To paraphrase Humprey Bogart’s movie-ending remark to Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” this is the continuation of a beautiful friendship.

For 78 years, since first grade at Sts. Peter and Paul School in Monongah, Bob Kasper and John Olesky, both Class of 1950, have been best friends.

We’ve comforted each other when our wives died. We’re celebrated marriages and births and adoptions together, too.

We’ve exchanged the same two Christmas cards since 1955 – SIXTY ONE YEARS AGO. Since we put the names of all family members next to each year, it’s almost like a family Bible that tells of birthdays, deaths, marriages.

It will be a treasured keepsake to the one who doesn’t go into the Great Beyond first.

And every summer John goes to Bob’s summer home on the shores of Grand Lake in Presque Isle, Michigan. We recall our Monongah High days, our lives and play golf at nearby Rogers City Golf Club.

In autumn, Bob comes to John’s home in Tallmadge, Ohio, which John shares with Paula, for more stoking of good memories and more golf, this time at Brookledge Golf Club in nearby Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Plus, a WVU football game in Mountaineer Field.

This year, Bob and John will sit alongside each other in Mountaineer Field for the Oct. 22 TCU-WVU game, adjacent to John’s sister, Jacqueline Olesky Straight, Class of 1955, who lives in Rivesville, and Jackie’s daughter, Renee Straight, a Ruby Memorial pharmacist across the Blue Parking Lot from Mountaineer Field.

Bob’s sister, Evelyn Kasper Boggess, Class of 1953, still lives in their childhood home in Frogtown, south of Monongah and just north of Swisher Hill on U.S. 19 between Monongah and Worthington. 

Her husband is retired coal miner Okey Boggess.

John will fly into Alpena, Michigan airport tonight – Monday, July 25. He’ll return to Ohio and Paula on Thursday night, July 28.

Because John won’t have his laptop with him, there will be no Monongah High Alumni blog article till July 29.

You still can email him at jo4wvu@neo.rr.com with any information you think should be shared with other former Lions.

He’ll catch up with the articles when he returns to Ohio.