Count of registrations and RSVP’s (7/20/09)
There are 225 paid registrants to the reunion. To see who’s registered, click on this page, which you can also find on the left sidebar of “The Reunion” page. To see who’s RSVP’d, click on this page.
RSVP page has been suspended
WIth only 8 days, 14 hours and a few minutes left before registration closes, the Reunion Planning Committee has suspended the RSVP process to encourage alumi to register and to eliminate the possibility of confusion.
If you are planning to attend the reunion, please register by clicking on this page. Payment is required for registration.
Hotel Reservation Deadline Extended to July 1!
We’ve spoken to the Radisson Hotel and gotten agreement to extend the reservation deadline until July 1 for the whole class, as long as we have 15 rooms reserved by June 15. We are currently at 12 rooms.
Remember, a reservation costs you nothing and can be cancelled up until 4:00 PM the day of arrival without penalty (confirm this upon making your reservation). Additionally, if we reserve all 20 rooms we’ve blocked out, we will have free shuttle service to and from the reunion on Saturday evening.
To make your reservation and get the special class rate of $79, please call (904)281-9700 and let the receptionist know that you are reserving under the Terry Parker Class of ‘79 block of rooms.
Please send your photos!
The reunion planning committee would like to publish your best photos in the program, in the slide show we’ll be presenting throughout the reunion and on this website.
Please email us your tasteful, vintage-1979-era photographs to photos@tp79reunion09.com by June 15, to include them in our publications. C’mon people! Show us how you remember your high school years.
Reunion Updates on Twitter available
Want to receive updates that much more quickly on …
- Who’s registered lately?
- What registration deadlines are upon us?
- What new events are announced?
- Who’s shown up to and what’s happening at the party?
- Where the “After Party” is?
Get yourself a Twitter account, enable your mobile phone to receive “Tweets” and follow “ReunionUpdates”….you’ll always be in the know.
Questions or concerns? Contact Ralph at rgomez@tp79reunion09.com
How to reconnect with Terry Parker Alumni
To make it easier for our class’ alumni to reconnect with each other, we have created an email address that automatically forwards to your actual email address, and that is easy for everyone to guess. Of course, we can’t forward emails to you if we don’t know your actual email address.
To write an alumnus, all you need to do is know the first initial of their high school name (nickname if that’s what they used) as well as their last or maiden name. The format of the address is:
first initial+last/maiden name @ tp79reunion09.com. For example, Ralph’s is rgomez@tp79reunion09.com and Nancy’s is ngroves@tp79reunion09.com.
Test your email address out by sending a message to your new account and seeing if it comes right back to you. If it doesn’t, it could be that you’ve supplied us a different email address or that it’s not working. Let Ralph know.
If you find that you’re getting too much legitimate or spam email, please let Ralph know and he’ll discuss with you your options (remove the account, forward the messages to a different account, put a spam filter on it, or something else),
Fletcher Class of ‘79 – Lost Souls
The Parker Reunion Committee is coordinating with the committees of other area high schools to help find some of the alumni with whom we’ve lost all contact. To start, we’re working with the Fletcher Reunion Committee (you know, the high school we beat during homecoming our senior year).
Do you know a 1979 graduate of Fletcher? They’re still trying to locate lost classmates for their July 17th reunion. Click here to check out Fletcher’s ‘Lost Souls List’ and share an email address with their reunion committee.
The Band is announced: Last To Leave
We promised you a band party, but didn’t just go out and get a typical wedding band, we contracted “Last To Leave” a local band that’s been playing Jacksonville clubs and venues for over 15 years. Billed as one of the top dance bands in the South, Last To Leave will make sure that even the shyest of all classmates gets their booty shaking on the dance floor.
To see a sample of their music, click play on the following…
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Deadline for registering
The reunion committee wants to remind alumni that there will be no registration the day of the event. The reasons are many:
1) Registration at the door would require us to either accept cash, checks or have a credit card processing terminal available. We really don’t want to be accounting for cash while we’re trying to have fun (it tends to disappear easily), we can’t verify easily that checks wont bounce until after the event, and we don’t own or want to pay for a credit card terminal.
2) Last minute registrants almost killed the 20 year reunion. Because of the large influx of walk up registrants, the kitchen had to scramble to fix additional plates of food and tables had to be brought in minutes before the reunion was to start. The 20 year reunion committee was really stressing to accomodate the procrastination of a large number of people; the 30 year reunion committee is not that kind.
3) Setting up a no-food late-registrant package, as has been suggested, wont be simple. We’re offering an hors d’oeuvres buffet, and don’t really want to spend our reunion time policing who walks up to get a piece of cheese or a shrimp cocktail.
4) **Without advance registrations we can’t know whether we’re financially whole or not! ** Since there are no deep pockets to pay for overspending, we are working very hard to ensure that we can pay our vendors’ invoices. We have made a leap-of-faith that people will show up and but are waiting to see what commitment there is from alumni before we sign contracts and pay deposits. Without advance funds, we may lose vendors.
The 30 year reunion committee opted to not use a Reunion Planning company because we felt that for the same money, we could provide the class a lot more value. We have taken the financial risk so that you could have a better party. Please do your part by registering as soon as possible.
The last day for regular registration (at $85 per person) is June 30. The last day for late registration (at $95 per person) is July 15 (two weeks before the reunion). We have communicated this on the website, emails and in a mailer we sent to everyone whose addresses we could find. Since we feel we’ve done our best to warm everyone, we will turn unregistered classmates away at the door. No exceptions.
