Page 133 - Complete Final Book2

Class Profiles
by Carol Biliczky Levandoski

Larry Collins

Larry Collins knew his number was up – literally.
He had toured the west with his cousin after graduation from MHS and then he had to face reality. His
draft number was low and Uncle Sam soon would be beckoning. He considered the Navy, but couldn’t
stand those bellbottoms. The Air Force it would be.

That led to a 20-year career as a supply technician and in electronics maintenance, with posts in
Greenland, Canada, Turkey and what came to be his favorite foreign country, England. That post was
where he met his wife, Susan, a staff sergeant. (She outranked him; he was then what was called a buck
sergeant and now would be a senior airman.) They married in 1976.“Everything was perfect. We did
everything together.” After 20 years, 19 days and four hours –he counted – Larry retired from the mili-
tary. That led to yet another achievement. “I had the cleanest garage in Glendale, Arizona,” where he
and his wife had moved, he recalled with a laugh. “I got tired of saying that, though. It was time to do
something.”So he signed on with a new company coming into Arizona, Office Max. There he was a receiving manager and, after 20 years,
retired again.

Then Larry turned to another line of work. He joined Don Sanderson Ford, the largest Ford dealership in Arizona, as a security guard, and
later was promoted to assistant manager of security. That means going in at 4:30 a.m. to open buildings, shut off alarms and the like. But
the job is part-time and it affords him opportunity to do other things, like wind his collection of about 30 clocks from the 1800s that he
bought in England. Yes, they all chime. “You get used to it,” he assures dubious visitors who come to the home. About two years ago Larry
visited Medina for the first time since graduation, and he’ll visit again in June to see family in Seville. Then he and his wife will head for
Pennsylvania to see her family and later drive down the East coast to visit their daughter, Shilo, outside Atlanta. So he will miss the reunion.
More travel may be in the couple’s future, especially New England and Alaska, neither of which they’ve been to. And this may be the year
th
that he retires for good, he suggests. The Collins's just celebrated their 45 wedding anniversary. He would love to hear from fellow class-
mates. Write him at Fx4collins@cox.net.

Larry Hood

When Larry Hood was in high school, he ditched homework and skipped school. The track team he made in his
freshman year didn’t hold his interest. The fifth of nine children, he often had to work after school jobs, like clean-
ing milk bottles at the Elm Farm Dairy.
He saw his future, and it was bleak: “I didn’t want to be stuck in some minimum wage job on Lake Road,” the nexus
of many manufacturing plants in the city. So in April of his junior year, a year shy of being eligible for the draft, he
joined the U.S. Navy. It was a path forward for him and one less worry for his parents. It was a path not many others
willingly took during the Vietnam War.

When his MHS classmates donned caps and gowns at graduation, he already had graduated from a Naval training
school and was a corpsman, an enlisted medical personnel who helps with patients and assists medical officers. For
most of his career, he was attached to the Marines, which doesn’t have a similar job for enlisted personnel. He was stationed in Okinawa,
Korea, and many stateside posts. He volunteered to go – but was never sent – to Vietnam.

“I was just thrown into it,” Larry said of being a corpsman. “They give you all these tests in boot camp to see where you fit in. This was
where I fit in.” He spent 10 years in the Navy, got out and worked briefly at Mack Industries and MTD, then reenlisted. That led to another
10 years of service, and he retired for good at 39. He got a job as a utility mechanic who ran a parts room for ground support equipment at
Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, first for Continental and later for United when it absorbed Continental.

Along the way, he met a woman named Charlotte at MTD who had a daughter, Carolyn. There were lots of women who were press opera-
tors at the plant, “but none who looked like her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” Larry remembers even now. They married in 1981 and
today have a home in Seville with two acres that abut Carolyn’s property. Through it all, though, Larry occasionally wished he had a high
school diploma. He knew that Ohio law allows honorably discharged vets who did not graduate high school to receive honorary ones. While
he got a GED in Maryland when he was considering being a state trooper there, he never pursued a diploma. “I just never keyed into it.”
That will change this week thanks to a chain of contacts from his high school class. When he “friended” reunion committee member Vicki
Crane Block, a high school friend, on Facebook, updates on his life began to filter out.

Reunion committee co-chairwoman Deb Hallock looked into a high school degree for Larry, and communications chairwoman Melissa Eddy
helped pull it together. The result will be something that Larry could never have dreamed. Kristine Quallich, assistant superintendent of
Medina Schools, and Jim Hoessle, a Medina County Veterans Service commissioner, will present him with an MHS diploma at Saturday’s
reunion dinner at the Bunker Hill Golf Course. “I am thankful and have lots of gratitude,” Larry said.

Larry looks much like he did in high school. But he’ll be driving something to the dinner that he didn’t have in high school – a cherry red
1966 Mercury Comet to which he’s applied coats and coats of wax and improved with a new engine, rims and tires. It, too, was something
he never could have dreamed of in high school.