponder after all these years. All this made simple as pie by the
act of joining. Once logged in one is provided with a personal profile page
complete with space for private e-mails, story-telling, various vital
statistics like kids and grandkids, and space for the billion photos of that progeny,
mostly it seems for those darling grandkids that seem to pop up everywhere.
However
taking trips down memory lane is a chancey thing and as I became engrossed in
some of the early stories, some of the photos, and some of the comments I began
to think that I should become more active in trying to gather in the clan for
the upcoming reunion. Put myself in harness and get some of the leg work done.
Now lately, mercifully lately, when I volunteer for some project or other task
I do it with the idea that I will be an active participant and not just some
name on a committee listing. Otherwise I prefer to pass. So after some thought
I decided to leap in, to join the North Adamsville Class of 1964 reunion
committee.
Now as one
might expect in the modern age most of the committee members were scattered about,
although most were in Massachusetts. But here is the beauty of the Internet Donna,
our webmaster introduced above, actually lives in Florida for the winter. Not
to worry though the tasks at hand, the one that interest me here, finding lost classmates
(“missing” we call them on the website until they join) can be divvied up via
the Internet. And so most of the last winter was spent working the “net” trying
to find those elusive scattered to the winds classmates.
My assigned
task since part of my professional work is on the computer anyway was to cull
what existing social networking class-related websites had and to invite the
classmates on those sites to come on board. There were four main sites that I
was able to find after some preliminary Googling-those on Facebook obviously, those who had joined a commercial classmates
site, those who had joined a local North Adamsville site, and those who had
joined through an all-American high schools site. Easy stuff right. Well, kind
of-at least for those who were listed on those sites. All I did was to copy and
paste the following simple message (later expanded and more targeted):
First Notice (Made Simple I Hope- Just Click Below) –Save
The Date -Spread The Word To Any Class Of 1964 People You Are In Contact With
Fellow
classmates from the North Adamsville High School Class of 1964- On behalf of
the Reunion Committee I invite you go to the newly established class website-
click here-
http://www.northadamsville64.com/class_index.cfm
-to find out more information about the planned 50th
anniversary class reunion. The reunion is scheduled for the weekend of
September 20th 2014 at the Best Western Adams Inn in North Adamsville
(adjacent to the Neptune Bridge and river if you haven’t been to NA lately). The
theme “Try To Remember.” We also invite you to join the website, create your
own profile page, and share whatever you want to share with your fellow
classmates. Sorry for the generic nature of this message. Sorry also if you
received this message more than once if you belong to various NA-related
sites.
Naturally there were some snafus, for example, on Facebook unless you wanted to “friend” every person who
was on the North Adamsville Class of 1964 group page you could only leave
messages on a secondary message space-which the classmate, depending on how Facebook-crazed
they were (an iffy proposition for AARP-worthies), might or might not get
around to checking. On a commercial classmate site I had to actually join the
site for a nominal fee since in order to send internal site e-mails one of the
party’s had to be a paying member. Moreover after matching names on that site
with names on our class website, including those who have passed away, I
noticed that a number of names were of those who were now deceased so that site
had not been updated for a while. On the local North Adamsville site I also had
to pay a nominal fee and their internal e-mail was erratic to say the least. Finally
the all-American site although free had a substantial number of names found on
the other sites. Normal detective work problems looking for people who have
been “missing” for fifty years.
Of course this kind of work is labor intensive for the
amount of results. The Internet-related population came in at around 200 names.
The NA Class of 1964 was a big baby-boomer cohort with over 500 graduates. Unfortunately
in conformity with any actuarial table you care to consult about seventy of our
classmates have passed on leaving about 440 possible contacts (not including
spouses, of course except those 15 couples, those 15 class sweetheart couples
who heroically married each other and lived happily ever after). We leveled off
at about 200 who joined the site and each of those brave souls received a
message from Donna upon joining which went like this:
Hi- Welcome to our class website-
For those who have, uh, lost, misplaced or sold off their
“Manet” [class yearbook] to the highest bidder we have a link to the Thomas Public
Library site on the left side of the home page so you can take that big trip
down memory lane. By the way (BTW, okay) the theme for this reunion is
“Try To Remember” so everybody better check that site out or get your yearbook
out of the attic. Spread the word to others from NA64 who you are in contact
with and sent any information that might help us to find missing classmates to webmaster
Donna Murphy McGraw. Also send photos of any previous reunions you may have
attended. Yes, and write stuff, put photos and video on your personal profile
site too. We want to hear about everybody’s story over the past 50 years.
And so it goes…
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