A fire was reported at Wayne Middle School Friday night.

https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2024/11/16/fire-at-wayne-central-middle-school-damages-classroom-and-library-closes-school/76362550007

A little over half-way through the season, Wayne Girls soccer is doing very well, winning 10 games with no losses and one tie. The tie was with Aquinas. Good luck the rest of the way!

Bill Dixon is hosting a get-together this Thursday September 19 at 3689 South Main St, Marion, NY. Look for the Topper Ladder sign in front of a house, take the driveway to the back.

Anytime after 2 PM is fine, bonfire lighting at 7PM. Grills will be ready if you want to grill your own. BYOB and a lawn chair. There probably will be some snacks around, but bring some if you want them for sure.

No cost, friends of the Class of 74 are welcome.

From 1967 Wayne Eagle Page 163

The Wayne boys basketball team came up short, falling to Glens Falls 50 – 37. It was a hard task with Glens Falls essentially playing a home game. But overall a great season, Section V Class A champs, winning the NY West Region, and not losing a game in Section V and finishing 23 – 3 overall.

More info on the season at https://waynealumni.org/basketball/?page_id=1198.

Wayne Central advanced in the state tournament, defeating Section VI champs Williamsville South 58 – 41 at Buffalo State Saturday afternoon. Moving on the first time Wayne has qualified for the state tournament.

I happened to come across this photo in my family’s collection. It was a slide that I scanned a few years ago. It was the summer of 1967, my little league (called Major League) Ontario Recreation team was playing a game on a ball field located at the Wayne Central High School. You can see the TC Armstrong Middle School under construction in the background. That is actually me pitching, I think we were the Giants, and Gary Pixley was our coach. One thing I do remember, I pitched a no hitter, though I had two walks!!

Wayne Football defeats Rochester Prep 31 – 0. Great win on Homecoming Weekend.

A scary accident in Webster this afternoon involving a Wayne bus with 22 seniors and juniors coming back from a field trip, and a car. The bus caught on fire. All occupants of the bus got out safely before the fire, with only two non-life threatening injuries. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the occupant of the other vehicle.

https://www.whec.com/top-news/school-bus-crashes-on-lake-road-in-webster/

From 1975 Wayne Eagle Page 9

Congrats to Josh Patterson ’06 for being named to the Section V Wrestling Hall of Fame (official induction May 10 ).

The Wayne Girls volleyball team is playing in the class B sectional finals on Friday vs Waterloo (at Victor). Good luck ladies!

A couple of pages have been created from 2001. Senior trip photos, and a few from moving up day 2001.

Thank you to the following alumni who have donated to help keep this site online for another 3 years:

• Kathy Doyle Hearn
• Fred Miller
• Charlotte P Siebert
• Diana Mattuzzi
• Tara Herbster
• Patty Jones Oughterson
• Celia Skorinko Weir
• Bruce A. MacMillan
• Cheryl Bamford Conte
• Kathy Hecht Langdon
• Eileen Legler

• Michele Farley
• Wendy Herrick
• Elizabeth Peters
• Jean Stein
• Sandy Weis
• Patty Marshall
• Chris Black
• Bill Jordan
• Ernie Fink
• Nancy Frederes
• Deb Pecoraro
• Katie Scott
• Wendy Kerr-Vine
• Anne Bulman
• Bernie Schuster
• JR Sharkey
• Dawn Wooster
• Dolores Fox
• Kathy LaManna
• Barrie Krochmalech
• Vita Barci
• Cathy Rich
• Wendy Freida
• Kathy Parks
• Amy Voorhees

Some traditions are lost, other new ones are started. I like this one. (From Wayne Central Facebook page)

There are only 3 yearbook covers not shown on our Yearbook Covers page. They are not in the school library or Ontario Library. If anyone could snap a photo of any of these yearbooks, it would be welcomed. Using a cell phone can be sufficient, try to ensure good lighting and get all the edges in the frame.

