When I was in Ontario Elementary, around 1965 or so, new windows were installed. Not exactly a big event, but I remember distinctly it being mentioned that these new windows were "shatterproof". Since these windows were something like 8 feet high, flying glass raining down on school children is not a good thing. Maybe it was a selling point at the time, one of the reasons they were replaced. Well, that selling point was eventually tested.

I used to ride my bike uptown from my North Slocum Road home quite often in the summer. I often brought my baseball glove and a bat, just in case. One day in the summer of 1967, or maybe 1968, we got enough kids together (like eleven) and were playing a pick-up game on the ball field that was right across from the dairy, on the east side of the school. The field there at the time had a backstop and bases laid out such that the school was out in right/center field. We used that field during gym class, and had played games there many times before.

I wish I could remember everybody who was playing. The only one I'm 100% sure about was Bill Burnett. I'm pretty sure Jim Kelly, Glen Cone, Bob Hetu, and maybe Clint Kleisley were there too. I remember it being a pretty competitive game. In those days, we always played hardball. With the school out in right field, and those big windows, and kids who were maybe 11-14 years old, I remember being a little concerned about those windows. Since most or all of us were right-handed, we usually pulled the ball to left field. I'm sure that we had probably bounced some balls off the school at some point, but what the heck, those windows are "shatterproof", which I actually thought meant they wouldn't break.

Unfortunately I found out that they do break. During one of my at bats, I hit a deep fly to right field, and as I rounded first base I heard the glass break. I instantly froze, as did everybody else. We looked at each other for a few seconds, and we all started to run. We wanted to get as far away as fast as we could. Then reality set in. Big trouble, but likely bigger trouble if we take off and THEN get caught. I think Bill Burnett was the oldest one there, and we kind of looked to him "what do we do?". Bill was wise even at 14 years old. He said we should try and find someone at the school and tell them what happened. And the key point for me, was that we ALL should take responsibility, not just the guy who hit that amazing powerful deep likely home run ball.

For some reason I think it was a Saturday, and I don't know why but there was a custodian in the building. He didn't hear it, but we (mostly Bill) showed him the room with the broken window. There was glass all over the place. So much for "shatterproof".

I remember us all giving him our names. And then I remember getting "the letter". The parents of all of the kids who were playing had to pitch in to pay for the repair of the window. The reason I knew how many of us were playing that day is because of the bill. It cost $110 to fix the window, and our parents had to pay $10 each, which at the time, was not an insignificant amount of money. It would probably be over $1000 today.

That was the last time we played hardball on that field.

Next time I see Bill, I'd better thank him.

Have you ever said that to your kids? I don't think I have, yet. That's one thing about computers, they do exactly what you tell them to do. I'm not sure I ever believed that before, as things always seem to get fouled up.

One of my co-workers has a sign on his desk, "To err is human, to really screw up you need a computer". In most cases, I think it's really because there was a human involved somehow.

Maybe you have noticed that the little NEW icons have been showing up either en masse or not at all lately. I had to disable the section that shows the new registrations in the last three weeks. It certainly might appear that something is really screwed up, and it was/is. But the computer is doing exactly what it is being told. Safe to say, I screwed up, kind of.

All registrations are kept in a database, which has an automatic timestamp field whenever the entry is added or updated. Which works fine most of the time. But I was working on a new feature that required a new field in the database, and I populated them, which essentially means every record has changed. Thus the little NEW icons all over the place. I disabled most of them for now. So for the next couple of weeks, I'll probably be slowly adding that capability back, until those changes are a few weeks in the past.

The real answer is to rewrite the "script" that makes all this work so that it is smarter. Given enough time and functioning brain cells I should be able to do it. The good news is, the more mistakes I make, the less mistakes I'll make in the future. Make sense?

If you've visited the site the last couple of weeks, you may have noticed various problems. It started with the website being shutdown again. This time it appeared someone was trying to use our contact form to spam us. About one or two emails were being sent every minute and this triggered a violation of the email policy of the hosting provider.

This is one of the facts of life of having a website. Though there our several components to help protect this from happening, it appeared someone had figured out a way around it. Ok, that is something we'll have to deal with, but our wonderful low budget hosting providers failed to inform me about what was going on for over 12 hours. All I knew is the site was disabled. Since I had had numerous issues with them already and had decided to move the site within a few weeks, this was reason enough to move it immediately.

Shortly thereafter I did get the email about why it was shut down, but it was too little too late. They just make it too hard to get help when you need it.

The new host is "Host Monster". I did some research and they have one of the highest ratings, if any of that can be believed. At least they have a phone number, which is a step up. And they don't seem to be in Canada, which has been bad luck for me.

Moving the site was not as bad as I thought. With several databases, including one completely integrated with the main page, I was a little concerned it might take a while. Other than a minor mistake I made when I inserted some temporary HTML (that caused the huge text problem), it wasn't a total disaster.

With the hosting provider, I hope some annoying problems will be resolved. One already looks fixed, a work-around I made to fix a problem ended up causing another problem for MAC users. So I'm looking forward to spending less time dealing with these issues and more time improving the website content.

There is a link on the right side of some of the pages (Home Page and any pages with Weblogs) called Last Comments. This hasn't been working correctly since these pages were integrated into the main site format. It seems to be working correctly now (how's that for confidence) since I made a fix. So if you have tried to read the comments using that link before, try again, it might work!

There are still some occasional issues popping up related to the "new security settings" on the web server. Another long story, which I won't bore you with, but I am fixing them as I find them. If you do have any issues, don't hesitate to send me an email. I may not know about yet.

I also want to thank Diana Mattuzzi '80 for helping out by improving one of the site scripts to completely eliminate email addresses from any viewable html source.

