Visiting Old Friends

Wes & Jackie Parker

Wes & Stanton Parker and Eldine & Wendell Cole

Wes Parker & Wendell Cole On Sunday we took a drive up to Goldendale to visit one of Grover's former high school teachers. Back in 1969 & 1970 Grover attended Auburn Adventist Academy and his geometry instructor was Wesley Parker. Mr. Parker went to school at Bethel Academy (1935-1940) in Wisconsin and was a classmate of his mother Dorothy and knew his Grandpa Cole. He also was friends with Uncle Eldine and Uncle Wendell (Dorothy's brothers). Grover enjoyed his friendship with Mr Parker and spent time with his family. As a matter of fact he stayed with them at their house over a holiday weekend. Mr Parker is an amateur radio operator and on one visit he setup a radio-telephone patch that allowed Grover to talk with his mother in Chicago. It was the first time he talked on a two-way radio. Fast forward to 2011 and one day Grover thought about Mr Parker and did an FCC amateur radio license search for him. Turns out that the Parkers have lived in Goldendale for the last 19 years. They live very close to the Klickitat River which Grover went canoeing down a couple of times in 2009 with Steve Klump. So we went over for a visit and talked about old times and caught up on what we had been doing for the last 40 years. We called Uncle Eldine and Uncle Wendell on the telephone and they had a nice visit with Wes. We traded pictures and talked about how our families were doing. Found out that their son, Ken Parker, was the pastor of the Centralia SDA church in the 1990s when we lived in Lewis County. The Centralia SDA church was where Grover and his first wife, Kathy, married in 1971. I brought along some old Auburn Academy annuals that I had gotten from Grandpa Cole (he taught there in the 1950s). We looked at some of the old pictures and I found faculty pictures of Grandpa Cole right next to Kathy's dad, Archie Johnson, who ran the Auburn Academy upholstery shop for a couple years in the mid 1950s. Funny how our lives are so intertwined together. We enjoyed our visit and hope to do it again in the near future. Grover also hopes to be able to talk with Mr Parker on the amateur radio sometime soon.