Although I have no official notice, I am now operating under the assumption that Reunions by the Party People will be handling our 20-year reunion. They handled our 10-year reunion and the Class of 1987 20-year reunion, so it looks like a done deal to me.

You can update your address with them including an alternate contact in case you move. If you do it now they can find you next year.

I just checked the MySpace RHS forum for the first time in months, and apparently the Class of 1987 had their 20-year reunion on June 1 and June 2. (UPDATE: That forum link doesn't seem to be working at the moment, but you can see the forum here.)

They were looking for missing persons on MySpace in April. And they are using Reunions by the Party People like our class did for our 10-year, so it's probably safe to assume they'll be handling our 20-year reunion as well.

I notice the ticket fee is much lower if you pay early, so if you're thinking of coming to the Class of 1988 20-year reunion you should plan to buy tickets before the end of the school year.

I hadn't checked this site in a while, but I noticed from the logs that people are starting to find it via search engines and Wikipedia. And at least a couple of them seem to be enjoying the photo gallery.

I haven't been checking into reunion or alumni stuff lately, but MySpace seems to be the place to go if you want to find someone from your high school days and talk to them.

Reunion.com and Classmates.com might be useful to look for someone if you're willing to pay, but I'm not willing to pay and am finding them both very annoying. Classmates.com is riddled with online ads while Reunion.com is emailing me at least twice a week with outrageous claims about people searching for me and other site updates that somebody imagines might somehow pertain to me (but really don't).

The other sites I blogged about here don't seem like they're worth a second look for the purposes of finding RHS 1988 classmates.

In the fall of 1987 I was part of a People to People International student
ambassador delegation to the USSR. The groups from Texas, New Mexico and
Arizona traveled together to Helsinki, Lennigrad, Riga, Misnk, Smolensk,
Kalinin and Moscow. Our group had a one-year reunion in 1988 but as far
as I know has not reunited since.

I'm the only one from RHS to go, but I thought I'd mention it here, anyway. I made an alumni/reunion site for that trip. The site is set up a lot like this one, but I don't have the forums set up yet and don't have the photos up. I'm posting this now just to get the site established on the search engines so maybe someone from the trip will stumble across it.

I saw a reference to this site while going through MySpace forum posts. myYearbook.com . They claim to be growing faster than MySpace...well since there was only me on this site until today when somebody else joined I guess I'm growing 100% in a day which must be faster than MySpace, too. :)

Anyway, I'm not in the mood to check it out right now, but there it is. I'll check it out sometime later.

I recall not being very impressed with MySpace the first time I blogged about it here, but I had an amusing reason to look for a friend-of-a-friend's profile (exes on myspace are a source of great amusement) and wound up revisiting the RHS section. I found another Johnny Reb who posted in the forum and had a message from someone who remembers me from 1988.

Previously I used the search feature to look for Class of 1988, but this time I searched for any alumni age 36 and came up with a lot more results. I'm not sure why the dramatic difference, but there you go. Expand the range to 35-37 and get a lot more results of possible interest. On the one hand this suddenly seems a great way to find alumni, but on the other hand I feel like I have some work to do in redoing the blog feeds for this site.

Link to RHS page at MySpace

EDIT: Okay, now I'm basically spamming people on MySpace who claim to be RHS Class of 1988, so maybe there will be something to read around here besides me soon. Points of interest will be the photo gallery, forums and blogs, all of which the Class of 1988 and nearby years are welcome to post to. I explain how to post your own photos here. They will be avaialble for anyone to see, but the search engines are instructed to stay out of the photo area so they shouldn't show up on an image search.

EDIT 2: I just found a user or group or something for Richland Rebels Alumni. It was created by a couple of people from the Class of 1989 and has over 1000 users or friends or something. I haven't quite got MySpace figured out yet, but I can tell this looks like a decent hub for RHS Alumni. And here's another user/group deal for the Class of '89 with 800+ friends.

LinkedIn is a professional networking site I recently stumbled across. They allow you to pick colleges you've attended or to type in your own school. I didn't try to type in a high school as the site doesn't seem to be geared to cater to high school reunions.

I did find a classmate and a former coworker, both of whom I might like to reconnect with. It costs money, though. I haven't coughed up the dough yet.

EDIT: One of the profiles had the email address, so I was able to contact that one. Most profiles have the company and city listed, so I could probably connect with the other for free by using a phonebook and a telephone. Another former coworker warned me he had an "'Amway' incident" via LinkedIn; I hadn't thought of that but suddenly remember I had a similar incident when a "long lost' alumni called me out of the blue one day a few years ago. Suddenly I'm less eager to try out this type of networking.

Something got me to sign into my Friendster account, and I saw they have where you can add your schools and search by school attendance. Friendster is a social networking site.

However I didn't see anyone for our school the right age to have been at RHS while the Class of 1988 was there.

I searched a bit in Yahoo Groups and MSN Groups to see if any RHS Alumni groups of interest to us had been formed. Nothing at MSN, and only a couple of possibilities at Yahoo:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dixieforever/ : This group says it's RHS Class of 1971 but all RHS alumni are welcome. A quick glance at the messages makes me think it's not very relevant to the Class of 1988

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Eat_This/ : This group says it's about the drama group at RHS. I presume this means the current drama group, but I'm not sure. I applied to join and am waiting for the owner or moderator to let me join to see the messages.

I scanned and uploaded a total of seven rolls or about 200 photos so far. I have a few more rolls that are partially RHS or the summer 1987 STUCO camp at TCU, but most of the general interest pics that I have are probably already there.

As I go through the rolls I notice I seemed to have a disproportionate affinity for taking photos of Lesli Mais, Chuck Hensarling and cafeteria food. Now Lesli I can understand, but I'm really wondering about the other two. I also notice I had a problem with focusing my camera. Oh well, most of the shots are viewable and some even have the correct subject in focus.

At least there are a few shots of me. I was able to update my Classmates.com and Reunion.com sites with my "then" photos. By the way, Reunion.com is now pestering me with even more emails than Classmates.com does. Classmates.com is still more annoying to use and browse and offers less free access.