In the early 1970s, these girls were close friends and classmates at Columbian Elementary School or in junior high or high school in Carthage, but as the years went by, they lost touch with each other.
Now, thanks to a social networking Web site and the organizational skills of one particular classmate, 30 to 35 of these women will gather in Carthage to get reacquainted, remember friends who passed on way too soon and talk about a tie that binds many of them, domestic violence.
Rhonda Butler Boudreaux, Olathe, Kan., is the organizer behind the “Sisterhood of the Traveling Sweatpants,” a group of former classmates who will gather for the first time on Saturday at Savannah’s in Carthage.
They all knew each other as children but time took them to other places and kept them apart.
“You gotta hand it to Facebook, I couldn't have pulled this off without it,” Boudreaux said. “I had this idea many years ago to find a few old friends but couldn't get a handle on how many phone calls and hours it would take to find them. It may have taken years, who knows if I could have found anyone the old fashioned way. Recently, I moved to Olathe, Kansas from San Francisco, turned 50 and really started to think about the rest of my life. I have accomplished a lot in my career, more than I expected of myself, yet there was that yearning to see my old friends and reconnect with my hometown past. I had not stayed in touch with any of my friends for the past 30 years except for a couple, one dear friend passed away 15 years ago and that was my last contact with anyone from school. Until a couple of months ago, via Facebook.”
Boudreaux said most of the women gathering here are graduates or would have graduated from the class of 1976 at Carthage High School. She herself dropped out of high school and later got her GED and now works as a freelance promoter and writer.
“We have sisters who also were what we called tagalongs when we were teenagers,” Boudreaux said. “Two of my sisters are coming and they went everywhere with me so everyone is asking about everyone’s sisters, so we wanted to include those a year ahead and a year or two years behind us. This is primarily the class of 1976.”
Boudreaux said she created a Facebook account for herself several months ago, but didn’t have any luck contacting any of her old friends until she added her maiden name to her page.
“I have another client who has a fan site and then a personal one and the personal one had reintroduced him to a lot of classmates and I thought maybe I could find some of my friends,” Boudreaux said. “I’ve been wanting to do something like this for 15 years and I opened my own account and started looking. They make it so easy, I put class of 1976, Carthage, Missouri in the search and Sandy Keller was the first one who contacted me. She had Dana Bass and a couple of girls who were friends of hers and it just started growing from there.
“I didn’t have my maiden name on there in the beginning and no one found me. As soon as I added my maiden name, which was Butler, to the Facebook page and had it as Butler Boudreaux, then everyone started everyone was starting to find me so I guess it’s important that women put their maiden names in on Facebook pages so their old friends can find them.”
Boudreaux said as she was reconnecting with her old friends, she started discovering that some had died recently, most after battles with cancer. Many other members of the group were victims of domestic violence sometime in their lives.
Boudreaux and some of the others who will attend the reunion hope their little group can make a difference in both of these issues.
Vickie Keller was one of three friends the group will honor on Saturday who died way too early from cancer.
Sandy Keller Faulk, Carthage, Vickie Keller’s sister, is a member of the group who will be at Saturday’s reunion.
She said the group and Facebook have helped her come to grips with her sister’s death 15 years ago.
“I think domestic violence is a huge thing and the cancer issue also, I lost a sister to cancer when she was 37 and that was incredibly difficult and we’ll be doing a memorial to her at our get-together on Saturday night,” Faulk said. “That’s when I actually saw Rhonda last was at my sister’s funeral.
“It’s really sad to look back and find that we’ve lost all of these people. Someone asked me on Facebook how Vickie was doing and I had to tackle it to put it in print, which I’ve never had to do, that she had passed away and they’ve really been a big support to me even after all these years.”
Susan Navarro, a 9-1-1 operator who lives in Kansas City, is another member of the Sisterhood who will be returning to Carthage for the reunion.
“I’ve been on Facebook for less than six months and it has been the best thing in the world for finding all of my old friends,” Navarro said. “For me, that’s the biggest and best part of Facebook is that I’ve been able to reconnect with friends. It’s a way we can all keep in touch, we’re all spread all over the country, we’ve even got one friend who is in Canada, so it’s a neat way we can keep in touch with each other.”
Navarro said she was one of those victims of domestic violence and now she sees it every day in her job, so she’s happy to join a group of friends who will speak out about the topic.
“I hope we can raise awareness that it is a lot more prevalent than people think it is and it even happens in small towns like Carthage,” Navarro said. “Women don’t have to take it either, every one of us has gotten out and survived. It’s tough to do but for us, I think it would have been a lot easier for most of us if we had had each other instead if being in such abusive relationships where we were isolated where we couldn’t turn to each other. I think regardless of those threats of don’t tell anyone, if you had someone to go to people would. We can all talk about it now, everything we’ve been through, because we’ve all survived it.”
