Hi Bill.  I have enjoyed looking at the website; hope this is the right email to send this to, as I don't want the guys to "win":

Ann Gerstenberger forced me to attend the 30th year reunion by sending me an airline ticket, and Dave (Duck) Farnam was about the only one who recognized me there so this bio may go unnoticed (and I had imagined I was popular in high school) At that reunion, Duck said, "I will always love you and good luck with your two stroke engine," which reflects on the level of intrigue in my life.  We lost Ann to cancer a few years ago and I miss her life-long friendship every day. Without her to drag me, I won't be making the trip to Pittsburgh for the gathering.

I left Mt Lebanon, (quite happily! too urban!) to waitress in Seaside Heights, NJ, (what was I thinking!) then went to college in Missouri where I messed around. I married the next year, moved back to Jersey, then back to Missouri, where I had a kid, divorced husband and his fraternity brothers, remarried and had more kids, some in the back room of the general store where we sold mostly dog food, ice, and Red Man Chewing Tobacco in a tiny town with one fire hydrant. I settled in the deep woods of Missouri as a sincere, back-to-the-land-and-set-my-soul-free member of the hippie New World Order. I started working as an underground midwife and a pretend nurse in alternative healthcare, divorced, married again, and had more kids. I delivered a bazillion home born babies, many by kerosene lantern among the rural Mennonite communities as I lobbied for legality for midwives, wrote op-ed pieces, rallied, protested and, in short, got political.

Four years political activist = burnout.

When I divorced again, (damn! why did I keep picking left handed alcoholics?)  I changed my name since I had the judges attention anyway and, too old to be a Barbie, settled on "Ivy" after several quirky experimental trials.  Certified Professional Midwives became sort of legal in Missouri  in the late 2000's and I got  an executive  director gig for a  not-for-profit birth center and eventually opened my own practice in Columbia, Mo. I've done a bit of traveling and have worked as: a goat herder/milker and on the artisanal cheese maker crew, a properties manager, barista, nursery school teacher, medical assistant, free-lance writer, muralist, model, modest chicken farmer, aerobics instructor, battered women's shelter worker, dark room specialist for the sheriff's department....all sorts of things to bolster income from soulful but financially wanting midwifery, and to feed all those kids.

I finally got my bachelor's degree but I am not sure why. A few years back I met an excellent (right handed, tea-totaler) man who was still deep in the Missouri woods, living his own version of the hippie dream for 40 years, and I hitched my wagon to his star, but he died soon after. So I've taken a year to rest, read, and hunt mushrooms while living a lovely hermit life in his one room, 200 year old log cabin near the Missouri river with a dog. And Wi-Fi.

My kids are very funny and interesting people, among them Missouri's State Securities Commissioner, an environmental activist in Las Cruces, New Mexico, an EMT and nightclub bouncer in Austin, Texas, a musician & bread baker extraordinaire, a cook/artist and, I suspect, anarchist, and one free spirit who laughs all the time and is enthusiastic about everything hula-hoops, and doing that in India as I write. Go figure: there are only 3 grandkids from this bunch, but they are excellent ones. Next year I am slated to teach midwifery and deliver babies in Atiak, Uganda. I have ordered a cd on how to speak Swahili from the library, just in case I run across folks who don't know that English is the official language there, and think I should have paid attention when Bill Coyne tried to teach me Swahili in 1972.

I hope you all have a blast at the reunion.     Ivy Case (at one time Barbara Buerklin)