Steve Shoup knows how George Bailey must have felt

Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Sitting on the patio at the Greencastle Starbucks, New York actor-writer Steve Shoup reflects on how classmates got together to secure a 1971 Greencastle High School yearbook for him and the subplots and sidebars that evolved along the way. (Banner Graphic/ERIC BERNSEE)

With a little help -- no, a whole lot of help -- from his friends, Steve Shoup finally has his high school yearbook decades after it was published.

More than 40 years after he graduated from Greencastle High School in 1971, Shoup again has a copy of The Minaret, the GHS yearbook he actually edited.

And all it took was a circuitous and top-secret collaboration of classmates reuniting across the country, a substitute yearbook being purchased and sent all over the United States (and even Canada) for signatures with various subplots and subterfuge all intertwined with the tragic death of classmate and fellow New Yorker Mary Whitaker.

Those involved like to refer to the project as "The Chronicles of the Traveling Yearbook."

Let's start at the beginning of this "The Notebook" meets "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" meets "It's a Wonderful Life" saga.

"Even though it's about my yearbook, it's not about me," Shoup said, likening the experience to the one George Bailey (think Jimmy Stewart) endures when he sees what life would have been like without his presence in others' lives in the Christmas film classic "It's a Wonderful Life."

The 1971 GHS yearbook -- the one Steve Shoup edited and brother Mark Shoup (a high school yearbook adviser) later called one of the worst yearbooks ever -- was lost to the ages due to circumstances beyond Shoup's control.

"My copy went to heaven," he laughingly recalled this past weekend during his first visit home in nearly 30 years to attend the all-GHS Alumni Banquet and visit his 88-year-old mother. "I never thought anything about it after that," he continued. "Que sera, sera."

Whatever will be, will be might have been good enough for Doris Day, but not, however, for Shoup classmates relentless Debby Lowdermilk Barloon, who now resides in Orange County, Calif., or the intrepid and creative Mindy Matthews, who calls Florida home these days.

They conspired with others to replace Shoup's lost soul of a yearbook.

A pirate treasure map, detailing the path of the traveling yearbook was created by classmate Mindy Matthews. The pirate character even folds down to reveal a picture of Steve Shoup. (Courtesy photo)

"Time passes, you lose track of people," the 63-year-old Shoup said, picking up the story as he relaxed at a table outside the Greencastle Starbucks. "Eventually we all reconnected again through Facebook. I knew Mary Whitaker was in New York as well but to a much more successful degree."

Actor-writer-building superintendent Shoup -- who likes to say he's "in show business for better or worse" -- learned Debby Barloon was coming to New York to meet up with Mary Whitaker, a world-class musician who was performing in several New York ensembles and on Broadway hits like "The Lion King."

Shoup and Whitaker hadn't reconnected even though both had lived and worked in New York for decades.

When Shoup finally revisited his two classmates over dinner, he related the tale of his lost yearbook.

"Little did I know it would leave a much greater impact on them than on me," he noted.

Barloon agreed.

"It was such a warm and memorial evening," she recalled via telephone of that reconnection. "Steve mentioned that even though he was editor of the yearbook, he didn't even have a copy."

She thought that was such a sad coincidence that she set out to find him one, periodically hunting via the Internet on sites like Classmates.com.

When one finally became available in reprint in June 2014 -- probably thanks to her persistence in looking for it on Classmates.com -- Barloon bought a copy and immediately decided it would be much more fun to have classmates sign it than just to give Shoup an unpersonalized yearbook.

And the plot of the traveling yearbook was born.

It started, of course, with Barloon in California, went to Matthews in Florida and began crisscrossing the country in earnest with stops in North Carolina, New York, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, Vermont, back to Florida, Colorado, Arizona, Ontario (Canada), Alabama and Tennessee before getting lost in the mail in Missouri.

But the organizers had planned for that, too, instructing everyone to send it on with a tracking number just in case.

So after a few anxious days AWOL in Missouri the lost yearbook resurfaced -- isn't that a perfect sidebar considering the crux of this story? -- the yearbook hit the road again back to Indiana and Florida, to Idaho, Virginia, South Carolina, Washington, back to Arizona and Indiana, Northern California, Arizona again, Florida, Indiana, New York and finally back to Southern California.

Barloon and Matthews stress that the signing sojourn was not meant to be exclusive in any way, and the yearbook was shared with as many classmates as possible before the delivery date arrived, so sadly some members of the GHS Class of 1971 were missed.

Cy Young organized the signings in Greencastle and about 40 people drove to his law office to contribute to the yearbook, Barloon said.

Tragically, one person who never got to sign it was Mary Whitaker.

In the midst of all that crisscrossing the country and keeping the secret from Shoup, the story took a tragic turn as GHS grads and everyone else were stunned by the brutal murder of classmate Mary Whitaker last Aug. 20 at her western New York summer home.

"The plan was always that Mary would present the yearbook to Steve," Barloon said of the planned December delivery while calling her death "an unthinkable tragedy."

"She would have loved all of this," Barloon added.

So in her place, Barloon told Shoup her niece would be coming to New York and asked her classmate to give the girl the "Steve Shoup walking tour."

He agreed, and met up with niece Dana at a west side hotel, only to be surprised as Debby watched from the shadows.

Thinking Barloon was in California, Shoup talked to her on her niece's cell phone until she couldn't keep up the charade any longer and told him to "turn around." That's when she descended a long, "Gone With the Wind" hotel style staircase with everyone in the lobby stopping to watch and listen as she announced, "Steve Shoup, here's your yearbook."

It made for a bittersweet turn of events for Shoup who was thrilled to get the yearbook and humbled by what was undertaken to get the more than 70 notes from classmates therein but saddened to learn "Mary was to be the courier."

"That put a whole new fire under this thing," Shoup said, adding that he still gets choked with emotion in reading the sentiments of his classmates.

"Mary was one of the sweetest people ever and a darling friend," Shoup added. "I would tell her jokes just to hear her laugh. She had a wonderful laugh.

"That's why Mary's death was such a tragedy to me," he continued. "Not only was it the loss of a great person but a consummate artist as well."

Barloon said the event has proved to be great therapy for a lot of classmates who were devastated by Mary Whitaker's death.

In addition it put classmates back in touch who hadn't seen each other for years. People who had lost touch with each other met face to face again because of the traveling yearbook journey.

Shoup said he keeps the yearbook on a table next to his favorite chair, where it has been since last Christmas.

"It still absolutely staggers me that it's so personalized and all of theses people came out of the shadows for me. I always figured if people were getting together and I was to be the topic, it would be to hire a hit man," he joked.

Many of the sentiments expressed look back on classmates' days at GHS.

"Many of them are 'I'll always remember this.' Or 'I'll always be grateful for that.' Or something like 'You made me laugh.' Or little things people remember that they wanted to share," Shoup said, calling it a "remarkably humbling experience."

So humbling in fact, Shoup refers to it all as the "George Bailey Syndrome."

"No man is a island," he suggested. "Whatever you do ends up having an impact on so many others."

Wait, a second now, are those bells we hear ringing?

"I hope in the long scheme of things," Shoup confided, "that a whole bunch of angels got their wings."

That's right, Steve, that's right ...

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  • wonderful story!

    -- Posted by talkymom3 on Wed, Jun 24, 2015, at 10:10 AM
  • I remember Steve from high school(I graduated in 1972). He was then, and still is, bigger than life.

    -- Posted by donantonioelsabio on Wed, Jun 24, 2015, at 2:29 PM
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