I did manage to find one of the first folks I looked for, a Sunday school teacher who had worked for NASA and then moved away. Though he's now partly retired, he still has a NASA email address, and I managed to contact him that way, and we corresponded a little.

Even his case was fairly difficult, but he had a relatively uncommon first name and I was pretty sure who he worked for. It's been much tougher with most of my other teachers, and so far I really haven't had much success at all.

Today I tried looking for several people, including my Kindergarten teacher. Susan was amazed I could remember her name (I think I've got it right but I'm not sure after 37 years). Susan's memory of her first years in elementary school here is a blur, I guess, since she was having to learn English. Even then, when some years ago we drove by her old school, over in Magnolia Park on the other side of Houston, she still had fond memories of it.

Memories are about all that's left of my elementary school, which closed last month, after 56 years. I've only driven by it a few times in recent years, but still it feels weird to think that the place, where I spent a great deal of seven of my earliest years, will be gone.

As it turns out, there are at least several kindergarten teachers with the name I was looking for in the U.S. And that's just kindergarten teachers! After so many years, you kind of assume that you can find folks on the net, but this is still pretty difficult. I signed up with classmates.com recently, which is pretty good and seems to be growing a lot, but so far very few teachers have joined classmates.com. Maybe someone with a teacher's group could start a push to get more teachers to sign up.

I guess my experience shows there's still a lot of opportunity for reconnecting folks with websites, such as military buddies, foreign exchange students, etc. I did read an interesting article recently about some Jewish people who, six decades after being sent to concentration camps, have been reconnected by the internet. Of course the sad part was there were only a few who did in fact survive, which of course would have made it hard even to know who to look for, but it must be amazing to see someone again after so many years and such a difficult ordeal.

I don't know why I find reconnecting with the past interesting; maybe it's because I've experienced so little of it since leaving for college. The Houston economy was in terrible shape when Susan and I graduated in 1986 (oil had plunged to below $10) and as far as I can tell most folks didn't come back like we did. I got a job here because NASA had given out a new contract just shortly before the Challenger accident, but that disaster meant that the rest of the space business was also pretty depressed that year.

In any case, I still remember a lot of my teachers and appreciate the efforts they made. As a parent I can understand a lot better now how a teacher must make countless unnoticed little efforts or sacrifices on behalf of their students. Teaching as a profession was difficult back then, but in somewhat different ways; there wasn't as many curriculum constraints and emphasis on test scores as today, but on the other hand teacher pay really wasn't keeping up with inflation during the 1970s, to the point where it was pretty bad by the time I graduated.

I guess I'll keep trying from time to time to see if I can find more folks from the past. I wonder if one of these days most everyone will have a blog or some kind of home page where they can be located. It seems like about 2/3 of people use the net and 1/3 could care less, and maybe of those 2/3 of net users only a modest fraction are interested in blogs or other content creation. Of course, the percentages are much higher with younger folks, so maybe it's actually easier to travel forward in time on the net than backward!