Travels to Waseca

  Junior Holbrook has received attention recently for perhaps being the oldest living person with Down syndrome. He’s 80 and lives in an Elm home in Waseca. An application to Guiness Book of World Records has been made.

Back in the 40s and 50s Junior was the person in our neighborhood that helped teach us tolerance and appreciation for developmentally disabled people and their families. He lived with his parents across the street from the baseball field (Community Field at that time). I’m sure he wasn’t always treated as well as he should have been by us kids but he had the run of the town and it was never him if there was a problem. That was an era when most of the developmentally disabled were institutionalized, forever. I’m sure there were people in town that thought that Junior should have been sent to Faribault State Hospital, too.

Here are links to two recent articles about Junior:

http://www.mankatofreepress.com/local/local_story_239001605.html?keyword=topstory
http://www.wasecacountynews.com/news.php?viewStory=515

I received the following note from Emily Westphal concerning her grandfather, John Spillane, SHHS 1936: 

John J. Spillane was my maternal granfather.  I was doing a search on his father, actually, and found my grandfather’s name on a list of missing Waseca alums.  The reason the attempt to contact him came back to you is because my grandparents weren’t living at the listed address at the time of your letter.  My grandfather died a number of years ago, in February of 2002.  It’s a shame because he would have loved coming to the reunion.  Those were good times in his life.
-Emily Westphal