I read in the paper the other day that the Hilton School District received a grant to scan all of their yearbooks and put them on-line. Who knew? I've been doing this for fun, I didn't know I could receive financial assistance to do it. (I can't remember for sure, but I think it was a state government grant) I really could of used the money when I had to get a new scanner.

Oh well, I'll probably never have time to do every page of every yearbook. I've always thought that one day, enough people would be interested that maybe we could get a group of volunteers to take this on as a project.

I've actually been surprised that schools haven't been putting new yearbooks on-line the last few years. I'm pretty sure they are all done digitally now, and it would be simple. I think the yearbook publishers probably don't like the idea. The longer they wait, the more that will have to be done manually.

I think one day we will have all our yearbooks available on-line. Hopefully it won't take a government grant to do it.

I've decided to separate all future posts that do not have any tie to Wayne Central or this website. So in the future, if I write something that is more personal, it will be in the Blog named For What It's Worth.

For those interested, there should always be a link to it, near the bottom of the right sidebar, under the heading "Linkblog".

I know some may have chuckled at the title of this website, thinking, this guy is so dumb. Alumni is an incorrect usage of the word. Or at least it is not all inclusive of all graduates of Wayne Central.

Well, even though I have never taken Latin, I am aware that the correct terms are Alumni and Alumnae, the plural forms of Alumnus and Alumna. An alumnus is a male graduate of school, college , university, and alumna is a female graduate of the same.

I'll admit, I'm fairly lazy when it comes to some things, like typing. But when the thought of having a website title of Wayne Alumni/Alumnae, or even Wayne Alumni/nae went through my head, it didn't seem like an idea that I wanted to pursue.

I don't think I'm the only one either. I've checked many other, and they seem to ignore the proper Latin forms of the words (except for where my daughter went to college, but they probably figure it was easier to just deal with it than constantly be corrected).

Since it was originally a Latin word, and now seems to be well entrenched in the English language, I think we should just face the facts, alumni in Latin means one thing, alumni in English means something slightly different, which is ALL graduates of a school, college, or university.

At least that is my excuse.

Think back - who were your very first friends? Maybe a neighbor who was close to your age? Or maybe you really didn't have any until you started school. My very first friends were Billy Ficarra and Bob Hetu. Billy was my next door neighbor, so I probably started playing with him at age 3. Around the same time I met Bob Hetu. Bob's Dad used to cut/style my Mother's hair (still does). So I usually went with her, and would play with Bob while her hair was being done. At age 4, Bob and I went to nursery school together in Webster. Bill and I remained friends after he moved to Knickerbocker Road.

So they were both friends of mine, but they didn't know each other until they crossed paths at school at some point, but I don't think they were ever close buddies.

Did you ever have a moment in life where you suddenly realized you were experiencing something special? Kind of like serendipity, but not quite. Which brings me to the Class of 75 25th year reunion in 2000, that I kind of crashed. Since working on this website, I often get emails from people working on class reunions, and Colleen Runne' Gray had been sending me info to post. So I knew that the day before the reunion they were meeting at Tom's Original Tap Room. I figured I would know most everyone, so I stopped in. I did know everybody, and eventually as things wound down there, some of us went to the Barn Door uptown, though it probably hadn't been the Barn Door in years, but I don't even know what it was called then. So anyway, we were sitting around having an adult beverage, and it hit me. I was sitting in between Bill Ficarra and Bob Hetu having a beer at age 44. These were the first two people my age I ever knew! And I had known them for 41 years. Bobby lives in Connecticut, and Billy lives in Rush, NY. So what were the chances of that ever happening? If I had not decided to go out that night and crash their reunion event, it wouldn't have.

Note to self and any other reunion organizers: Think about finding a way to get your neighboring classes invited for the next reunion. OK, they were not part of the best Wayne Class ever (mine and yours), but they were next to best. And you may end up having a moment.

A few weeks ago, I noticed Linda Dudley '73 registered on the site. I didn't know Linda that well in high school. She was a year ahead of me. I think we played on the golf team one year together.

So when I saw her name, the first thing that came to mind was, man, I'd really like to have an Old Beam Pizza again.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, the Old Beam was a bar that occupied the space that is now a vacant lot in the middle of the village of Ontario. It burned down in 1980. Linda worked in the kitchen there for a time. I had a bunch of pizzas there over the years. A small with cheese and pepperoni for $1.90.

I liked it so much, it actually was my Thanksgiving dinner in 1975. My parents had the nerve to go on vacation. My brothers and sister were whatever state they were living in at the time, and my nearest relatives were 350 miles away. I probably ate at Bill Gray's the night before, so where else are you gonna go? Not surprisingly, it was kind of a slow night at the Old Beam that night.

There was something about an Old Beam pizza. I can't quite explain, but it tasted different from any other pizza I've ever had. And Linda made the best ones.

The main issue we've been having with the website has been resolved. I was very close to moving it to another web host, but suddenly the mail function on the server was working. I've had no real explanation, only a cryptic short email. So for now, all is well.

On top of that, I've had an offer of help with some of the programming type stuff where I tend to sometimes get bogged down. So it's all good.

Now that issue is over with, I can get back to hopefully making some further upgrades. You can now display a single class in the alumni directory instead of a whole decade. There is an upload capability, which hasn't been used yet, but I expect it will soon. I also was able to style the weblog into something fits right in with the rest of the website.

Since some of these weblog topics are tending to center around me and my experiences (I know me better than anyone else), I have created a category designated as Personal, meaning it will probably not have much to do with Wayne Central. So if you see that the category is Personal, you can decide not to bother reading.

I'm not sure how many more stories about Wayne Central I can come up with, and even if I do, they will likely be from 1968-74.

So I'll offer again, if anyone wants to post anything here, I'll do my best to make it happen. I'd love to hear some stories from the 50's and 60's, 80's, 90's.