Guest Column

A high school reunion ended as a learning experience, not a trip down memory lane

By JARED STRONG
June 21, 2005
ATLANTIC, IOWA

It’s hard to believe that five years have passed since my days walking through the halls of Atlantic High School in this southwest Iowa town of 7,000. As I talked to former classmates at our first reunion last Saturday, it was fun to catch-up on what has happened to them since the spring of 2000 – and it also became clear how little I knew of some of their lives back in high school.

The reunion was held at the local bowling alley, the Super Bowl, but I had a chance to meet up with some classmates a few hours before at a friend’s house to catch up on lost time together. While I reminisced with 15 or so friends at the pre-reunion gathering, I wondered who I’d see later that night. The turnout was supposed to be low, since only 50 of the 120 of us who graduated together had RSVP’d.

There was one person in particular I wanted to talk to, but I doubted he’d attend.

I don’t remember the first time I met Andrew Tunney. He and I weren’t really friends in high school, and I had no clue where he had gone after graduation. But when I saw him as I entered the Super Bowl, I knew I’d finally get a chance to tell him something I’d wanted to say for years. I wanted to tell him how he touched my life.

Andrew was somewhat of a troubled kid when I knew him early in high school. He came to Atlantic as a freshman and lived with a foster family in town. I knew him because he played drums in the band and was also on the freshman basketball team with me. He would have fits of anger when some of the hot shots on the basketball team would tease him for one reason or another. None of them were good reasons. Later, when I got my driver’s license, I occasionally gave him rides to school, which was a long walk from where he lived across town.

Because Andrew was in band, he was in Clarinda with me at a marching band competition the day my dad died.

My father, Stephen Strong, was on his way to an Iowa Hawkeye football game that day, and I would have been with him had I not been marching in Clarinda. He started feeling chest pains, and was taken to Grinnell Hospital. My aunt and cousin came to the competition, told me he had a heart attack and took me to Des Moines, where he had been transferred.

As we walked into the hospital, I started to get excited. I couldn’t wait to give my dad a big hug and tell him how much I loved him. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity. When the nurse took us to a private waiting room, I knew something was wrong. It turns out he had an aneurysm, and there was nothing that could be done to save him.

I felt sorry for myself for a long time after that.

A few months later, Andrew and I were waiting for rides after we played in an out-of-town basketball game. I don’t remember how the subject came up that night in front of the high school, but we talked briefly about my dad’s death. He said to me, “You’re lucky.”

I looked at him in total disbelief.

“I never knew my father,” he said.

At age 14 then, I didn’t quite know what to say. I didn’t fully accept what he said at that moment, but over time it sank in. Almost a decade later, I had a chance to talk to Andrew about his life at our class reunion and then on the phone the next night.

Andrew, I learned, had entered the foster care system when he was three months old. His mother gained custody of him again when he was four years old, and moved him from his birthplace of Madison, Wisconsin, to Red Oak, Iowa.

He spent a few years in Red Oak before his mom moved him and his sister to two other nearby towns, Stanton and then Villisca. He said it was there that his mother started beating him. It wouldn’t be long before he was a ward of the state again.

Andrew said it culminated one day when his mother hit him repeatedly with a one-inch thick board. He called it the “beating of a lifetime.” He said the incident left him with a splinter in the head and a nearly broken arm.

It took a while for me to fully grasp what he said to me that night after the basketball game. I didn’t know the kind of tragedy Andrew had experienced in his short life. But that was the turning point in how I looked at what I had experienced. I was lucky to have a caring family and caring friends. Andrew made me see that.

After his boyhood of living in 10 different foster homes and five group homes, spending time in a juvenile detention center and moving from town to town, Andrew has found stability in his adult life.

He lives in Red Oak with his wife, Tiffany. They work at ROMech in Red Oak, making parts for Daimler-Chrysler, and are expecting a child in August.

He and his wife usually work six days each week, but in his free time, Andrew is working on finishing a novel he started more than five years ago. He also plays the guitar and has written more than 100 songs.

On occasion, he visits one of the group homes he stayed in as a youth, and he speaks to the kids there. He says he wants to tell them about his life to give them hope about the future.

Andrew has also been somewhat successful in tracking down his father, who he thinks is now 58 years old and living in Seattle, Washington. Attempts to contact him have been futile thus far, but he’s not giving up.

I hope his father returns a phone call or an e-mail. He needs to know the extraordinary life Andrew has lived, succeeding against all odds. His father will be proud.

Jared Strong, a native of Atlantic in southwest Iowa, is an Iowa State University graduating senior, with a double major in journalism and computer science. He is spending May and June interning as a columnist and reporter at Offenburger.com. You can find Strong's earlier columns in this site's Archives under ''Jared Strong's columns.'' You can write him at jared@Offenburger.com.

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