Another found soul

Karen Leonardi should be a private investigator. When I first started working with Karen on the 2002 reunion, I was amazed that she had a complete list of graduates along with addresses and phone numbers for most of us. I figured she must have gotten them from Bishop O’Reilly. I know the nice people at O’Reilly always were able to find me, especially around fund raising time, so I figured they had some special way of keeping track of us. However, when we attempted to put together a list for this reunion, I found that Karen’s list, which was 5 years old, was actually much more complete than the one that I got from Bishop O’Reilly which was missing about half of the current addresses. It was then that I realized the extent of Karen’s talent in tracking people down.

In a period of 5 years, people tend to move around, and many of you have done just that. In addition, people change email addresses like they change their clothing these days so the Internet hasn’t always been the asset one might assume in keeping track of all of you. So a lot of work goes into tracking down individuals. And this very much follows a sort of 95/5 rule where we spend 95% of our time trying to find the last 5% of our class members.

One of the people we were not successful in finding for the 25th reunion, and that was still on our missing persons list for this reunion, was Ann Marie Yatsko. That was true until Friday. Karen managed to track her down here in Colorado. She lives about 50 miles from me. I’ve exchanged some email with her and found that she was living for 6 years in Utah and then moved to Colorado about a year ago. Her husband, Al Manzi, is the President and Publisher of the Boulder Camera newspaper. The Boulder Camera main office is on Pearl Street which is within walking distance of Kati Wood Gardner’s house in Boulder (less than 2 miles). Ann Marie’s husband Al was also Rick Leandri’s college roommate in Bloomsburg. So there were a lot of small world moments experienced on Friday.

Unfortunately, Ann Marie won’t be able to make it to the reunion since she’s having company visiting from PA, but now that we’ve found her again, we hope that she’ll be able to make it to the next one.