History of the CV Memories Blog

Now that CV Memories appears to be winding down I feel the urge to relate a bit about how this blog came about. I’ll consult my memory and the back files of the blog, but I’m sure this will be as much fiction as fact, as are all our memories.

Sometime in 2006 or 2007 I made contact with my old CV schoolmate, Wayne Woodruff, after having no communications since the mid 1950s when we were both undergraduate students at KU. Wayne was living in New Mexico, as was I, so I invited him to visit us in Santa Fe when he was coming our way. Wayne came through and spent a night with us on his way to Ohio, where he was moving. He related how he had retired from his medical practice to take care of his wife, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease. After she died, Wayne had begun to make contact with a number of people he had grown up with in CV, in part, as an antidote to depression I thought.

We had a good day in Santa Fe remembering our years in CV and I thought that since Wayne was emailing several of our classmates we might go “high tech” and create a blog to all share our various memories. Wayne had the contacts and I had the techie skills to get it off the ground so I put up a blog called CV Memories and we invited people to join.

I should say at this point that I also had an ulterior motive for putting up CV Memories. I had been collecting little autobiographical pieces for several years that I was planning to put in book form and the blog seemed a great place to preview pieces that pertained to CV. (I ultimately published Pebbles: Memories of a Small-Town Kansas Boy in 2008.) At first, the CV Memories blog consisted mostly of excerpts from Pebbles, and others seemed loath to join in. Gradually, Wayne began to write down some of his memories and they developed into an extended essay on the Main Street of Cedar Vale as he remembered it.

When I had exhausted the store of excerpts from Pebbles, sometime early in 2008 others began to come online to fill the gap. Wayne continued to post his offerings, and Don Cox became the resident historian, since he is still living in CV and has the clearest and most extensive memory of early days there. He also has his companions at the Hill Top Cafe to fill in the details for him from time to time.

CV Memories gained local notoriety in Cedar Vale when Susan Schaff, editor of the CV Lookout section in the Winfield Courier began to use excerpts from the blog in her weekly news section. By this time, I was mostly serving as administrator and collector of the photos and other memoriabila that people sent along. I created the photo section you see on the blog from the stuff that was sent to me. I enjoyed bringing some of the older photos to life through the magic of Photoshop.

To be continued.