Reunion Info

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1967

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1968

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1969

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1970

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1971

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1972

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1973

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1974

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Class Size:
Reunions:
Average Attendance:
Last Ticket Price:
Reunion Committee:	Lori Henry Fischer
Reunion Contact:
Missing Classmates List	www.jacksonhs.com/74/miss74.html

 

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1975

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1975 3/4

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The Basics:

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Places/Music/Events

Reunion Sites	Class	Recommendation	Rates	Contact Info
Marriott Hotel	1971
Century Center	1975
South Bend Country Club	1972
Music
Live band	1975
LCD projector 10' screen.	1971		$100 Marriott
DJ	1971/1972			Janet Shafer
Class	Saturday Golf	Tour of JHS	Friday Warm up	Sunday Event
1975	Yes	Yes ($50.00)	MRFalcon $5.00	Potato Creek (rained out)
1971	Yes	Yes ($50.00)	no	no
1972	Yes SBCC $50.00	No	Fat Wally's (Champs)	no

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Notes

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Rick Miller Class of '71

Start early! The earlier the better. There were some major problems with having only 4 months to pull this thing off, and we got lucky in some ways. I was lucky in that Jan Sharp Streich and I were a good team!  We worked incredibly well together, and that is rare. Her interests and abilities seemed to compliment mine, and together we were able to accomplish a lot. That brings up another point.
In a perverse way, having such a short time period to plan a reunion had some beneficial effects. As it turned out, it was more of a dictatorship than a democracy. If we would have had a real committee, with real meetings every few months, I wonder what we would ever have gotten done. We had the luxury of just doing what we thought was needed, without having to worry about protocol or who was supposed to be doing what, or waiting to get someone's approval to proceed. I guess we were too stupid to know you can't plan a reunion in 4
months! I located the place to have the reunion and made all of those arrangements, found the DJ, located most of the people, sent out the e-mail invitations and notices and made up the program. Jan took care of the money, created and mailed the snail mailed invitations, did the memory book and lots of the later stuff.
 

• Pick a date and place, get the place reserved. I was lucky to find the Marriott, which turned out to be a fabulous place to have a reunion I highly recommend the Marriott for other reunions.
• Have one person that is the undisputed leader, enforcer, decision-maker of last resort. Don't get overly hung up on structure.
• Choose wisely who is to be on the committee. This is no place for deadwood, and there can be no honorary members. Each has to pull his or her own weight and everyone is important.
• Use technology to the fullest. Exploit it.
• Locate classmates via Internet and networking.
• I highly recommend a DJ vs. a band.

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Notes: Class of '72

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The reunion was fantastic.
The event at Coach's was a nice opportunity for people to start the reunion
early and for folks that could not attend on Saturday to check out the fun.
Coach's was perfect because they didn't have music so you didn't have to
shout.

Even though I was not real keen on having the event in a country club (real
liberals cannot afford country club membership), the SBCC was a delightful
venue. Plenty of space to mingle and the food was exceptional. The DJ
played a decent mix of music and low volume; I could talk without shouting.
And we had lots of room; the bar, the big room downstairs and the entry room.
Lots of area to mingle without being crowded

My thoughts for the next Reunion committee:

The post cards were a great idea to alert folks to the reunion weekend. The
 cards should stress 3 pieces of information;
    a) - Mark your calendar for the upcoming event
    b) - If you know the addresses and e-mails of classmates, please
         submit them now so we can invite them (don't bitch to us at the bar the night
         before that "Ms X lives in town, why didn't you look her up in the phone
         book, she's pissed she didn't get an invitation")
    c) -To reduce costs of the invitations, e-mail invitations will
         be used. If you have an e-mail address, keep your eyes peeled for a message
         label "Jackson High School 35th Reunion"
 

A buffet is the way to go. Less time, less money, and more variety. The
food was great, and I certainly enjoyed the ability to quickly nibble and
maximize my gabbing.

The only complaints I heard were about people who were mad because they
were not contacted (see item 1b)

We should'da got a reunion picture, Dang!

