I had more than a few of you ask me if the rain amount listed in my column of August 19 was a typo or not.

The column listed the record rainfall for one year in Fountain Hills as 26.38 inches in 1978. That is no typo.

It rained so much that year and the following year that it actually changed the course of history for Foun-tain Hills schools.

When the school district was formed in 1972, it was decided by the board that junior high and high school kids would be bussed into Mesa schools until such time that a high school was built in Fountain Hills.

But in those years of heavy rainfall, the normally dry Salt River had water flowing between its banks for months at a time.

The flowing water, at one time, washed out all river crossings except for the Mill Avenue bridge in Tem-pe.

As a result, the students had up to two hour bus rides to and from schools in Mesa.

The school board decid-ed in the summer of 1980 that the high school stu-dents would be bussed to Coronado High beginning with the 1980-81 school year.

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Boy, does this make me feel old! I received notice last week that my 50-year high school class reunion will be held this November.

I attended West Phoenix High School and graduated

in 1965. I ran track and cross country in sports and was a violinist in the or-chestra.

I have a lot of fond memories of high school. We had 564 students in our graduating class. The cafeteria had music play-ing, but there weren’t that many selections. It seems like I remember every other song was “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles.

Now that I think about it there were Beach Boy songs playing also.

That was probably done to satisfy the surfers. Yes, we had that craze well covered even though we were more than 300 miles from the Pacific.

Several guys had surf boards and carried them around in the back of their pickups. We even had one surfer dude who had a “woody” station wagon that he found in a barn in Tolleson. And, of course, he carried a surf board on top.

As I said, they are all good memories.

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I noticed a familiar face in the obituaries in The Ari-zona Republic a few weeks ago.

If you are an early-day resident of Fountain Hills, you probably remember Susan Ptak. She passed away on August 1st at the age of 88. She was very active in the community in its formative years. She and husband Roland had a very successful advertising agency in the Valley. They later started a high produc-ing real estate agency in Fountain Hills.

she was hired by MCO Properties as its public re-lations director.

She partnered with Rol-land as founding members of three Episcopalian churches in Arizona, the most recent of which was St. Anthony’s of the Desert at 124th Street and Shea.

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There is relief in sight.

After living through the second hottest August in history with an unusual number of days over 110 degrees, the high tempera-tures are predicted to get back to normal and even below by week’s end.