Rick Van Krugel

Posted on: Feb 18, 2025 at 4:15 PM

Here’s something kinda cute. My older brother Greg just found this little clipping from the P.D. about my school seal contest win. I still have the ring, a hefty little chunk of 10K gold from back when the stuff was fixed at $35/oz!

Posted on: Aug 18, 2024 at 7:57 AM

Good morning from Victoria. Since I almost never check in here, I’m just saying hello to let y’all know I’m still doing OK up here, and still playing music, which I never touched doing until my time at SRHS (first with Tom McIntyre as the school spirit driven “Clyde Avenue and the Tijuana Crass” playing and singing at rallies and other school events, then in my junior year with Joel Russ, Ron Babbini and the late Larry Olsen (Swede) in the Acme Jug Band. I’m now sixty years into playing a lot of mandolin and a little bit of guitar…scary to say that. I don’t know if you can play this Facebook linked song or not, but it’s a song from our school days, by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, an old fave I keep coming back to, Little Red Riding Hood:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid05WkVk9PU2X9YRC6gLg73TjAiNzeCiYeB2qn2JGNY9AjEsYxvgmGNru44VdeRxvmsl&id=686842665

Cheers!

Posted on: Aug 05, 2024 at 6:12 AM

I’m sitting here trying to reply to last year’s response from you to my in memoriam note on Judy’s passing a year and a half ago, but the system is malfunctioning and won’t permit me to post the reply, i.e. there’s no “send” button, and anything I try leaves it sitting there without delivery, so here ya go, cut and pasted for all to see:

I don’t think I’ve read this reply from you until now, a year and a half later! It’s the nature of the beast of how these emails work, how stuff from this group pops up in my morning email (which I read directly off the server on an iPad browser), and when I click the message links it’s a dead end. In other words, I don’t take the trouble to execute the full login process I just did, so it’s my own damn fault on a certain level. Anyway, it’s very sweet of you to say what you did, and I want you to know it’s appreciated. So there…done! I’m up here living a good life in a beautiful little oasis of a city location in a beautiful little city that’s perhaps starting to get a bit too big for its own good. Can I post a photo here? Not seeing it as an obvious option or I would. You too, be well, and if you’re ever planning to be up here in your travels (Victoria being the tourist destination that it always is) I’d love to see you. Cheers ??

Posted on: Jul 02, 2024 at 1:33 AM

Posted on: Feb 28, 2024 at 8:09 AM

Posted on: Feb 28, 2024 at 8:01 AM

Posted on: Feb 28, 2024 at 7:59 AM

I got to know Judy under an unusual circumstance going out of Fremont Elementary. Judy and I were the winners in some sort of art competition (you who knew me in elementary school no doubt recall me as “that kid” who was socially pretty awkward and couldn’t compete in anything BUT art!) in sixth grade, and the prize was a summer art class at the home of an absolutely lovely woman whose name I believe to have been Elizabeth Quandt. Judy and I spent more than half that summer meeting a day or two a week and being taught to make a relief sculpture from cast concrete aggregate, a completely new and unique experience to us both at the time. Was it 1959? We worked in clay to form the shape of what was to be cast, copied the clay sculpture in reverse with plaster of Paris, then mixed and poured the concrete into that form, and fine tuned and filed the concrete as it was mostly set and still workable. Judy made a little swimming fish and I made a swimming turtle. Neither one of us was the type for the other to have normally socially mingled with in the usual context of school, but we got on like a house on fire doing art together that one Santa Rosa summer, and I’ll come out for the first time today to say I was left with a mighty twelve year old crush on that girl! I see the word “lady” being used to describe her in people’s memories of her, and it fits perfectly. She was a beautiful lady already at 12. My condolences to those close to her and R.I.P. to this lovely lady.

Posted on: Jul 02, 2021 at 1:33 AM

Posted on: Jul 02, 2019 at 1:34 AM