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Pat Parker Hewlett (Class of '66): CYO Conventions
I attended one convention when the group went to Chicago. Jim Reinhardt took our group and we had the time of our lives. We stayed at the Palmer House Hotel. Nancy (Vesci) Halvachs, my best friend and I had so much fun. It was my first time to really visit Chicago and I was all eyes on Michigan Avenue. We were young versions of LaVerne and Shirley, I am sure.
Jim Reinhardt (Class of '59): CYO Conventions
Who is that odd fellow in the picture at the top of this web page? His jacket looks like something out of the 60s! (In fact, it was.) That picture was taken when we were preparing to go to Miami Beach in Nov '67 for that legendary Natl CYO Convention. Legendary because while it was the largest attended of those conventions (8,000+), almost no one went to any general session or workshop because they were all busy playing on the beach. (Can you blame them?)
The mass of good Catholic teens did however have time to TP the entire Fountainebleau Hotel -- yes the entire outside, thanks to the presence of a balcony in each room. That group was also remembered for conducting a coordinated flush of toilets throughout the hotel at the same moment, nearly destroying the plumbing.
Wasn't the Fountainebleau still gangster-owned in the late 60s? We could have been in deep doo-doo. My sister Janice, Greg Goldasich, Jane Ann Lambert and her mother Roberta were on that trip. I think that we had 25-30 from St E there. It was probably one of the largest single parish delegations at the convention. Roberta and I were caught late one evening in the famous Boom-Boom Room, escaping from the kids for a brief respite.
I had learned of these national conventions in 1964. Pepsi had underwritten a 30 min film of the convention in Nov 1963 where JFK had spoken just days before his death. In those days, I got a lot of films that we showed after the meetings. When the kids saw this one, the immediate question was "Can we go next year?" They began fund-raising in earnest. I'll always remember that Nov morning when we gathered at the GC train station for the trip to Chicago … lots of nervous parents and excited kids. We went to the NCYOF Conventions in 1965 (Chicago), 1967 (Miami Beach), and 1969 (Denver). In 1971, after I had already moved to Albany, Virgil took a group to Wash DC where we met for a fine reunion of sorts.
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CYO Clubhouse (Roberta Lambert's Garage)Mark Reinhardt, Class of '72
I dreamt about the old clubhouse in the Lambert’s back yard just a week ago. I think it comes from thinking about the reunion this fall.
In my dream it had undergone extensive renovation, and was now a two-story white frame house with wrap around 2nd story walk-around balcony. I remember in the dream thinking “this looks different than I remember…
” I recall the egg-carton ceiling tiles, and the wall on one end of the room that was open to the creativity of anyone who had a pen, or paint-brushes and palette of paint…it became the wall of graffiti and local art creations…even back then I thought what a shame that someday all that art would be lost with the passage of time. (Wasn’t there a Medusa-head of sorts on that wall?)
