OPINIONS & EDITORIALS » LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Dear Editor:

From June 5th through the 8th, I was honored to be part of a family reunion in La Porte City which gathered some 25 members of the Brown family from Iowa and the Tucker family from Oklahoma. The event's most celebrated guest was 98-year-old Gladys H. Tucker of Oklahoma City, who was born Gladys Mae Hartz in La Porte City on March 1st, 1911, and who gew up in the town with her sister Mabel and brother Donald and who graduated valedictorian or her class at the local high school.

Mom Tucker, as we all call her, declared this trip to be her "sentimental journey," a pilgrimage to the town in which she grew up and from which she has so many memories.

The Tucker family was humbled by the hospitality of the La Porte City Browns, which included Bill and Esther, Rocky and Mary, and Rocky's mother Pat.

Generous helpings of home-cooked food, some genuine Iowa wine, an impressive farm tour by Rocky Brown, a lovely piano recital by Marybeth Brown (daughter of Bill and Esther) and not least, lots of laughter, were among the many highlights.

In concluding, I would like to mention how impressed we "out of towners" were by La Porte City's FFA Museum, the Family Aquatic Center, and the Cedar Valley Nature Trail from which several of us bicycled to McFarland Park. Any town in rural America would be fortunate to have even one of these wonderful resources. For La Porte City to be blessed with all of them struck me as pretty remarkable.

John Graham Tucker (son of Gladys H. Tucker)
New York, New York

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