Frequently Asked Questions
Hi there, I thought I would put together this list of questions and answers since I get asked the same ones a lot. Hope this explains everything.
Who runs this website?
My name is Mario Lanza, and I graduated from Interlake in 1992. Nice to meet you.
How did this site come about?
It originally started as an “In Memoriam” page for the class of 1992. One day, while I was doing research for our upcoming twenty-year reunion, I learned that a friend of mine from Interlake ‘92 had passed away. And I was surprised because I had never heard anything about it. So I asked around, and I tried to find out what had happened to him, and I was even more surprised to find out that nobody seemed to have any idea. It was all just this big mystery.
At this point, I went to the internet to start doing a little research, and I realized that there was almost no information out there about my friend at all. There was no online obituary, there was no date of death, there were no social security records, there was nothing. It was like he had never existed. And I thought, well that’s terrible. How can a person pass away and there not be a single record of his existence on the internet? What kind of a legacy for a person is that?
The more I thought about it, the more this bothered me. After all, with libraries and books all being digitized in the near future, it is extremely likely that the internet will one day be the only permanent record of society as we once knew it. I mean, this right here, this is it. The internet is going to be our generation’s Library of Congress.
So at this point, I decided to create a little online memorial for the people in my class who had died. I called it “The Late and Great of the Class of 1992”. It was intended to just be an offshoot of our class of 1992 twenty-year reunion page . And I thought that would be it. I put an entry up for my friend, Tony Fox, I put up another entry for another friend of mine who had recently passed away, Colleen Hansen, and I thought that was going to be the extent of it.
A few days later, though, a Facebook friend of mine sent me an email. She asked if I could add an entry for her brother. He wasn’t in the class of ‘92, but he had recently died in a car crash and she would love to see his name up there on the memorial as well. And then another friend came to me with a similar request about HER brother, who had been in the class of ‘84. So I added entries for the two of them. And now my page wasn’t just about the class of ‘92 anymore. Now I had expanded it to be about all the classes of the ’80s and ’90s.
Well, you can probably guess what happened next. Once word got out that there was an online memorial to our lost Interlake classmates, now I started to get dozens of emails, from all sorts of people. People from classes waaaay before mine started emailing me, about friends or family members or other loved ones who had died that they wanted me to write about. Or people they had just “heard” had died, and they were curious about some of the details.
Within a couple of weeks, my humble little “The Late and Great of the Class of 1992” memorial had now become a Facebook group called “The Late and Great of Interlake High School.” And then it quickly grew to an even bigger page, called “The Interlake High School Memorial Wall.” And then finally, in 2021, I moved it over here, to http://ihsmemorial.org, which will now be its permanent home.
How long has the Interlake High School Memorial Wall existed?
I started it in late 2008. It was a simple Facebook group at first, but it has grown bigger and bigger over the years, and I eventually had to move it over here, onto a standalone website. Which is nice, because now you don’t need Facebook anymore to access it. Now anyone on the internet can view all the entries. This specific website (ihsmemorial.org) first went live in February of 2021.
Is this the same thing as the Facebook page “The Interlake High School Memorial Wall”?
It was, at one time, but it is not anymore. That WAS the old page, but due to changes Facebook made to their website in 2019, I was no longer able to edit the page or add any new entries to it. So that page was only accurate up through 2019. This is the only place in the future I will ever add entries to.
Where do you get all the information for the entries?
Well, this is where I mostly depend on you. I would say that ninety percent of the information on the IHS Memorial Page has been emailed to me by friends and family members of the people who died. Yes, some entries I have managed to put together myself, but for the most part, what happens is that people will email me names or dates or class years, and then they will ask me to go put together an entry for them.
When I get a request like this (and I still do get a lot of them), all I really need from you is a name and a class year. Personal details about the person are great too, of course. If you have anything you would like me to write about a person who has passed away, just tell me and I will add it to their entry. But really all I need from you at minimum is a name and the year they graduated (or were scheduled to graduate.) I can generally track down the rest of the info on my own. And I will tell you right now that the best places to go for information about a person who has died are legacy.com and ancestry.com. That is almost always where I start when I need to find some info about someone. That or plain old just Google their name.
Where did you get all the pictures?
Some of the pictures were sent in by friends and family members, and some I just took right off a person’s online obituary if a picture had been included. But for the most part, the majority of the pictures on the IHS Memorial Page came from old yearbooks.
Did you know that classmates.com has a digital copy of nearly every Interlake yearbook from the years 1968-1988 available on their website? And that, unlike most things on reunion websites, the old yearbooks are free? If you didn’t know that before, well now you do. When I need to find a picture of someone, I just go to classmates.com and I find an old yearbook photo of them I prefer to use senior pictures if possible, because they are generally bigger, and they have generally been scanned in clearer than a person’s underclass pictures were. But if I can’t find a senior picture, I can usually find a sophomore or a junior picture at least to use as a backup.
By the way, please note that this process only works for people who were in the classes of 1969-1988. For people who graduated from Interlake AFTER 1992, you’re probably going to have to send me a picture of them. Because I don’t think yearbooks after that are ever going to be digitized. I asked someone at Classmates about this once, and she said that it was a legal issue, and that 1988 is the newest yearbook they are probably ever going to have.
