Angie and Mopp
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
There were two specific girls who I knew during my Junior year at Beavercreek High School. Both attractive, both blond, both with good senses of humor. I had no idea at the time that they even knew one another. Angie Crowder was in my American History class with Mr. Holliday and Jennifer Grimes was in my Math class with Mrs. Boff. As you might suspect, I liked to tease girls back in high school. Actually I did that well before high school…and well after. But nevertheless, I liked to tease them. Angie, I quickly found, was one girl who liked to tease back. Read the rest of this entry »
When I first moved from Fairbrook to Ankeney in the Fall of 1984, our former arch rivals from Valley Elementary were converging into the same junior high. Therefore I had a whole new set of faces and potential friends and enemies. The smart kids now had more competition, the pretty girls now had more competition, and the popular kids now had more competition if they were going to be running as class officers. My friend 
Lisa Baker and I went through all 13 years of school together…from the lowly kindergarten class at Fairbrook Elementary to graduation day at Beavercreek High School. Along the way, we shared moments of both disdain and awkward crushes – but I always considered her to be a constant friend. We first shared the same classroom during second grade in Mrs. Deets’ class (her picture from that year seen at left), and then again the following year in Mrs. Corn’s third grade class. There were times when we got along fine and then there were others when I can remember her eyes shooting daggers at me during Mrs. Owens music class. And I have no doubt it stemmed for some display of obnoxiousness from me like, oh say, tapping my cowboy boot to the music. 
School days nostalgia is fun to recall. Spending 13 years in the public schools is bound to yield a great number of memories spanning from early childhood to the onslaught of adulthood. I hold all of the memories from these years in very high regard, but it seems that the older the memory, the fonder it is. My Ankeney years came at the beginning of the latter half of my school years – from the Fall of 1984 to the Spring of 1987. It was a new era of leaving behind the safety of Fairbrook Elementary where I was an upper-classman, and become a lowly pre-pubescent, chubby, gawky, early teenaged seventh grader. But, boy, these were fond memories too. 
In the gorgeous senior photo at left is Amy Meredith. This photo was sent to me following our last year at Camp Woodland Altars together. Amy and I had attended Youth Camp together in 1987, 1988, and 1989. We were in the same group led by Kevin Dull and Judy Yoder in 1988. She was always one of my favorite people in the camp – smart, pretty, kind, and with a great sense of humor. I’m not sure how her judgement was though, because apparently she seemed to be fond of me as well. On the back of the photo, she wrote: