More North Boyer tapestry

As with any neighborhood, our North Boyer roots run deep. So, any time a name from North Boyer's good ol' days re-emerges, I get really excited. The most recent sighting occurred on the new Sandpoint High alumni site (www.sandpointhigh.com) a couple of weeks ago when I saw that JoAn DeGroot had registered, representing the Class of 1956.

I hardly knew JoAn because she's almost ten years older than I, but I knew her family. They lived about a mile north of us on the north Sand Creek hill. There were four DeGroot kids: JoAn, Bob, Carol and Dick. Carol and Dick were classmates and good friends of my brothers. Their parents were Henry "Heinie" and Virginia. Heinie was a local printer. I remember his crewcut and tattoos (from the Navy, I believe). When they moved to Sandpoint and North Boyer, Heinie took up raising registered Hereford cattle, just like my parents Harold and Virginia.

I think I must have seen JoAn fewer than half a dozen times during my pre-teen years. Then, she went off to her life somewhere else, and I never heard about her again until the day her name appeared on the alumni site. I immediately called her, left a message and later sent her a note but received nothing back until two or three days ago.

Since then, we've exchanged about a dozen emails and learned that we have mutual acquaintances and friends. She knows the Palmers and the Meneelys, and she's promised to check on the whereabouts of Shirley Beasley, since Shirley's older sister is one of her classmates. Shirley Beasley, whose father Ora came from Mississippi, attended Lincoln School with us. She talked about the South a lot and would probably pleased that I married a Southerner. I still have a black-and-white mug shot of Shirley in my scrapbook; it was taken sometime during our high school days.

Ironically, JoAn and her husband own a Hereford ranch in Northern California. Her mother Virginia at 86 is doing fine, just like my mother Virginia at 85. Sadly, both of our fathers have passed away. In our notes, I've learned that her husband Andy McBride rode motor cycle enduros at Burnt Ranch, Calif., in the 1970s. My mother started grade school at the tiny hamlet of Burnt Ranch nearly 50 years earlier.

JoAn asked if I knew Shirley Carter Jones, who rode horses and reigned as a rodeo queen in the 1950s. I chuckled while responding that I'd actually been Shirley Jones' teacher back in the 1980s when she enrolled in a night class that I taught for North Idaho College. Shirley's daughters were in high school at the time, and we became friends on a totally different plane from the days when I was the little girl looking up at the rodeo queen dressed in her white outfit and riding the big black horse.

I've learned through our correspondence that the DeGroot kids are scattered about, just as my siblings are. Dick has just moved to Hawaii; Bob, who graduated from the Naval Academy lives in Maryland as an IBM retiree, and her sister Carol, a cancer survivor, lives near JoAn in Northern California.

After all these years, JoAn and I could have even run into each other last week and probably would have if I hadn't been so busy moving. I learned in her first response why I didn't hear from her until long after I'd sent her that first letter. At that time, JoAn was at the Bonner County Fairgrounds celebrating her 50th-year SHS class reunion----less than half a mile from the old DeGroot farm (now the long-established Vedelwood subdivision) and less than half a mile from the Tibbs ranch (now home to at least a dozen airplane hangars).

The land may have changed, but the bond of North Boyer remains. It's been fun reconnecting with yet another product of our cherished childhood setting.