As for the yearbooks from 1989-1992, I do have those, because that’s when I was a student at Interlake. So really it is the pictures after ‘92 that are the biggest problem for me.
Does anyone ever get upset about something you have posted about their loved one?
From my experience, the one thing that has been consistent over the years is that loved ones don’t want you to mention if the cause of death was suicide. From day one, people have consistently emailed me and asked me not to mention that in any of my writeups. So I won’t. I will only include details about how a person died if A) the family and friends have already okayed it with me, or posted it publicly somewhere, or B) it was specifically mentioned how a person died in their obituary.
So to answer your question, no, no one has ever been upset that I posted an entry about their loved one. In fact, quite the opposite, most of the emails I get are from people who are thrilled that someone took the time to actually write a tribute to their loved one at all.
Which leads me to add that, despite its appearance, the IHS Memorial Page really isn’t a sad website for the most part. Yes, it might be sad at first. When you first look around at the number of entries, it might be a little overwhelming. But if you saw all the emails that I get from people who are appreciative of what has been posted about their friend/parent/sibling/classmate, you would realize that this is actually a very comforting place for a lot of people. Most people are genuinely happy that their loved one has even been remembered at all. That is the sentiment I hear over and over again, in almost every single email I have received over the years. And that is the main reason why I will never stop updating this page. After you die, it seems like the most important thing in the big picture is that the world just remembered you.
How accurate is all the information here?
It’s pretty darn accurate, as far as I can tell. I mean, I can’t guarantee that every single little day of the week is absolutely perfect. And some of the causes of death might be written a little vague sometimes. But if I post something on this page, you can be sure I have generally confirmed it first from at least two or three different sources. I will never write a sentence on this page unless I have a pretty good idea it’s the truth.
In regards to names, I have done my best to confirm names and middle names and spellings of names in every single IHS yearbook I had available to me. I’ve also verified names through every single SSN index and ancestry page that you can find on the internet. And it gets tricky sometimes, because one thing I have noticed over the years is that people have their names misspelled in yearbooks A LOT!
Is everything on the IHS Memorial Page 100% accurate? Probably not. But I can guarantee it’s at least 99% accurate. And, of course, if you see something that you know is inaccurate, please email me at MLanza1974@aol.com as soon as possible so I can fix it. Please don’t let me post something that is inaccurate.
Have any entries been harder for you to write than others? Is it difficult to run this page?
Oh absolutely, it can be incredibly difficult at times. It’s not very fun to write about loss and death all the time. And I’ll be honest, it really makes you think about your own mortality. More than you would probably prefer to.
But here is the positive of it, at least for me. I’ve never actually met 95% of the people on this list. So I am sort of fortunate, in a way, because I don’t know most of the people that I am writing about. I’m really just here for their friends and loved ones. I’m here to make sure the entry comes out the way that they would like it.
But I won’t lie to you, there are some entries on this page that REALLY got to me. Specifically, I had two good friends from Interlake (Jenny Johnstone and Colleen Hansen, both class of ‘92) who passed away after I first started putting together this page. And both of them actually helped me with a lot of the earlier entries, and helped me pull together a lot of the original info. So having to write entries for them both a few months later came as a bit of a shock.
And then there’s another entry on this list, Melissa Waller from the class of ‘96– her entry is one I will always remember. Melissa was diagnosed with stage four cancer at the age of 31. And, as a child of the digital age, she was able to document her battle with cancer on her online blog. She posted in that blog almost right up until the day that she died. Those are the stories that tend to stick with me, because there was so much info out there about what her last year was like before she died. And hers isn’t the only entry like that, she’s just one that pops into my head when people ask me which of the entries on this list was the hardest to write. And no, I never actually knew Melissa. I just “know” her from reading her cancer blog.
By the way, before this question bums you out, let me quickly add that I have enjoyed running this page more than I have ever been depressed by it. I am so grateful for all the interesting IHS alums I have gotten to meet over the past thirteen years, either because they sent me an email, or because we corresponded behind the scenes via Facebook. I mean, these are people I NEVER would have met if I hadn’t put together this website. Seriously, how often would a 1992 Interlake Saint ever meet a 1969 Interlake Saint, or a 2015 Interlake Saint? I have learned SO much about the history of our school (and the history of Bellevue in general) through this project, and I’ve had a chance to become friends with some amazing people I never would have gotten to know otherwise. So yes, while it can be tough to run this website at times, the friendships I have made out of it have more than made up for it.
I can honestly say that after thirteen years of digging through Interlake’s history, and its yearbooks, and its people, and its names, and learning which teachers and administrators were there for how many years, I probably know as much about IHS history as ANYONE at this point. And at this point, this is where I’ll say the one thing that I believe we all can agree on: Muck Fercer.
Does this page have any relationship to the IHS Memorial Plaque on campus? If not, who runs that?
This is really the million-dollar question around here. Who DOES run that plaque? This question has come up many, many times over the years, and no matter how many people I talk to or ask about it, nobody ever seems to know the answer.