The 4 of us should have had a picture taken - Double dang!!

 Joe Kocy

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 Also make sure that the heads up postcard has a return address and send them out well in advance (like 4-5 months) to give the committee time to track down contact
info on the classmates whose postcard gets returned.

We made up T-shirts which I thought was a fun thing to do.

South Bend Country Club was a great choice. Beautiful new facility in a
beautiful setting. The club house is 4 months old and is really nicely
appointed and architecturally interesting. I highly recommend the facility.
I don't know if you have to have a member sponsor your group but anyone can
call to find out.

I think you can have a golf outing there without a member sponsor and it is a
great golf course. The price was $50.00 with cart which is an excellent
value.

We made the registration cut off date 1 month out and had 75-80% of the
people signed up by then. We got inquiries right up to the week of the event
to ask if people could still come (we said of course). I sent 3 email reminders and
we did 2 mailings including a missing classmates list and people still
complained that they weren't contacted, even though they knew about it.



Wayne Sill
 

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SBCC was a great place to have it. Of course you have to have a member get you in but the place was beautiful, the staff went out of their way to be helpful. All around a good place. The food was good and buffet was definitely the way to go. We had 4 stations set up around the room so people could go from one to the other and no long lines at just one spot. One table had cheese, crackers, fresh fruits etc. Another had two kinds of freshly prepared pastas with toppings. There was a fajita table with beef and chicken (even made some vegetarian stuff specially for me) and a table where they sliced beef and I think turkey with rolls. For dessert we had an ice cream bar with vanilla ice cream and toppings. I'm pretty sure everyone enjoyed the food.

We had cash bar. The SBCC sold drink tickets and exchanged them at the bar for drinks. Later in the evening they just started taking cash. Lots of room to move around and talk. In the entry way, in the bar, in the main dining room and outside. I think people did pretty good at mingling and not just sitting at their table all night. We debated with having sit down tables at all because we wanted to encourage everyone to move around and talk but it's hard to eat and hold a plate and drink so we had to do the table thing.

The DJ was great. To be honest I don't remember a lot of the music she played which was good....really needed it mostly for background music. Some did get up and dance a little as you've seen in the pictures but not all night. She also did some singing and karaoke....beautiful voice! Not too many takers on the singing, though. Wouldn't be worth spending extra money on it.

Friday night at Coaches was great. There was plenty of room for everyone and not too many other customers so it's almost like we had the place to ourselves. To be honest, I think everyone would be just as happy to have a casual thing like Coaches in place of a more formal reunion. We had a very casual 25th. Pig roast, outdoors on the hottest day in July. I think something in between what they did for the 25th and what we did for the 30th would go over best. I imagine whoever plans our 35th may try to come up with a compromise.

As far as the start up and planning went....it was a blast! I'm really having email withdrawal now. I rush to the computer in the morning and.....no emails!
Anyway...it's amazing how much we were able to accomplish via email. Proves that you don't all have to live in town to get it done.

 I think it does help to have one or two representatives in South Bend. Rick had a PO Box set up to use. We didn't use it and unless you really know the person responsible for picking up and forwarding the mail, I'd avoid anything like that again. I think we missed a lot of people by not getting their mail returned early enough to do a good search for a good address. It helped to use Classmates..both for our class or to contact siblings in other classes. Hard to use the internet for common names and for the females who've changed their names. Hopefully with the jacksonhs.com site, we'll keep better records for the future.

We set a deadline for reservations but of course, had lots of late responses. We kept things open for too long...

Despite some of the glitches, having the website for reservations and questionnaires was great. There were some we had lost track of who found us because of it! Hopefully in 5 more years, there will be more online classmates and we can almost eliminate the paper invites.

...I can't think of much that I would do differently except try to reach more people. Maybe get more classmates involved in the search for missing classmates...

 I think it was one of the best reunions we've had in awhile. Don't know why. I think as we get older we appreciate each other more. Hopefully with email and the jacksonhs site, we'll all stay in touch over the next 5 years.

Sally Helms

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Andrew Jackson High School Alumni

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