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2012-03-06 14:47:20
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Casey Cain
Sales
Married
2
7
1
In the fall of '62, I began four fun-filled years at C.M.S.U. in Warrensburg as a business major. In my senior year I had the good fortune of being on the same sidewalk one evening with Carol Eyermann, a sweet and lovely girl from St. Louis. We've been on the same path ever since, living in Johnson County, raising two great kids, and now, loving seven adorable grandkids.
Carol just retired from Blue Valley School District after thirty years of teaching as a reading specialist. I'm still working and self-employed providing printed forms and filing systems to professional offices. But, thanks to ever changing technology, I'm in the final glide path to full retirement. The idea of retiring seems to give me the same mixed feelings I remember when graduating from college. But, again, it seems pretty exciting.
A memory from high school that recently came to mind was of an old fashioned act of generosity: In our junior year I had a Cushman motor scooter (that does seem like a long time ago) and Paul Pritchard let me park it behind his house to keep it from being vandalized or stolen. Thanks again Paul!
For me, the thought of the countless details of the high school years can be condensed down to a big smile and a little sigh. And luckily, the same can be said of the last fifty years.
2012-08-06 22:51:25
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Andrew Campbell
 
Retired
Married
1
3
3
After leaving SWHS, I earned a B.S. in Hotel Admin at Cornell University in 1966, where my Beta experiences may have outweighed my academics. I then took off for better weather, an MBA and CPA at the Univ. of So. Calif. in 1969; my academics improved in the interest of maintaining my grad school deferment of active duty. During grad school, I also worked in a CPA firm providing consulting services to hotel developers and restaurants. The succeeding two years in a green suit provided me experience as a Company Commander at Ft. Riley, KS and a Plans & Operations officer at the HQ of US Army in Vietnam. We had a gang of junior officers at VOMA (Vietnam Open Mess Agency); and one of my duties was to run a VOMIT (Vietnam Open Mess Inspection Team). Essentially, we tried to keep the enlisted, non-com and officers’ clubs under control so the “lost” inventories and stolen slot machines wouldn’t buy bullets for the bad guys. The best parts were the travel – I saw most of the country at one time or another – and the attitude we maintained as non-career officers – “what’re you going to do, send me to Vietnam?”
Beginning in 1971, I lived a few houses from the sand in Manhattan Beach CA and commuted to downtown Los Angeles to work as an auditor of hotels, restaurants and country clubs. In 1972, I married Martha, a girl from Prairie Village and moved her to Hermosa Beach, where we lived for 10 years until our (relatively amicable) divorce. I had been sent to a human potential seminar (like EST) by a marriage counselor and Martha; after two years of that, we processed our marriage into oblivion. In the mid-1970s, my CPA career wasn’t very challenging and the consulting department I had started in the LA office was fully staffed, so I ended up in the healthcare business, working as Chief Financial Officer at one of the early HMOs. While we were considered “medical Communists” by most of the physician community, we were able to hire staff providers who preferred a regular income and hours to the uncertainty of collecting from both insurance companies and the rapidly-growing Medicare and Medicaid programs. The company grew quickly in Southern Calif. and acquired businesses in Guam and Salt Lake City, UT; this occasioned a lot of travel for me, most of it fun. Imagine going to Guam for a week and returning home six weeks later, after negotiations with the government finally concluded. SLC travel was much less stressful; usually we’d solve the Thursday morning management crisis by late afternoon and spend the next three days on the slopes. Oh, and the Park City condo was much cheaper than paying for a lot of hotel rooms. I capped my HMO career in the early 1980s providing consulting services to startup HMOs around the country and negotiating provider contracts in a number of rural Calif. towns for the United Farm Workers, where I worked closely with Caesar Chavez for more than a year. In the mid-1980s, my healthcare management career morphed into Cost Care, a startup company that provided the cost controls developed by HMOs to small insurance companies and self-insured unions and employers. I moved to the Newport Beach CA area to build this company to almost 400 employees (mostly nurses and physicians) serving 10 million patients through our health plan clients around the US. We traveled around the US a lot and to Europe on several occasions as we built and eventually sold Cost Care to a major insurance company. This by itself wasn’t enough excitement, so I met and married Dotty, with whom I adopted Annie at birth. An “open adoption” is a wonderful way to start a family. The child doesn’t have to grow up with a “big secret” or go through the trauma of finding her “real parents” later in life. Annie had extra parents (birth-mother and birth-father), three grandmothers, two grandfathers, a great-grandmother and a great-grandfather to dote on her. And, dote, they did. One grandfather and I built a little house by the pool for her one summer, and another set of grandparents kept Annie in proper meals and taxi rides while she attended Boston University. Annie graduated from BU in hospitality administration and, like her Dad, sought warmer climes. She’s now in her fourth year working in tourism in the U.S. Virgin Islands. My next career was the home health care business, in which I owned two companies (Americair), one in Orange County CA and one in Denver CO. I had a partner in the CO franchise, with whom I sold our group of