Lifelong friends and educators

PARK FALLS — A pair of retired Park Falls educators will celebrate their 70th class reunion together with other members of Park Falls High School class of 1954 during Flambeau-Rama weekend.

Sally (Lemke) Meeks and Roger Reas are lifelong friends and classmates since attending Lymantown Elementary School together and then Park Falls High School. They both went to Wisconsin State College-Superior (now the University of Wisconsin-Superior).

After college both Meeks and Reas eventually returned to Park Falls School District until their retirement. Both are members of the high school class reunion planning committee where they emphasized the class and the school district of the time had a strong work ethic and a sense of community.

“We are kind of like a tree in a sense,” Reas said of coming back to Park Falls. “You plant and the roots get deeper.”

It was a different time, he said of life growing up in rural Park Falls. He was one of 13 children raised in a home that didn’t have electricity until 1947. The water came from an outdoor pump.

Reas made his way through a pre-handicap accessible era with a shortened leg. He said it was a birth defect as a result of his mother contracting German measles (Rubella) during the first-trimester of her pregnancy. He wasn’t discouraged and not even Meeks was aware he had an artificial leg as he could walk naturally. Although he wasn’t allowed to participate in physical education, he used the time to improve academically and focused on the sciences with the goal of becoming a physician and later a teacher.

After graduating with the class of 1954, Meeks completed a three-year teaching degree at Superior, and then completed her Bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin- LaCrosse. She married Joe Meeks, who had enlisted in the U.S. Marines at age 17, and would teach in North Carolina when stationed at Camp Lejeune, in California when stationed at Camp Pendleton, or in Gulfport, Mississippi.

When he was overseas Meeks would return home where she taught in Woodruff, Rhinelander, Nekoosa, Mosinee, and Park Falls. They had one son together.

“Every time they shipped him overseas I taught in all different places around Wisconsin,” Meeks said.

Joe Meeks earned a field commission in Vietnam to serve as a company commander. After the war the Marines restored him to his enlisted status but he rose to the rank of sergeant major. When he retired the couple returned to Park Falls where Meeks would teach fourth grade in Park Falls until retiring herself after 37 years. After her own children were grown, Meeks was around 48 years old when she received her Master’s degree from UW-Superior.

Joseph, who was also in the class of 1954, went on to become director of transportation for the Park Falls School District. He died in 2003.

Reas completed his science teaching degree at Superior in 1958 and after two years of teaching in Winter, he was awarded a graduate fellowship at the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

“Sputnik was my degree,” Reas said of the funding that was available for science education at the start of the space race with the Soviet Union. The Soviets were the first to launch an artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, leading the U.S. government to provide scholarship funds for math and the sciences.

“I spent a full year there and then I started searching for a new position,” Reas said.

Reas interviewed with several high schools and was also being considered for a junior college position in Austin, Minnesota. The decision to hire or not for the Austin position would come after all of the high schools he applied with had started classes in the fall.

Then Park Falls School Superintendent F. C. McLaughlin telegrammed Reas an offer to teach at Park Falls. As the only job with available housing, Reas said that as a husband and father of a young family, coming home was the only logical choice. At that time, teaching in your hometown was considered a “no-no” because of relatives and friends, he said. But science and math teachers were scarce and the school district was interested.

Reas signed a three-year contract with the Park Falls School District with the task of strengthening the science curriculum. He would teach chemistry, physics, human anatomy, biology, general science, and even a course on timber and game management practices.

Reas did receive that offer to teach in junior college. It would have been a stepping stone to earning his doctorate in science education. But he said it didn’t matter because the course of events of his life in Park Falls told him he made the right decision.

“Though I had never intended to return to my high school in my hometown, to my surprise and delight, I ended up retiring from the Park Falls High School after 33 years of teaching,” Reas said in his book, “My Life Stories,” published as a memoir for his family in 2024.

The money was also a little better in Park Falls, he said. It helped to be in Park Falls where he had summer positions at the paper mill, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Reas is also a lifelong member of the Shriners and the Masons.

As it turned out, it was Harry Frojker, the high school principal of Meeks and Reas, who encouraged McLaughlin to hire Reas to develop a strong science program. Frojker later became the superintendent when both Meeks and Reas were teaching in the district, and the three became good friends with Frojker as a mentor who shaped a core group of educators into one of the best school districts in the state.

Reas and his wife, Phyllis, had three children together. She died in 1975. He married again in 1979, this time to Sharon, who taught special education in Park Falls.