Ernest Gill

Subject: 68 reunion
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 1998 05:42:59 PDT
From: "Ernest Gill" <percydovetonsils@hotmail.com>

Dear Joe,

Hi, my name's Ernest Gill, Central High class of '68. I live in Germany now, and when I called my dad the other day he said you'd been looking for me because the class reunion is coming up this month. I'm afraid I won't be able to attend. Too bad y'all didn't hold in in May, 'cause I was in Angelo then for three weeks.

I'm trying to remember who you were. Don't be mad -- it's been a long time. Your name sure sounds familiar, but I'd have to get out the old school yearbook to make sure -- and it's in storage God knows where.

Nobody probably remembers me 'cause I was very shy, pimply-faced and a complete nerd in thoses days. Actually, I haven't changed that much. Played trombone in mean old Homer Anderson's marching band. Worked on the school paper but was too timid to be a good reporter.

After graduation I went to ASU and majored in journalism and minored in German and prayed to heaven I wouldn't be sent to Vietnam and have my cojones blown off. My draft number was 54, so I signed up for a Navy officer training program for a while.

I worked as a cub reporter at the Standard-Times and after graduation from ASU I moved to Boston, Mass., and worked as a reporter and later as a desk editor at various newspapers in the Boston area. I became fascinated by sign language for the deaf and worked for several years at WGBH-TV, the PBS station in Boston, as associate producer of a captioned rebroadcast version of the ABC Evening News.

Thanks to Reaganomics in the early 1980s the Captioned News lost its funding and I was faced with the prospect of being unemployed or writing captions for the deaf on Tidy-Bowl toilet cleanser commercials. I chose to get my severance pay and use it to fulfill an old dream -- living for a while in Europe.

I came to Europe in the early 1980s, scrounging a living for a time as an English teacher until I got a job as a desk editor in the English Service of Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, a German newswire service. I've been here ever since.

That's about it. Let me know if this message doesn't reach you.

Here's my mailing address:

Ernest Gill
Loogestieg 3 20249
Hamburg Germany

Best Wises, Ernest