Well, our Senior Alumni Reunion is over. Fred Otto and Foster Shibles represented our Class at the 67th Reunion.
It is with deep sorrow that I inform you that our classmate, Carol “Squeaky” Loud, passed away on October 5, 2023.
While at the University of Maine, Carol was a very active member of the Modern Dance Club, a cheerleader, and a member of the Maine Masque Theatre. You will see how talented she was when you read from this excerpt of a Martha’s Vineyard Times article:
“Carol was born in Waterville, ME. During her school years in Waterville, she began lessons on the violin and piano, which led to a lifetime of music, which she generously shared with the world through performance and teaching.
When she started dance lessons, she knew she’d found her passion.
After graduating from the University of Maine in 1956, she lived briefly in Boston, where she worked at what became public radio. She attended NYU Graduate School in New York City, where she began serious studies in dance. In the early ’60s she moved to California, where she taught dance to children and organized dancing in the streets of San Francisco.
She developed deep ties and lifetime friendships in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lived for more than 30 years.
Later, after moving across the country to Martha’s Vineyard in 1995, she returned each summer to teach workshops in creative body alignment . . . She added her inimitable humor, fun, and poetry, along with her deep knowledge of the body, to this important work.
Carol became involved in much of the island’s varied music scene, teaching piano, taking dance classes, accompanying the Minnesingers and students in the island-wide string classes and recitals.
She was an early member of Island Community Chorus, as well as singing in Vintage Voices. During street fairs in Tisbury, Carol was one of the troubadours. She served as church musician at several area churches.
She built a washtub bass, which she played with Princess Pupuli’s ukulele band. For the past 26 years she was a featured soloist as well as a part of the Woman Within dancers in Built on Stilts, a summer program which included performers of all ages.”
Many thanks to Dee Gardner ’89 for providing the information related to the Class of 1956 Zoom meeting held on October 3, 2021 and printed in the summer 2023 MAINE Alumni Magazine.
Once again, I was notified by the Alumni Association that there were no clippings for our class. In desperation, I will provide another “it’s a small world” article in the next issue of our class notes.
I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and your new year is off to a good start.