Hull High Badge

Wrap-Up to Hull High School Class of ’61 Class Reunion, June 21 & 22, 2003.  

All agreed that we had a great two-day, 42nd anniversary, class reunion.

I would like to express my thanks to the many persons who contributed to this very happy and successful reunion. Bob Hughes was constantly available to discuss the concept, progress, finding hard to find people, and checking address, phone, and e-mail information. Others included June Carnahan Brace and her mother Kit Carnahan, Barbara French Bowman, Bonnie Darraugh Régimbald, Kitty Smith Kourounis, Lynn Ross, Dianne Lee Hayley, Vivian Charron Behnke. Mrs. Ruth Bates Smart was helpful in finding former basketball team members. Mrs. Christie’s ebullient daughter, Diane Christie Stanton, was very helpful in filling in details. Mrs. Evelyn Burden Hetherington helped to find former students and former teachers.

Forty (40) persons attended the dinner at the Canal Ritz Restaurant in Ottawa on Saturday evening. Twenty-four (24) persons attended the brunch at Moorside, Kingsmere, on Sunday morning. Old friends certainly enjoyed seeing one another again. It was so nice to have several of our former teachers attend these two events. It seemed that within a short time of our sitting down to dinner on Saturday, the conversations became so animated that the ambient noise level reached 30 decibels of enthusiasm! A few got lost on the road to Moorside, but all arrived safely and we continued our enthusiastic reminiscences.

We were happy to see Marla Bryant representing the late Barry Bryant, our former Head Boy. Barry was an outdoor athlete, a ski instructor and a centennial canoeist, and was a community leader in outdoor athletic and recreational activities. We were also very pleased to see Gail Brown Potvin representing her sister the late Sandra Brown. Sandra was a member of the Hull High School Girls Basketball Provincial Championship Team, playing on the front line with Vivian Charron, Sylvia Keyes, Beverley Isles and Sandra McClelland, and went on to play and coach in later life.

We also remembered fondly Karen Brown Jessen, and Rodger Brunet, both enormously popular students.

It is quite amazing that a graduating class of just 28 students in a regional high school with just four classes form grade 8 to grade 11 and approximately 120 students overall would have produced the amazing results that we have seen.

First, athletic achievement. Our high school won the provincial boys and girls basketball championships under coach Ruth Bates, out-performing many much larger high schools in the province, and this was most certainly attributed to the training and practice, skills and abilities, and the personal leadership and confidence developed, by the athletes under coach Ruth Bates. Our school also won the Western Quebec track and field championship under coach Ruth Bates, who once again helped athletes to train and bring out their very best in performance, and to develop personal leadership confidence.

Second, academic achievement and career success. Our graduating class has had quite a distinguished record of personal achievement following graduation and life long careers. We have produced a minister counselor diplomat, a chief of protocol, an ambassador, a chartered accountant, a certified fraud examiner, a chartered financial planner, a certified management consultant, a lawyer, an agronomist, a chemist, several biologists, several school teachers, several farmers, several electricians, telecom and computer experts, a city mayor, an international air and rail engineer, a real estate broker, a real estate investor, a community outdoors athletics and recreation activities specialist, as well as several entrepreneurs and a good number of administrators thanks to Mrs. Burden. We were strengthened by our academic foundations at Hull High School.

Micki Kaminska Fraser came to the reunion on Saturday evening with her high tech digital camera and took loads of images. Micki has offered to take ALL of the digital and still photos from our class reunion as well as some of the older Hull High vintage photos, and will create a new web site for us to refer to. We will be able to add text information to this web site, including the planning information, class address, and trivia quiz, which I have sent your previously. You can be creative and make your own contributions. If you were not able to attend our class reunion this past weekend, and would like to submit an old photo and a recent photo of yourself/your family, then please do so, c/o Micki Kaminska at her address given in my last e-mail also please send copies of your digital images via e-mail. (All original photos will be returned of course.)

Following our brunch at Moorside on Sunday we met in the gardens and discussed the possibility of two potential initiatives: First, the creation of a scholarship trust fund to support current graduates to go on to university studies, and second, the creation of a speakers bureau of successful role models of persons who have had diverse careers to speak to current students about career options. More on these two items later.

I will develop a general template for organizing class reunions and will make it available to other classes so that they can more easily organize their class reunions. Each class from other years should select a lead person to collect class information and organize a class reunion. These many lead persons should get together and organize a bigger class reunion for multiple years from Hull High School, and to permit the massing up to support the scholarship trust fund.

Once again, a big thank you to everybody who helped to organize this year’s class reunion for the Class of ’61.
Sincerely,

Philippe Roy





Last Update: September 7th, 2003