OBSERVERXTRA FEATURE |
EDSS Mural: Seriously …
“Where are they now???”
BY: VANESSA MOSS
At a time when websites like Facebook and LinkedIn are making connecting with old friends easier, tracking down 12 former Elmira District Secondary School students should be easy right?
Not exactly.
It took almost 100 e-mail correspondences, countless phone calls and four months of searching to find them and I only recently (Thursday) collected photos of each one.
Needless to say, the process was challenging.
The purpose of this time-consuming exercise was to find out what these former athletes are up to now since they were all connected back in high school. In 1985, they were the subjects of the mural project that still graces that gym wall at EDSS.
In November, I started my search in the most obvious spot: the high school.
By perusing old yearbooks and talking to teachers who have been around since the ‘80s, I came up with an initial list of names corresponding with the silhouettes on the mural.
In the end, this list changed five times and led me to interesting people throughout North America and abroad.
The key to coming up with correct identifications was Tom Thirtle: the former-art teacher who was the brains behind the mural project.
Finding him proved to be particularly challenging because no one at the school or in the area seemed to know where he went after leaving the school in 1997.
With the knowledge that he could possibly own a glove company in Waterloo, I started searching online and ended up on a sailing club website out of St. Marys that ordered its clothing crests from a sportswear company under Thirtle’s name.
As luck would have it, he was the man I was looking for, but it would take a few phone calls to find out for sure.
His reaction when we finally spoke was, “You found me!”
From there, I easily narrowed my list down to six by doing online searches and talking to dozens of people.
My conversations normally took me on a scavenger hunt from a friend-of-a-friend to a family member, to another friend, to a spouse and then finally, to the person I was looking for.
In December, as my list got shorter, we ran an ad in the Observer asking if anybody knew where my “missing people” could be.
That led to interesting voicemails saying, “I used to know their parents,” or “I knew her brother’s best friend.”
Luckily, some of those connections did pan out and even more people came forward once the holidays hit and families got together to catch up.
Even people living in the United States e-mailed me to say they were home for Christmas and found out I was looking for them.
Finally, in January, I was so close. I only had one lingering contact yet to be found: Tony Kreutzer.
Garnering information from various sources, I eventually found out that he might be living in Kelowna, B.C.
That tip turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle that allowed me to connect all 12 of these old classmates once again.
Over the last four months, I have had frustrations and disappointments, but mostly, the experience has been enjoyable. On top of getting to know 12 new and fascinating people, I also made connections with their family members, friends, and friends’ friends, who were all part of the process.