Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Mission to collect school chum addresses

Alumni and other Gurdon students of the past will have a chance to get together for an informal reunion every year if they register at Faith Mission during the 2005 Forest Festival, Saturday, Oct. 29.

Tommy Potter, mission director, said the building will be used for bathroom facilities at the festival again this year and he would appreciate all of the names and addresses of former students here that he can get.

"I am hoping for 1,000 to sign up this first year," Potter said. "We are not doing this for profit, but rather as a tool to increase attendance at the fall Forest Festival. The database will be shared with the Gurdon School System.

"The reunions of tradition are for alumni and leave out people who may have attended Gurdon for awhile and then went other places. We want everyone who has ever attended Gurdon and remembers someone they would like to see again to come register at our tables in the mission."

Potter said he recently had a classmate die and attempted to contact some of his classmates without much success.

"If we had a former students last known address, we could email," he said.

"I want to stress that giving us your name and address will not land you on any solicitor lists. This is not a sales scheme and wont be used on any for-profit lists. I want the school to have it for political contacts, or for those searching out classmates, and of course for reunion organizing."

If every Forest Festival that rolls around could get some of the classes to have their reunions, we might interest some of Gurdons former students into coming back here to start businesses, Potter said.

"We could use some of our brilliant minds of the past as a think tank," Potter said. "A lot of people have never belonged to anything as good as their class at Gurdon High School or Bell High School. If we could get 10 percent of them to return to the home town, just think what that could mean to this area."

Potter said the growing list of students will increase communication with many people who may care deeply about the future of Gurdon "and somebody will take the ball and run with it."

He stressed the need for the Forest Festival to begin to grab hold of the homecoming idea "so it is once again more than just a few townspeople who still live here going downtown to say howdy."

"Our potential is so much better when we come together," he said. "Please participate. If we get 1,000 people to respond and they have a spouse and one kid, that is 3,000 names."

Potter said those who sign up will have a chance to win a door prize.

As to the names being placed on the web, he said, "We may consider a very secure site, where nobody that was not a student could have access, or we may not deal with Internet and just let the school system decide the best use for this list.

"We hope this will be seen as an attempt to help build Gurdon."