Terry Parker ‘79 “Lost Souls”
At this point, we have made email contact with 212 Class of ‘79 alumni and posted by U.S. mail a notice to the rest of the class. However, the notices for the following 19 people were returned, which classifies them as our “Lost Souls”.
Please pass on any information you may have about their whereabouts so that we can inform them of the reunion:
Jerry Douglas Ancion
Douglas Robert Yoel
Randall Brannen Nelson
Linda Ann Dotson
David Clifton Black
Hubert Leroy Hodges
Ulf Nilsson
Ralph Matthew Bartley
Sharon Elizabeth Barksdale Stewart
Venetia Renee Benny
Daniel Wells Benson
Barbara Louise Christian Daniels
William Paul Clark
Tammy Denise Drayton
Keli Marie Ponder
Rennee Walls Scharning
Vera Almeter Williams
Derrick Lamar Wilson
Registration is now open
The reunion committee is happy to announce that registration is now officially open. To simplify the registration and fulfillment process, we have decided to offer a one price ($85 per person) pass to all Saturday evening events.
To register with a credit card, please click on the following link.
If you prefer to pay with a check, please send a check made out to the “Terry Parker Class of 1979″ to:
TP Class of ‘79, PO Box 11822, Jacksonville Florida 32239
The check should be in multiples of $85 ($85 for one person, $ 170 for two, $255 for three) plus an additional $5 for processing. All paper registrations must be received by June 30, 2009.
You should also include on a separate piece of paper the following information:
Name ________________________________________________________
Maiden Surname ______________________________________________
Street ______________________________________________________
Street ______________________________________________________
City ________________________________________________________
State/Zip ___________________________________________________
Country _____________________________________________________
Home Telephone ______________________________________________
Email ______________________________________
And, if you think $85 is a lot of money, be glad you weren’t in Fletcher’s Class of ‘79….check out what they want for the reunion: http://mysite.verizon.net/resxjvh7/fletcher79/index.html
The poll results as of today
Thank you to all who voted on the polls we posted earlier this week; 150 emails went out and 46 of you voted (does that mean only 1/3 of you would consider going??).
If you voted, you can see the most up-to-the-date results by clicking on the “View Results” link under the poll choices. However, I can share with you that as of this moment, the results are as follows:
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Click on graphic for better view
If you consider that anyone that’s willing to pay $150 is also willing to pay $125 and $100 and $75 and $50, and that anyone willing to pay $125 is willing to pay $100…and so on…then we can say the following: Of those that took the poll….
100% are willing to pay $50
76% are willing to pay $75
53% are willing to pay $100
29% are willing to pay $125
18% are willing to pay $150
What we’ll be discussing next week is whether to create different bundles that provide you more party opportunities depending on the cash you’re willing to dole out. Feel free to comment below on this concept.
New poll: Which teacher(s) would you like to see at the reunion?
I’ve posted a new poll on the top page asking which teacher or administrator you’d like to see at the reunion. We’ll stop polling in a month or two and see if we can locate the top 3 or 4, then invite them to the reunion free-of-charge – pending sufficeient registrations from the classmates.
In other words, you will subsidize it, but we need to have enough people attending that it doesn’t materially affect the price.
If there’s a teacher you’d like me to add to the poll let me know and I’ll do so.
Ralph
New Email Subscription Process
From this point forward, if you want to receive updates by email, you should register yourself on this website by clicking the link on the left column under the word “Registration” (in red).
You will then be automatically (i.e. no work for the webmaster!) sent a weekly digest of all the changes made during the week. If you find you’re getting very long emails, you can select the categories of posts and pages that you’re interested in.
This new proces will also ensure that the webmaster doesn’t miss something and will simplify the number of applications being used. Overall, life gets better for you and the overworked webmaster…and minimizes the number of places you need to go to for registration.
As this change is first implemented, please be sure to give us feedback if you find this to be too cumbersome, or if emails are too wordy or unclear.
Sponsors Needed
The reunion committee would like to offset the costs of the reunion by offering a limited number of sponsorships to business and individuals that would like to promote their products and services. First priority will be given to classmates that may find it beneficial to advertise on our web site, mailers, program and the reunion.
We are looking for both cash donations, as well as materials and services that may be useful to us in the planning and execution of the reunion.
If interested, please contact Susanne Kemmerer Pinkien by emailing her through the contact form available on this website.
Our 30 year reunion is around the corner!
Believe it or not, next year it’ll be 30 years since we left the halls of Terry Parker High School to start our lives as adults. Several of us have decided to not let this milestone moment pass by unnoticed and already, we have put in months of hard work to secure a location and a band, start contacting people and pick out a date.
We hope that you can attend and we also hope that you can help. Right now, we are in dire need of people’s email addresses, so we’ve put this web site together in hopes that you’ll submit your own address and your friends’ addresses….it’s the easiest way to disseminate information about this upcoming event.
So, submit your own contact information by clicking here. When you enter your information in this survey, you’ll have a chance to let us know if the information you provide should be kept confidential. And we promise not to spam you with excessive emails or even phone calls.
After that, dust off your address book (if you’re old-school and are still using paper) and provide us the email addresses of anyone else in our class by clicking here and taking a brief survey. You can only enter 3 people’s names and emails at a time, but you can take that survey multiple times. We’ll only use these to let people know that this web site exists; they’ll then have a chance to take the survey you used to register yourself.
Note…..do not leave private information in the comment sections of this web site because it will be picked up by spammers and you’ll be hating life.
AND….stay tuned to this web site for more information on the reunion!
