During my 50th high school reunion a month ago, our class president, Rick Jellinger, said he has learned two things since we graduated from Ames High School in 1965: “God has a plan, and he also has a sense of humor.” 

Like a lot of my generation, Rick dropped out of college, got drafted, went to Vietnam, returned to school, tended bar, got a graduate degree, had a family and was moderately successful in his chosen career.   

The biographies that Rick and other classmates wrote for the reunion contain much wisdom. 

Dorothy Albertson, who married classmate Bill Hawkes, wrote: “Life was simple the first five years. We were students, lived in cheap apartments, had no car, no furniture, no TV, no credit cards.” 

Kevin Hoskins had a different view. He joined the Marines after high school and helped fly Cuban refugees to Miami. 

While in the Iowa Air National Guard, Kevin was “placed on active duty on many occasions, with stints in Panama, Kuwait, Turkey, Great Britain, Spain, Japan, Korea, Ecuador and Germany.”

Jerry Bowen, who had an anchorman’s voice even in high school, spent 33 years traveling the world for CBS News. “I claim to be bi-polar, having traveled to both the North and South poles on assignments,” Jerry wrote. 

Super smart and talented Karin Everson, got a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology after helping to found the international singing group that became Up With People. She also did a stint with Time magazine.

Jim Billings worked for the Peace Corps and the United Nations in jobs that took him to Mali, Haiti, Somalia, Papua New Guinea, Zambia, Egypt, Micronesia, Lebanon, Rwanda and Senegal. 

All-state musician Margaret Ulmer received a graduate degree from Brandeis University before launching a freelance music and theatrical career in New England. “When I needed a ‘real job’ (regular paycheck), I directed the summer school at the New England Conservatory of Music,” Ulmer wrote  

Bob Best, our best all-around athlete, has bowled two perfect 300 games. He also coached high school football and softball, winning state championships at Valley High School of West Des Moines, and was elected into the Iowa High School Softball Coaches Hall of Fame. 

Several classmates went into academia, including National Merit scholars Carolyn Bliss and Richard Knight. Bliss, who was also musical, teaches English literature at the University of Utah and reported, “I still love to dance.” Knight teaches wildlife management at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and has been voted “favorite professor” five times.

Janice Miller, our class baton twirler, was a professor and associate dean of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business. She wrote in her bio that she also “threw out the first pitch at a Brewers game” last year.

Our class produced at least one Wall Street lawyer, a Wall Street financier, a very minor candidate for president and a CIA spy, as well as several ministers.  

Many of us had second and third careers, but Steve Risdal may have the best. After selling his family’s Casey General Stores in 2000, Steve “got in the motorcycle business” as an owner of a Harley-Davidson dealership in Colorado.

We were not particularly athletic. Our football team lost more games than we won, which prompted the unusual cheer “We ain’t down yet.”

We didn’t know it then, but that cheer was a pretty good philosophy for life, because as reunion organizer Kathy Burnet wrote in her bio: 

“Life has had its expected downs, yet there is an undercurrent of goodness and happiness that leads me to the satisfying conclusion that life is indeed good and that the days of our lives make a difference.”