Using the Google PhotoScan app would be preferred. It is available in the Google Play store or Apple App Store for free. It is easy to use.

Send any photos to briand”at”waynealumni.org – Thanks!

Still hard for me to believe, but this website has been up in one form or another since 1997, making this the 25th year. Retirement has given me the ability to focus attention on this again. Much of the pre-2016 website has been restored, Registration has been re-enabled, the alumni directory is back, yearbook picture of the week is more consistent, and some broken features have been fixed.

Wayne Basketball History has been updated, and Wayne Soccer History has also been updated.

I get some occasional feedback and comments, and hopefully people still get some benefit from it being available. In a couple of months, it will be time for renewal of the web hosting, and hopefully I can get a handful of people to contribute to keeping the site available. Stay tuned for announcements about this in the future.

It seems like many people access the Wayne Alumni Facebook page to keep up-to-date. Just FYI, all posts on the website are not posted on the Wayne Alumni Facebook page. Facebook won’t allow me to automatically update the page when I post on waynealumni.org, so I have to manually do it. I try to minimize the Facebook clutter, since for most people it is become a vast wasteland. So visit waynealmni.org directly to see all the latest.

Things I hope to do in the future:

• Get access to more yearbooks
• Scan more yearbooks
• Enlist people to contribute content to the site
• Get more participation form the 2000s classes
• Develop a succession plan

There are probably more, but I will post updates as required.

When I was in middle school, I started attending high school basketball games. This was probably 1968-70. The “old gym” was the only gym back then, and it probably didn’t hold a huge number of people. But entertainment choices were more limited then, and the stands were usually pretty well packed, even when the team’s record was not that great.

I’m just guessing, but at least 50% of the crowd were students. There also was a concept in those days called cheerleaders. Before it was turned into a sport, cheerleaders actually attended all the games and tried to keep the crowd enthused. Nothing against it being a sport, but seems odd that the original intention was lost completely.

Anyway, in addition to the cheerleaders, at least in 1968-70 (or thereabouts), there was this thing called a pep band. If you’ve ever been to a Syracuse University basketball game at the dome, and it’s not winter break (Dec 20 – Jan 20), you may have seen the student band playing in the student section. It was kind of like that, but only 15 people. And they somehow squeezed between the two sections of bleachers behind the scoring table.

At that time, I was probably playing in the middle school band as a percussionist, so I always watched them with interest. But I always remembered how loud they were, with no amplification. I don’t know all the songs they played, but think of a college football game. That kind of music. One song I do remember was “Oh Wisconsin”. It was just a great atmosphere that the band contributed to.

Maybe my ears were untrained, but I thought they were very good.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it last much beyond 1970. It was probably difficult to get all 15 players to attend every home game. Maybe you could do without one now and again, but it must have been hard. Then to have one of the music teachers also commit as well. So it didn’t last. But even if Wayne didn’t win, you knew that band was good!

Traditions are nice, maybe not always essential, to be maintained. It is also nice to evolve. Sometimes they just fade away. By virtue of working on this website, I have had an opportunity to see most of Wayne Central’s Yearbooks (72 so far). I have around 26 myself. We have a page on the website of all (except a couple) of the yearbook covers. The Wayne Central yearbook has a title “The Eagle”. The early ones, it was prominently displayed on the cover. After about 5 years, for unknown reasons, it was shortened to “Eagle”. Sometimes, the name did not appear on the cover, other times an Eagle was depicted on the cover.

In the 50s and 60s, often the yearbook had a visual theme, with artwork, graphics, font. Starting in the late 80’s, themes were appearing again, but now with the theme given a name, like “Climbing Life’s Ladders” or “On the Move”. Which is OK, but now often replacing “The Eagle” or “Eagle” on the cover. Some still depicted an Eagle on the cover, some not. Themes seem predominate in the 1990s for many years after. In 2018, 2019, 2020, they just say “Wayne Eagles” on the cover (very nice appearing covers), which is not the name of the yearbook, it is the name of our sports teams.