Do I have anything to do with the IHS Memorial Plaque? Nope. That plaque existed way before I ever went to Interlake. By the time I showed up on campus, in 1988, it was already firmly established right there in front of the administration building. We already had a memorial to all of our former classmates who had died.
That plaque still exists on campus, by the way. Only it isn’t in front of the main office anymore. Now they have hidden it waaaaaay out in the garden in front of the horticulture building. These days, you actually have to go through a gate (or climb over a locked fence) and search around under a tree if you want to find it. I know that because I’ve… uh… personally climbed that fence a couple of times, just so I could go take pictures of it. Shhh, don’t tell anyone.
And now, the big question. Who maintains that plaque? Does anyone know? I certainly don’t know. In fact, last time I stopped by campus, and I looked at the plaque, no new entries had been added to it for at least five or six years. And some of the older entries have long since faded out, or have recently been covered by spray paint. Some of the really old entries are 100% unreadable now. It seems pretty obvious to me these days that NO ONE maintains it.
About twelve years ago, somebody told me that we have an “Interlake Alumni Group” that maintains that plaque. But that was a long time ago, and I have yet to hear any follow-up about who that group actually is or who is actually in it. So I would be willing to bet that NO ONE actively maintains the IHS Memorial Plaque. I believe it has been left out there to fade in the sun like an old abandoned car.
I would obviously love it if someone could tell me otherwise, and prove to me that it actually is being maintained. But… I’ll believe it when I see it. Also, I should point out that I am not local to Bellevue anymore. I moved down to Southern California in 1999, and I have been down here ever since. So there is very little I could do to keep the plaque maintained, or do anything about it these days.
Reading through this list, it seems like Interlake has had a lot of young deaths over the years. Was our school just unlucky? Did we have a lot of asbestos in our walls or something?
This is something that people mention to me all the time, but I suspect that any other high school’s memorial site would probably look very similar to ours. So I don’t think our overall numbers have been all that abnormal. The only reason there are more names on our page is because this page was just better researched than most, that’s my guess.
Have any patterns or trends jumped out at you as you created this page?
Yeah, there are two of them, actually.
The first one is how predictable the cause of death is going to be, based on your age. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but in general you’re going to see a lot of young people die of suicides or accidents. And then as people get older, you start to see melanomas and other cancers start to appear. And then around age forty or fifty you’ll start to see heart attacks or strokes. And again, I don’t think this was overly prevalent at Interlake. These are just the stages of life in general for most people. Although for me, it was especially interesting to see the trends start to change based on when you grew up. In the 70’s you had a bunch of kids dying from accidents - train accidents, skydiving accidents, car crashes, helicopter accidents. And then by the 2000’s and 2010’s you hardly saw any of those things at all. Why? Well I suspect it’s because kids in the 70’s just went outside more, and they did more daredevil things. Kids who grew up in the 2000’s and 2010’s don’t do those types of things anymore, so you don’t get many accidents. I just thought that was interesting.
Oh, and here’s the second biggest trend I noticed just from running this page. This one is going to make you kind of sad, so I apologize. At some point in the mid 90’s, Interlake became an International Baccalaureate School. Which was great for the school, but terrible for IHS history. Because what happened was that Interlake was no longer just a bunch of kids who grew up in the same neighborhood, and who all went to the same neighborhood school. Now you had a lot of families who would move to the area just for the Interlake IB program, and then after high school was over, they would move away. This was great for the school, of course, and great for the students, but it pretty much destroyed any history or sense of continuity that Interlake once might have had. And again, this is very noticeable when you read through the IHS Memorial Page. If you look at the entries from 1968-1996 or so, you will see a lot of the same last names. And a lot of the same families. And a lot of the same teachers and staff members. And then after that you never see any of the same names anymore. With the remodel of the campus, and the addition of the International Baccalaureate Program, it basically became an entirely new school. I know this was good for Interlake in the long run, but it makes writing about the history of the school especially difficult. The reality is, it’s really not even the same school anymore that most of us went to. Interlake from 1967-1996 is a much different place than Interlake from 1997- the present.
Finally, what happens if YOU die? Who’s going to add your entry to the page?
Well, I mean, we’re all going to die one day. That is the harsh, but unfortunate, reality.
I don’t plan to die anytime soon. But of course this is life, and I realize I don’t have all that much say in what happens to me. In fact, that is one of those things that is crystal clear to me after thirteen years of running this page. We all get older eventually. And sometimes shit happens.
If something WERE to happen to me, rest assured that my friend Chris Alef ‘92 helped me set up this website, and he also has access to add or edit new entries to it. So yes, there is already a succession plan.
If something were to happen to BOTH Chris and me at the same time, um yeah, there might be a problem. But hopefully we’ll work out some sort of a contingency plan before we get to that point. For now, the succession plan appears to be good.
I hope you enjoy the IHS Memorial Wall. As always, please let know f you see anything that needs to be added or changed. You can email me at MLanza1974@aol.com.
-Mario Lanza, Interlake Class of 1992
Posted on March 23rd, 2021