Email written in June 2009 by
Marge RUMSEY Budd, Class
of '49
Email written to classmates by
Maria Perdaris Lanides,
Class of '59
Anecdotes provided by
Geoff Williams,
University Archivist,
following the
2005 All-Milne Reunion
April 2005 All-Milne Reunion
Irving M. Richter, Class of
'33
June 28, 1986, Class of '38 48th
Reunion
Harriet Richter Koblintz, Class of
'38
September 1984 Milne School Commons Room
Dedication
Judy Koblintz Madnick, Class of
'61
"On a Personal Note"
from The Class of 1964 40th Reunion Book
Martha Lowder Kimball, Class of
'64
Memories of Dr. Fossieck
Dean Quackenbush, Class of
'70
| Email from Marge RUMSEY Budd, Class of
1949: How well I remember you, Margie and most of the others, from those by-gone, outstanding years at Milne ~ what wonderful memories I hold dear. I really loved that school and the young, enthusiastic student teachers, and the activities of the choir with Mr Roy York, Jr, the plays that were put on (Dan Westbrook, Pete and others), the concerts and great music like The Messiah, The Lord's Prayer, "Way down yonder, in the old corn field" with Dan singing base, indoor basketball games, the jumping cheerleaders (still partly recall one of the cheers was, "One a (something), two a (something), three a (something), four; Yea, Milne H.S, we want more"), baseball games in the large area out front (remember when George DeMoss was struck with the ball in the head near his eye? We were all so worried about him!), etc.... and of course my friends... eating lunch on the grassy bank of Washington Park lake with Pat Carroll watching the ducks on lunch break, and riding in her brother Drew's yellow convertible in our senior year... "You're only young once" we used to say with hair flying in the wind... How I wish I were able to attend the reunion! Howard and I went back one summer, passing through Albany to see it.... Milne was somewhat changed, classrooms I remember using were empty offices, etc. The Assembly Hall was locked up, but a custodian opened it for us. JUST as I remembered it, only it looked so much smaller. The stage, the same. And memories came flooding back... I'd love to return again... |
| Email written to
classmates by Maria Perdaris Lanides, Class of 1959: Thanks Barbara [Kircher Fenimore] for sending the photos [of Milne and Page Hall]. Looking at them makes me feel very sentimental and makes me wonder on life. How good it is to have high school reunions. We grow up..we play, we laugh and we cry. We go to school. We move away...we raise our families and at some point...we all think about our high school reunions. Even though I was at Milne only 2 years....I think of those years as "MY HAPPY DAYS" and don't think of them as just 2 years...... Every time I drive by Page Hall I seem to recall a different memory. I can still see the baseball diamond.....and remember how I enjoyed trying to hit the softball........ I ran well but I had never picked up a bat before......and I laugh every time I think about it. I felt and most likely looked very awkward. I loved to peek in to the art class in the AM to see what new creations were on display....either finished or works in progress. I often wish that I had been at Milne longer for a variety of reasons including.... so that I could have had the opportunity to develop my "artsy side." Recently, I told Sybillyn how I used to envy her work on the yearbook because I've always been a "closet writer." She told me how she was overworked and never could get help. How little we knew ...... I marvel how we talk and remember items of interest from high school and how each of us must often day dream about way back when..... I'd like to mention that one of my clients this week signed his email request to me with the following statement: "a chance to sleep — perhaps to dream." I keep thinking this comes from something I've read but can't recollect. Maybe some of my brighter classmates will remember and enlighten me. This client is in Iraq and contacted me to arrange a limo as a birthday gift for his fiancée. My eyes filled with tears when I first read the above profound statement at the end of his email. I kept reading the words over and over and then would think of him in Iraq — wanting to do something for his fiancée....when just by being there.....he is doing so much for her and all of us. I just read all the names shown in the "to space" and happily got teary eyed. A fond hello & hug to everyone....... Every time I go back to "My Happy days" .... I want you all to know — You all make me smile! Maria |
| Anecdotes from Geoff Williams I received a nice packet from Frank Ward, Milne '56, one of those who heard about the reunion too late to sign up but who came anyway with his son and took part in the Milne building tour. He has a great story about how he and a friend designed a working rocket in the mid-50s and brought it in to Carlton Moose, who didn't believe it would work and who told Ward to put it in a vice in the Chemistry Lab and fire it off. Apparently, the flames singed the wall and the fumes were so bad that they had to evacuate the third floor. Another alum, from the Class of 1974, told me that after the University moved to the Uptown Campus, Milne expanded to include classes in Richardson and Hawley Halls and that Milne students could even use the Hawley Library, which they shared with the James E. Allen Collegiate Center, to do library research. Someone at my dinner table, I think from the class of 1959, told me about I believe it was a chemistry practice teacher who froze up in the class, walked out, and was never seen again. |
