July 3, 2019
Membership Registration Form Updated and Available to download now
The 2019 Membership Application has been updated and is now available for those who still want to help support the Narimasu Alumni Website. The annual fee helps to pay for the official Narimasu Alumni Association website as well other expenses (postage, mailing, printing to members without email and/or internet access.
Ron Montgomery, ‘70 NAA Vice President Email: ronald.j.montgomery@outlook.com
June 28, 2019
Puff the Magic Dragon
My first memory of that song was in 1963, when the Narimasu Dragons were playing football against the Falcons at Johnson Air Base. I remember sitting in the stands at that game and the Johnson fans would sing that song. I was in 6th grade at Johnson Elementary and in a year, I’d be living in Grant Heights, attending school Drake Junior High, then 4 FULL exciting years at Narimasu High School. When our family arrived in Japan in late September 1962, we stayed with family friends in Grant Heights briefly and I’ll never forget seeing the banner going across the road on the way to the main gate reading ‘Narimasu Dragons Far East Football Champions’.
I look back to those 4 years at Narimasu and often remember all the great times and friends I had then. My Father was in Civil Service so we were fortunate to stay there all those years while others would come and go after two or three years. I still think our high school mascots, the Big Dragon and Baby Dragon were the grandest mascots of all high schools. Not just in Japan. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another high school mascot in the US that even comes close to being as awesome as ours was.
Narimasu High no longer exists, except in our yearbooks, saved newsletters, Facebook, a few other websites, including this one, but also in all of our memories. We all were very fortunate to have been living in Japan and going to school there in the late ‘40s on up through the early ‘70s. We experienced a lot of change in Japan as well as the rest of the world. We were exposed to another culture, other religions and maybe even picked up the language or at least learned enough to get around off base.
Members of Narimasu Alumni Association (NAA) Board, specially our Secretary/Treasurer, have been working hard to get our alumni membership information updated and corrected and a group of alumni, led by our Reunion Coordinator, have been working together in planning our All Class Reunion is will be held from April 19-23 at the Tuscany Hotel and Suites in Las Vegas. Please note – membership to the alumni association is not required for attending the reunion. The membership fee does help pay for expenses for continuing the NAA.
Our membership dues have been cut back down to $10 a year ($25 for 3 years), $15 a year for a family ($35 for 3 years). That is basically to cover the cost of maintaining our website, postage for members who don’t have access to email or the internet and other miscellaneous expenses. Some of our biggest expenses over the years was the published Alumni Directory and the Dragons Roar Newsletter.
The directory will soon be available via our website. An email will be sent out once this is done and we will be asking everyone to let us know if they would prefer to keep their personal information private (phone, mailing and email addresses).
I am considering adding an additional web page to our website for a monthly recap of activities our members have been experiencing that they’d like to share. Since we no longer are producing the Dragon’s Roar Newsletter, I thought we could at continue some form of the newsletter on our website. This could be anything from travels, celebrations, mini-reunions, announcements, you name it. I am willing to have members email me with this kind of information to post as well as getting posted information from Facebook via our Narimasu related groups on Facebook.
Please note that the website is being updated and a few areas need fixing. The membership application, which you can download, is not current, but you can still use that. Just remember the membership fee and where to mail it is on the membership page and that information on the form is outdated.
Ron Montgomery, Class of ‘70
Vice President – NAA
Email: ronald.j.montgomery@outlook.com