I’m sure the student yearbook staff putting yearbooks together is a lot of thankless work, doing something they never have done before. I would hope a yearbook advisor would be aware of what the yearbook name is supposed to be.

I like the themes and some are very clever. It seems like it would be easy to include “The Eagle” or “Eagle” on the cover and still have a theme. Just a suggestion.

Here is the brief story – The old (circa 2016) Alumni Directory has been partially restored. It is just a list of all who were registered on the site by mid-2016. No contact links, no photos, but if there was a short Bio, that link will work (though info might be outdated). There may be further updates regarding a new Alumni Directory in the future, but we will see.

from 1987 Page 15

No job and cold weather means website gets attention. In addition to new yearbook covers in the last post, some pages that were part of the old website (pre-2017) have been restored. The Yearbook Dedications, Ontario High School, Wayne Middle School, and Walworth School pages have been brought back to life. The Contact page has also been fixed (sorry, I did not know it was broken). I visited the Internet Archive (I can’t believe this exists), and was looking at the site from 2016 and earlier. I put so many hours into getting it working just the way I wanted back then. Despite the fact I will probably regret it, I made some tweaks were made to the styles, as there were some things I wasn’t happy with on the current site. There could be a few issues I haven’t found yet. Though using WordPress has made many things easier, they hook you in for free, and then everyone wants to charge you monthly to get the “premium” features, which conveniently include things everyone wants/needs.

By the way, don’t be alarmed by the “not secure” warning in your browser when visiting this site. We aren’t doing any financial transactions here, so it’s not an issue. To get that removed, it will cost another couple hundred a year. I don’t think it is justified.

Finally managed to get a 1950 Wayne Eagle yearbook cover image. Not that I had to look far, but it is nice to always have a camera in your pocket. By the way, this was the very first Wayne Eagle yearbook.

The Wayne Basketball History website has finally been updated to look less antiquated. A few teams have been updated with info, and hopefully more to come as time permits.

Here is where to find it:

http://waynealumni.org/basketball/

A Natural History of Lake Ontario

As headlines of deadly heat waves and extreme weather around the nation abound, Lake Ontario’s moderating influences on our temperatures has never been more apparent. The lake’s many gifts to us include our diversified high value fruit growing region, a major recreational fishery and some of the best sailing and cruising waters in the northeast. And yet says the author, “It remains over looked and under appreciated so I felt a need to write this book.” Gateley, who now resides in Fair Haven, has spent decades exploring the lake afloat with her various boats and its shorelines on foot. She says, “Lake Ontario is an international body of water that has played a key role in the history of two nations. Its coastal landscape is one of the most dynamic areas anywhere in upstate NY. It is a place of constant change shaped by water and wind.” Her new book will help beachcombers seek out fossils, lucky rocks, and water rounded quartz crystals among the shore’s varied pebbles. Some of the colorful beach pebbles here were transported by the glacier from the Canadian Shield, home to outcrops of the oldest surface rock on the continent. Gateley also documents some of the many changes that have occurred in the last few decades to Lake Ontario and its fisheries. Over fifty black and white photos and descriptions detail the interactions of native and recent immigrant animals and plants that now call this Great Lake home. Despite pollution and on going deforestation and development, the lake retains much resilience, and native birds and animals like the osprey and lake sturgeon are making a comeback here.Susan Peterson Gateley has written on Lake Ontario topics for more than thirty years covering everything from midge hatches and classic wooden boats to radium factories in her books and magazine articles.. She also scripted a 2015 documentary, “Lake Ontario, Quest For Hope” that was broadcast on local TV. Part of that video, based on the book “Saving The Beautiful Lake” was adapted and distributed in Canada for classroom use as a short. A Natural History of Lake Ontario is available in bookstores throughout the region and can also be found on line or ordered directly from the author. Visit susanpgateley.com for more information and a link to Lake Ontario Log, on line since 1995, and to her videos.