Thanks and Acknowledgements
The Decatur Alumni Website chronicles the Alumni of DHS from 1935 to 1984 when our school consolidated. We are striving to include graduation pictures (when available) and current pictures; information about each graduate since leaving DHS; personal information, such as mailing addresses, phone #s, and e-mail addresses. We consider this website to be "a work in progress" since people marry, give birth, move, divorce and die. We hope to constantly update it as information becomes available to keep it as current as humanly possible. Since each Graduate will have a personal page, we encourage everyone to send any information, or pictures, that they would like to share, to be included in their space to me, Sherry Rogers Carlson, at onlysher@charter.net
I created this website for the Alumni of Decatur High School in Decatur, Nebraska, but I can't take credit for the original idea of creating such a website. My husband's classmate and friend, Ray Frigon, created a website for their school, CCCHS in Clay Center, KS and I thought it would be wonderful to do something similar for good old Decatur High.
My Husband, Arlen Carlson was the first person instrumental in getting me started. Not only is he very knowledgeable with computers, but he has a lot of patience when it comes to helping me with things such as this. He scanned the picture of the school directly from the inside of the 1959 Annual and set up the original HOME Page to be as visually attractive as possible. I told him how I wanted things to link up and he has patiently showed me how to make it happen.
The first information used to get us started was compiled mostly by Lynna Helms and Anita Swanson for last year's (2008) get together with the classes of 1960-1962 at Janz in Onawa. We were so pleased that a lot of our classmates provided their e-mail and home addresses, phone numbers and some personal information about their lives since graduation. We didn't want to waste that information, so we decided to start with what we had. Lynna Helms was on board from day one and has spent hours helping to research as many names and addresses and phone numbers as she could from her computer. She also took time to scan the entire 1954 graduating class pictures and e-mail them to be entered in the website. She has been instrumental in getting the word out about our site as well. Besides letting the Burt County Plaindealer know about us, her latest accomplishment is getting us linked up with the University of Nebraska, Lincoln's website. The FUN PAGES are Lynna's domain, and she has done a great job getting all the candid shots in there along with a lot of fun things like "Wills and Prophecies" from the annuals that had them.
Terry Smith, from the Class of 1964, took time to scan and e-mail me pictures of the entire graduating Classes of 1963 and 1964 from his personal Annuals; and Sandi Robinson Wheatly did the same from annuals and reunion booklets she had from 1938 48, 55, 57 & 63. She also contributed some great candid shots, from by gone days, for the class of 1964. Paul Novak did the same for his 1984 class.....It is so nice to have classmates who know their way around a keyboard. Joan Tippery added additional corrections early on as did my Mother, Orma Rogers.
A VERY important source of information came from the little black book, "A Continuing Story of an Old Town", that John Byram and Lee Deman wrote some time back. We were delighted to see Rosters listed for every class graduating from Decatur. They have already given their acknowledgements to anyone who helped in that endeavor so I won't repeat those here. John Byram has also been scanning and sending us pictures from the 1952 Graduating class and some of the other candid shots of Decatur that he had in his possession. He's always willing to help in any way.
Once Alta Wolf directed me to the e-mail address of and I was able to make contact with Sarah Jobeun Shook, the current, 2009, Decatur Alumni President, this project was really able to take off. She was so encouraging and excited that this website would be for all Decatur Alumni. Sarah said that the Alumni Secretary, Pam Nelson, has been keeping records of all the graduates from Decatur High and would be happy to share those for this project. Pam has records dating from the 1800s up until the school was consolidated in 1984! For the purpose of this project we are only doing a 50 year span from 1935 through 1984. I was delighted when a package of 106 pages of glorious information arrived in my mail box from Sarah. Thank you so much Pam and Sarah! The information they provided has been invaluable. A special thanks to you, Sarah, for your support and all the time you take to send information to me via snail mail, and for answering my many, e-mail questions about some of the information to be entered. Thanks, again, to Pam, we have more obituaries entered for our classmates. She sent a scrapbook of obituaries home with Lynna after the May 2009 banquet; and Lynna spent hours scanning them and e-mailing them to me. Thank you SO much! It took me hours and hours to type them all in. I think I entered almost 100 of them in one week.
I mentioned that Terry, Lynna, Sandi, John and Paul have scanned and e-mailed pictures of graduating classes from their annuals. I hope someone from every class will be willing to do that, so that each and every Graduating Class will be represented with faces to go with their names. We would also suggest people share current photos and a bit of information on what they have been doing these past years. If anyone would like to have an obituary included for a deceased classmate or family member, that would be nice too. I go in to the Pelan Funeral Home's website frequently, and included any obituaries for our alumni that I find. Their archive only goes back a few years though. There is quite a bit of "dated" information in the site from Alumni Banquet Booklets from the 25th and 50th years. If you want your information updated, be sure to send an e-mail with your current info.
I hope all of you will think to let us know when changes need to be made to make the information contained here as accurate as possible. It will take all of us to make that happen. If there is anything that should be corrected, updated, added or deleted to make the information more accurate, please let us know. You are only a CLICK away. Any changes requested will be handled in a very timely manner. Any suggestions that could improve the site would be appreciated too.
If we have accidentally missed saying "Thank you" to anyone who helped make this site possible, we are sincerely sorry. We hope that you will let us know of any oversights so that we may rectify those too.
Sincerely,
Webmaster, Sherry Rogers Carlson (Class of 1962)
Our Continuing thanks to everyone .............