Ye Olde Homecoming

Among those attending the 50-year class reunion in Glenwood this weekend will be a tall, slender woman with grey hair and kind eyes. She doesn’t live in Glenwood; in fact, she doesn’t even live in the United States.

Judy (Nightingale) Bain attended Glenwood High School for one year. She was the school’s first female exchange student, arriving in Glenwood in August 1962 from her hometown of Truro, England.

“A girl I knew from school, Juliette Williams, had gone abroad the year before and I thought it sounded interesting,” Bain said last weekend after arriving in Glenwood for an extended visit.

As a teen, Bain left her home in England in late July 1962, sailing the Atlantic Ocean to New York City aboard a boat called the Seven Seas.  From New York, she came to Glenwood, where she stayed with the Rev. Arthur C. Marston, his wife and their three children.

The affable young lady had thought America would seem familiar, as she already spoke the language.

“I was congratulated a couple of times on how good I spoke English, which amused me,” Bain said.

While the language was familiar, she found many things about school unfamiliar.
 
“It was a very different atmosphere,” Bain recalled.  “At the school I came from, you wore a uniform, and if you were seen on the bus without your hat and gloves on you were in trouble. Here, people wore all sorts of different styles of clothes to school. The school I came from was an all-girls school, so the relationships were something you didn’t see - people having boyfriends, girlfriends and the like.”

Bain said where she came from, kids participated in school sports, but it was not as big an affair as it is in the U.S.

“I was amazed by the distances people traveled to for school sports,” Bain said. “The whole town supported the school and the school sports. In England, the school is separate, it’s not supported by the community.”

Homecoming in Glenwood was an experience she wasn’t prepared.

“I was completely befuddled,” Bain said. “It was right after I came, so everything was strange at that time. I remember the parade was impressive.”

Bain was a member of the senior class, but did not ride on a float in the parade.

While in Glenwood, Bain participated in speech and choir. She wrote for the school newspaper, the Hi-Arrow, and played basketball.

“People thought I would be good at basketball, because I am so tall,” Bain said. “But I’m totally uncoordinated, so I didn’t actually play much.”

Bain left Glenwood in summer 1963.  Before returning to their respective homes, American Field Service had its exchange students in the U.S. travel to Washington D.C. to meet with someone special.

“We went to the White House,” Bain recalled. “We sat on the White House lawn and President Kennedy spoke to us.”

That fall, Bain attended college in Liverpool, England. She remembers being on a date in late November when she learned President Kennedy had been assassinated.

Bain obtained a degree in social sciences and found a job in the welfare department in Coatbridge, Scotland.  While working in Scotland, she met Andrew Bain.
 
Judy and Andrew were married in 1968. They took a very adventurous honeymoon.

The young couple traveled by bus for three months, through Scandinavia to the Soviet Union and then to Pakistan, Iran and Kathmandu. While on their honeymoon, the couple met and became friends with, Keith Jenner of Australia. The Bains ended up traveling to Australia instead of their original destination of New Zealand.

Post World War II, the Australian government encouraged British citizens to migrate to Australia by a scheme known as a “Ten Pound Pom.”

“You could go to Australia for 10 pounds, and if you lived there for two years, you didn’t have to pay anything,” Bain said.

The Australian government proclaimed better employment opportunities and housing prospects than their homeland. Once there, the Bains found very different jobs than they had in Scotland.

“My husband wanted to work out-of-doors, and he got a job in the forestry,” Bain said. “My first job was picking apples. We were in the town of Dwelling Up.”

Bain later obtained a job teaching. “I taught English and social studies because they were short of teachers,” she said.

After living in Dwelling Up, the couple moved to Collie, where Andrew found a job singing in a pub. They later bought a house in Collie. They had one daughter at the time, Rowena. Bain was pregnant with their son, Alistair, when Andrew died.

Following her husband’s death, she went on to earn a teaching certificate and found a job teaching in Perth, Australia. By 1981, she had accumulated what the Australians call a Long Service Leave. She took a year off and traveled around the world with her children. They went to the UK and spent time with both Judy’s and Andrew’s parents. The family also traveled to Denmark, Germany and France. They visited the original Legoland in Denmark and saw several cathedrals.

“My son was seven and when I said we were going to America next, he asked ‘are there any cathedrals there?’” Bain recalled.

They met Jenner in Chicago and traveled with him to Ontario, Canada. Leaving Jenner, the family came to Glenwood to visit friends, then traveled to Kansas City and Los Angeles. They visited Hawaii on the way back to Australia. Until this week, her visit in 1981 is the only time Bain’s been back to Glenwood since graduating with the Class of ’63. She retired four years ago.

Craig said she found several classmates, including Bain, through the Internet while planning for the class of ‘63 reunion. Glenwood, however, is not Bain’s only stop on this trip.

Bain left Australia in early July.  She first camped in Chobe National Park in Botswana.

Later, she visited with family in England and Scotland.  She arrived in New York City Aug. 30, where she met her friend from home, Mary Harney.  The two traveled around New York, taking a boat cruise around Manhattan and a bus tour of the city.

From New York City, they traveled with a tour group visiting many places in a short amount of time. They visited Philadelphia, Niagara Falls, the campuses of Harvard and Yale, the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, N.Y., and a replica of the Mayflower in Plymouth, Mass.

Bain is spending her week in Glenwood visiting old friends.

Following Homecoming, Bain and Harney are traveling to the Grand Canyon for four days, then on to Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. They’ll come back to California before flying back to Australia.