Dear Woodward Class of 1972 alumnus,

The final plans have been made!! This is your invitation to attend the 35th Reunion of the Charles W. Woodward High School Class of 1972!!

Date/Time: Friday, November 23, 2007, 7PM — 11 PM

Location: Garrett Park Town Hall, 10814 Kenilworth Avenue, Garrett Park, MD 20896
(http://www.garrettpark.org/guide/d_tnhall.html)

What: We’ll supply the DJ and good food. BYOB

Cost: $50 per ticket.

To make your reservations and purchase your tickets, please send in the Order Form below along with your check no later than November 15, 2007. Your reservations will be held at the door.

We want to create a CWW 1972 – 35th Reunion Keepsake Booklet and DVD. Please send us your bio so we can include it. Please include the following in your bio:

1. Full name
2. Address/phone (if you want it published)
3. Email (if you want it published)
4. Current photo
5. Your profile and history since CWW: family, work, education, hobbies
6. Favorite CWW memory
7. Anything else you want to add

Get this bio info to Karen Olson by email, with the subject line: “CWW Bio of [NAME]” at: ko@olsoncreative.com, or FAX at: 631-271-5264, or US mail to: Karen Olson, 14 East 13th Street, Huntington Station, NY 11746. To be sure your bio is included in the Booklet, please get your information to Karen no later than November 9, 2007. The Booklet will be available at the Reunion. The DVD will be sent to you after the reunion and include photos and video from the reunion night as well as from our days at Woodward. If you plan to attend the reunion the cost of the Keepsake Booklet and DVD is included with your ticket. If you are unable to make the reunion, please send us your bio information anyway and if you would like a copy of the DVD, please fill out the order form below.

This is going to be so much fun! We can’t wait to see each of you there!

Signed,

Your reunion committee
Ellen (Ball) Gara
Tom Barse
Chris (Davenport) Grewell
Betsy Franklin
Bruce Garrett
Beth (Hayden) Rydzewski
JD Leonard
Karen Olson

——– Order Form – Detach and mail in ——–

Name:_____________________________________________________________

Number of CWW 1972 – 35th Reunion tickets @ $50 each______________
I can’t attend but want ______ copies of the CWW 1972 35th Reunion Keepsake
DVD @ $5 each

Make checks payable to “CWW 1972 – 35th Reunion”

Mail this form and your check to: CWW 1972 – 35th Reunion, P.O. Box 392, Merrifield, VA 22116

Just a few notes so you know what your reunion committee is up to.

We investigated having Woodward as the reunion site, which would have been theoretically do-able. The building is currently being used by the Tilden Middle schoolers while their own school is being renovated. But we were informed that it might be possible to have the use of the building auditorium for the reunion. We wouldn’t have been able to serve alchohol there, but it might have been fun all the same. But our contacts with the county school system went unresponded to. So we looked elsewhere and have decided on having the reunion at Garrett Park Town Hall.

We’ll be gathering there on Friday, November 23, 2007, from 7PM to 11 PM. There will be catering and a DJ. As far as drinks, it’s BYOB. This is to keep the costs down. Looks like tickets will be running about $40. The official announcement is coming soon.

I’ve scanned in the senior class photo pages from the yearbook, and committee member Karen Olson, of Olson Creative Design, will be doing us up some badges with our yearbook photos on them. We will be asking you for a short bio…if you can send it in before the reunion that would be great, but we’ll have questionnaires at the reunion for you. We’ll be making up a reunion booklet and DVD with some photos from back in the day, plus stuff we take at the reunion, and any photos you want to contribute, which we’ll be mailing out after the reunion.

So…a good time for all is in the works. In the meantime, I have the pages from our 1972 art magazine, Inquiry, all scanned in and ready to post here. They’ll be up as soon as I can spare some time to upload them and create their web page. I’ve also dug up a copy of the 1971-72 CWW Student Guide and the1971-72 Course Descriptions. And I still have tons of photos I took back in our senior year I’m busy scanning in. Should be fun.

Stay tuned…

[Update…] My bad… The tickets will be going for $50. Announcement’s above. Hope to see you there!

The First issue of our senior year is up now.

There’s a shot on the front page of some of the teachers sitting in Frank Moran’s mail truck (remember that?), a page three spread of the new teachers who came to Woodward that year, and an editorial on the school’s namesake, Judge Woodward. We see on the Calendar that Sept 14-17 were the days that we seniors were scheduled to have our yearbook pictures taken (I got a rare haircut that week to satisfy mom…), Sept 18 was the GSA Car Wash day, September 25 our football team was hosting Einstein at home, and the Pom Pon Coffee house was open, and September 19 was the Class of ’73 “Slave Day”

Our student newspaper was The Advocate, and I was a staff member during our senior year, brought on board as cartoonist (I was a barely passable one back then). But during my Junior year I’d been bitten by the camera bug and about halfway through my senior year I was taking photos not only for The Advocate, but also The Verdict, our yearbook (though I was never officially staff on The Verdict).