| Written for the April 2005 All-Milne Reunion by Irving M. Richter, Class of 1933: Dear Fellow Milnites — I often look back in time to the years that I spent in Milne — the best years of my youth. This has always been a place dear to my heart. What a wonderful supervisory staff we had, headed by Dr. John M. Sayles, a strict but fair-minded administrator. While we had student teachers, they were supervised by a most competent staff that kept them in line, as well as keeping us students in line! And we all were able to go forth from the Halls of Milne to the colleges of our choice, with no conditions attached. As in all the following years, the class size was always limited, and we students had a feeling that we were in a second-family atmosphere. The friends we made during those four years were, in many, many cases, friends for life. We celebrated our 25th Anniversary in 1958 with a very large attendance — and with the same delight as all of you who are fortunate to be attending this reunion. While sports were not essentially a big item at Milne due, no doubt, to the limited enrollment that we had, nonetheless, we had the spirit and we supported our baseball and basketball teams wholeheartedly! My contact with Milne did not end with my graduation. After college and a stint in the Army during WW2, I returned to Albany, married Betty, and we had three children — Alan, Barry, and Carol — all of whom are Milne graduates! Thus began a renewal of my association with Milne. And this was great, for we had the opportunity to enjoy Milne again. During this time, we were able to know the faculty of those years — Dr. Fossieck especially. He was such a dedicated person, and we cherish our memories of him. And, once again, we had the chance to cheer Milne on the basketball courts — especially when we beat the Academy!! Well, those are the few recollections that I have had about Milne. I feel certain that all of you in attendance at this reunion have feelings similar to mine. Have a great time on this special weekend — and know that an old alumnus is there with you in spirit. |
|
Written for the 40th Reunion of the Class of 1938 |
|
Presented at the September 1984 Dedication of the |
| "On a Personal Note" from The Class of 1964 40th Reunion Book by Martha Lowder Kimball, Class of 1964 : I don't remember a specific announcement that Milne was in my future. From the day when my family moved to Albany in 1952, that was part of the background noise. Because my parents discussed the school in the most positive of terms, it didn't occur to me to question the desirability of leaving the third new set of friends I had made (at P.S. 19, Altamont Elementary, and then Westmere/Guilderland) to begin life at yet another school, walking two miles a day and entrusting my punctuality to the utterly unreliable Schenectady bus. But on the opening day of the pre-seventh grade summer program, somehow I bought into the Milne experience. Would my life have followed a different path had I boarded the school bus with my neighbors and gone to Guilderland Junior High? Absolutely. I suspect that it would have been easier but more commonplace. We arrived at Milne from many places, both geographically and symbolically, to undergo an intense communal experience. The small class size, the six-year program, the unusual nature of the student body, and the school's particular philosophy all contributed to that intensity. Still, though we labored side by side and went through the same motions and emotions, many of us were mysteries to one another. There were unspoken traumas, silent sorrows, petty insecurities, hidden talents, miscommunications, and missed opportunities. One of the joys of helping to plan this reunion is the chance to see classmates come to terms, from mature points of view, with who we all were then and who we have become. With luck, that is a work in progress. In learning more about numbers of people than I knew about them in the fifties and sixties, I'm realizing with pleasure just how well all of us learned the lessons of Milne — and not only, or even primarily, the academic lessons. Having endured and triumphed, in the short run or the long, each of us made substantial contributions in utterly individual ways, whether to family, political, or religious life; whether to the arts, media, academia, business, literature, or the service professions. We've written, published, catalogued, and reviewed books, plays, and journal articles, edited magazines, produced television programs, taught children and young adults, healed the sick, patented inventions, served our country, advised the government, counseled, audited, litigated, legislated, prosecuted, engineered, marketed, volunteered, and explored. That's not bad for the scrawny bunch that I see in my seventh-grade yearbook. Because Milne was never a neighborhood school and because it then literally ceased to exist, it remains only, like Brigadoon, as a mythical construct that endures in our memories and reconvenes periodically through reunions. It is the hope of some of us who find that old friends grow more precious with age to set aside one weekend