companies at the end of 1997. Just prior to selling, our franchisor had badly breached his agreement to our detriment, so I embarked on a whole new career – unlicensed paralegal. I managed the lawsuit for seven years, producing over 800,000 documents and enduring a six-month jury trial involving 11 plaintiffs, 5 defendants and seven attorneys. Fortunately, the jury and the judge got it right, awarding 100% of our damages, our punitive damages and our legal fees! Just after selling the home health companies, my partner and I were searching Oregon and Washington for locations to start assisted living centers. After finding that two competitors had tied up all of the good locations, I said “let’s go to your golf club”. John had played most of his life, and I started that day what has become a major pastime and challenge for me. Over the last 14 years, I’ve played all over the UK and in France, and am working on playing as many courses as I can in the US. After 20 years of marriage and seeing Annie through most of college, Dotty and I divorced. A good friend sponsored me at Santa Ana Country Club; I found I needed a regular partner to accompany me in mixed events. The sale of our Americair companies not only allowed us to finance the suit, but also provided additional capital for me to continue my private equity investing activities. While starting and building companies is fun, one can’t do very many simultaneously. So, throughout my various careers, I’ve been able to find promising business plans created by very smart and fun people, and participate in their development and financing. Not all of them were successful, but the ones that were made the others much easier to chalk up to experience. And, learning about assisted living centers, vertically-integrated optical services, implantable glucose sensors for patients with diabetes, internet grocery shopping with same-day delivery services, and ballast water treatment systems which allow ocean-going vessels of all sizes to meet U.N. and U.S. mandated environmental regulations has provided me a little intellectual stimulation at the end of a day at the office. A successful search on Match.com in 2008 netted me my best-ever companion, sous-chef and golfing partner; we’ve been married three years. Ann (not to be confused with daughter Anne) is my cougar, having been born ten days before me. Of course, I have to acknowledge that her seniority has granted her much more wisdom than I possess, but we both have learned what’s important in a relationship, so we’re living a delightful life. Third time is, indeed, a charm! Ann and I have several wall maps on which we’ve posted pins for places that she, I and we have been, and everyplace else we want to go together. Although the U.S. map has 8 – 10 empty states, we can knock most of those off with a well-planned golf trip or two. Internationally, Africa, Russia and India vie for most-neglected and France is most-adored. We’re going to Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong this Spring, and New Zealand three weeks after reunion. During all my careers, and my marriages, one constant has been my avocation of wine tasting. It started in 1972, when I joined several tasting groups in Hermosa Beach. The groups of 12 - 14 met every Monday night for ten years. We formally evaluated wines from around the world (averaging over 50 wines each month) in various formats (best wines from CA, France, Italy, etc), but most of the groups looked for the best wines for the money. Our theory was that any fool can buy a 96-point wine for $100, but we want one from the region that rated 92 points for $20. Our current tasting activities are more focused on dinners with a number of friends who are professional or amateur chefs. For additional extra-curricular activities (remember those on college applications?) I’ve kept up my singing in church choirs and have been on a number of non-profit boards, including Santa Ana Country Club, Newport-Balboa Rotary, and a foundation at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. My Rotary activities have been the most rewarding, as a fundraiser in Rotary International Foundation’s efforts to eradicate polio around the world; we’ve received grants from the Gates Foundation and others to assist us and we’re down to fewer than 500 cases in the world last year. Ann and I are looking forward to reunion, and a bit of golf around K.C. BEST: The Student Prince; beers at Pizza Hut on Rainbow blvd. during 7th period. WORST: Trigonometry 2012-08-06 20:09:08 Send Andrew a Message
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2012-02-15 10:50:44
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2012-02-15 10:58:57
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2012-02-15 10:58:57
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2012-02-15 10:50:44
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Caryn Nilsson (Carlson)
 
Retired Special Ed Teacher/Sub Teacher
Married
4
10
2
I went to Baylor my freshman year, got married and finished up my degree at UMKC in Elementary Ed. I taught 4th grade at J.S.Chick and then had 2 children. I then taught at church preschool, got a divorce and taught at St. Paul's Episcopal Day school. I remarried and acquired 2 children. I moved to North Carolina went back to school to get an elementary/special ed add on to my license and taught preschool special ed with children on the autism spectrum. I sub now, spend time with local grandchildren, and ride my bike all over our small town.
I learned so much in Ms Guyer's history class. I still have some of those extra books she made us read. I remember getting to go sketch around town in art class. We would drive around the Plaza in a converible-great times. I remember Mr. Stephens dropping dead during a basketball game.
2012-08-06 20:09:14
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2012-02-15 10:58:57
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2012-02-15 10:50:44
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