Judy L. Hanes

We just recently reconnected after so many years after high school graduation at girls lunch gathering. I never knew how well you could tell a hilarious story about something that happened in your life! I will never forget the dead fish story you told at one of our lunches. I hadn’t laughed so much in many many years. You will be making the souls in heaven laughing just like we all did! You are already missed!!

You will be so missed. We had so many laughs. Whenever you called and said, “ Do you want to hear a funny thing that happened to me” I knew I was in for a treat. I will share the funny things that happen to me via the angels that I will talk to about you every day.

We met when we were 14, and I had just moved to Erlanger. We soon discovered that we had a lot in common, and that we liked horses a lot more than we liked boys. We played “wild horse canyon” with our vast herd of plastic horses. We spent all of our babysitting money horseback riding at Center Hill Farms. Then our mothers signed us up for dance lessons at Baker-Hunt Foundation and we quickly decided that boys were pretty neat too. Of course we always liked the same guy, just liked we always liked the same horse! But we never fought over a horse – or a guy!
I believe in the after-life, and I have talked to Judy a lot since she died. I have “stage fright” and Judy gave me the best gift ever, when she told me I did not have to get up and speak at her funeral! Thank you my dearest friend!
Enjoy yourself as you.gallop across the heavens, wild and free, on your favorite horse – Bullet! I LOVE YOU.

Judy was a gregarious person. Great classmate. She loved being with friends and will be missed by the St Henry class (1964).

Learning to drive can be a challenging and scary ordeal for a teenager, and a lesson in patience for the parent. These were the last words I heard my mother scream at me right before the pickup truck totaled our car on the drive home from church. No one was hurt, except my pride and trust in my mother as a driving instructor. I can still hear those words every time I look at a stop sign.

A small house in the city just up the road from the church and school your children attend daily was hardly the location for any person to stick their head out the back door and scream the names of their children as loud as one could. On the other hand, a house in the country located in the middle of a road that has no beginning and no end, this was the only way you will ever see your children in time for dinner.

I was not allowed to grow up without knowing how to approach and ride a horse. This skill came in handy at camp over the summers. I was also brought up believing that all animals had some sort of magical relationship with my mother, and they would all obey her loving command, which for the most part was just “come here”.

The house would fill with a familiar smell of my mother baking. Bowls, wooden spoons, and small bread pans. The smell of Date Nut Bread would alert me to the fact that ‘club’ would soon be coming over. Jumping into my footed pajamas before they arrived, I knew I would get at least one slice with cream cheese spread on top on before I went to sleep that night.

Every Tuesday we would drive to the parking lot in front of the Zayre to meet my grandmother for shopping and lunch. Fabric stores, cafeterias, trading bags of used romance novels for slightly less used bags of romance novels, layaways, and returns. I was in it for the red apple bag grandma would always bring filled with candy or a small toy surprise.