a year for a spontaneous reunion with no preplanned activities. I hereby volunteer to serve as repository of address and e-mail changes. Thank you all for the wonderful updates and reminiscences that you shared for the making of the reunion book. In case anything was left out, here are a few of the things that I remember — or simply can't forget: 2:22; 3 x 5 note cards; afternoon World Series games apprehended secretly via transistor radios; the Albany Liberal; Alley Oop; the Alma Mater; alphabetical seating (always behind Lewis and Lockwood); the Alumni Ball; assemblies; away games; Bernie Bryan getting down; the Big Gym; Bob Newhart records; Pete Seeger at the MGAA banquet; book reports; the Boulevard Cafeteria; bowling after school; breaking in green student teachers; Brita Walker's encouraging smile; brush cuts, pompadours, and D.A.s (I don't mean district attorneys, Mark); Bunsen burners; the C&W B&I dance; Cecil Johnson's Cherry Valley rock formations; charm bracelets; cheerleading tryouts; cheesecake in the cafeteria; Cherie and Mary dancing the pony; cherry phosphates; circle pins; class meetings; the cold sweat preceding oral reports; the Co-op; dancing nose-to-navel with Terry Heffernan; the day we spent an entire class period discussing the poem "So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens"; the Dewey decimal system; Dr. Fossieck's inordinately puffed-up chest; election posters; evil looks from Mabel Jackman in the library; filmstrips; flips, bouffants, pageboys, and French twists; French journals; the French trips to New York, Montreal, and Quebec; Gerald Snyder puffing and tugging at his belt; the ginkgo tree in Washington Park; gym suits with bloomers; hall passes; hanging out in Page Hall; the horror of the late bell; "I love you" notes created with Sweetheart straw wrappers; ID bracelets; ID cards; intramurals; Jack Krail's drillmaster act in homeroom 130; the jitterbug; Joe's roast beef sandwiches; the Kingston Trio; lab coats; lingering in the stairwell for a kiss; the Little Gym; lopsided ceramic ashtrays created in shop; lunch on Page steps; the Madison theatre; the mid-September start of school; Mike's Log Cabin; milk cartons; Mrs. York's enormous witch-like shadow cast on the auditorium wall as she conducted; the NFS; notes passed furtively in class; pajama parties; penny loafers and pointy-toed flats; the peristyle and Minerva statue; physical-fitness tests; pin-cushions sewn (badly) in home ec.; the pipe fence; the powdery smell of the girls' locker room after gym; purple dittos; Quin and Sigma; Regents Week; remedial slips; Roy York's sweaty brow, hopeless comb-over, and contagious love of classical music; rubbery worms in dissecting trays; Ruth Wasley's bounce; the Senior Ball; senior photos; the Senior Room; "Seniors first!"; spin the bottle; square dancing in gym class; the stag line; the stroll; summer vacation; "Teddy" Bayer; trampoline; the uncooked macaroni at the Future Homemakers' picnic; upperclassmen; the "Valentine" from Mike and Jeff that contained a genuine frog's heart skewered with a dissecting pin; "We are the Raiders, mighty, mighty Raiders"; what mildly passed for "dirty" jokes; white shoe polish on sneakers; wooden desks; wool pleated skirts and angora sweaters; yearbook picture day; yearbook-signing. |
|
Memories of Dr. Fossieck
by Dean Quackenbush, Class of 1968: I don't believe I have ever mentioned to you that Dr. Fossieck was a long time personal friend of my entire family. My parents (with kids in tow sometimes) and the Fossiecks socialized quite often over their long friendship of 40+ years. Dr. Fossieck was at my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, which is also the last time I personally saw and spoke to him. As a matter of fact my brother, parents and I all attended both his wife's and his funerals. I saw Coach Lewis (Bob Lewis) at Dr. Fossieck's funeral and managed to visit with him for a while. He was getting ready to retire at the time. One other little footnote on Dr. Fossieck, whose name I hope will someday be given to the reincarnation of Milne. My mother and he used to every year play practical jokes on one another for each other's birthdays. I remember once my mother sent a singing telegram (forerunner of Zing A Gram) right to Dr. Fossieck's office at Milne during the middle of the school day. They both got a big laugh out of that one. In his private life, he was a big kidder and loved to have fun. He had no family of his own, but we all knew Milne WAS his family. No man was ever more totally dedicated to the academic well-being of his student body than Ted Fossieck. I say "Ted" simply because I grew up with my parents always addressing him as such. He was a unique individual, as was The Milne School. Ahhh, the good old days. Life was much simpler (and safer) back then. But every generation can say that about every succeeding generation. I can't help but think that many of my supervisors, including Dr. Fossieck, are turning over in their graves or retirement communities contemplating the future of this country with our current class of junior and senior high school students having grown up in such a crazy environment as we all live in today. Much of that generation just plain "doesn't have a clue" about reality more so than any other generation I can remember. We need more Milnes in the world. |