I kept many of my Advocate issues stored away all these years, and now the paper is starting to get a tad…delicate. So I’m taking this opportunity to scan in what I have. You’ll notice a new link now on the right sidebar, with our newpaper’s banner. Click on the link and you’ll go to a page I’ve set up, just for links to my Advocate scans. Also some shots I took of the Advocate staff at work (and…play).

At the moment I only have links to one issue up, the issue of May 25, 1972, which was also the last issue the class of 72 had a hand in producing (our staff was comprised of both seniors and juniors). The issue is notable for its tow-page center spread, containing quotes from nearly all the seniors regarding our plans for the future. (As a matter of fact, I Did go into professional photography after graduation…got my police press pass and everything. But it didn’t last long obviously, or I wouldn’t be a software engineer today…)

It’s a real time capsule. Check out not only the stories and photos, but also the ads.

Hopefully I’ll have a few more issues scanned in for our reunion. I want to make a DVD set of this stuff for those of you who come. And…if any of you have photos of the Advocate staff or issues of the newspaper you’re willing to let me scan (because I’m missing a few), let me know.

I’ve added the photo albums I put up on Classmates.Com to the right sidebar. Just click on a link to see a few images from back in the day. Some of you may remember me as the kid who always had a camera with him. I did some cartooning for the Advocate, and some photography for both the newspaper and the yearbook, and I have tons of stuff from back then that I’ve been busy scanning in with the good film scanner I bought late last year. So there will be more, much more, as time permits. I also hope to do a DVD of photos to give out to those of you who come to the reunion.

If any of you have photos you want to share with the rest of us from back then, or stuff from your life now that you want to share, by all means send it my way, or if it’s somewhere like on Flicker or such, send me a link and I’ll be glad to put it up. Eventually I’d like to have a separate page, just of links to various photo albums that we share with each other.

I have one set I just scanned in of some of the drama club productions that I want to get up here, and some of the sports events. These two albums are mostly just random day-to-day images that I hope will recall the times we spent at Woodward. It’s like looking back in time, seeing some of the stuff I’m turning up in my film archives. The clothes…the hair styles…the cars…

What I’d eventually like to see on the left sidebar, under the poem that graced the yearbook, are links that any of you want to share to your own web pages, personal or professional. Something to show all the different paths we took in life. If you have any such links you want to share with the rest of your classmates, please send them along.

This is getting exciting! We had our first in-person meeting of several members of the Woodward Class of 1972 35th Reunion Committee meeting last weekend.

The date of the reunion will be Friday, November 23, 2007. SAVE THE DATE!

Bruce Garrett has set up a website for us at www.woodwardclassof72.com There is now a blog (you’re reading it). Please check back often to stay informed about our plans as they develop.

We need your help with a couple of things. First and foremost, if you have ANY contact information for 1972 classmates, please send it to reunion@woodwardclassof72.com so we can assemble all the contact information. We’ve only found contact information for 58 classmates so far. We need email, phone numbers, and/or mailing addresses for the rest.

Second, while we’ve selected the date, we haven’t yet decided on how to set up the reunion. We need your ideas and suggestions. One suggestion is that we hold a sock-hop at Woodward, maybe book the Nighthawks or what’s left of Grits for old times’ sake. An event on school property probably must be alcohol free, so there’s another suggestion that we have a dinner and a dance at a nice venue like the Rockville Mansion or a hotel. Maybe we want to plan two events, one in the afternoon at a park or Brookside Gardens followed by dinner and/or a dance or party in the evening. Please send your ideas to reunion@woodwardclassof 72.com and we’ll plan the event based on the most popular ideas.

Third, we’d like to put together another reunion book. Please provide a brief (suggested 50 word limit) biography of what you’ve been up to since the last reunion and send it to (you guessed it) reunion@woodwardclassof72.com

Thanks so much. We’ll keep you posted as things develop.

Your reunion committee,

Tom Barse

Ellen (Ball) Gara

Chris (Davenport) Grewell

Betsy Franklin

Bruce Garrett

JD Leonard

Karen Olson

Hey there, to all my fellow classmates…Welcome aboard!

This little corner of the World Wide Web is just for us.  A place to meet and chat and hopefully in the near future, organize our 35 year class reunion. At the moment your website administrator (me) is still busy nailing a few planks together here…so if the look of this site still seems a tad…unfinished…there’s a reason for that.  But hopefully, as time goes on, the place will get a bit more polished.

In the meantime, your comments are more then welcome. This site is meant to be a community venture…a place for all of us to sit back, relax, and reconnect with our friends and classmates.