Ya done good!
Thanks to you readers, we blessed a 2020 'Covid class' of sixth graders in Taylorville, Ill., with ten $1,000 scholarships — on the eve of their high school graduation
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series on a May 12-18, 2026, trip to the Midwest Sally and I took. Today’s column is about an event we put on to honor some graduating seniors in Taylorville, Ill. Saturday: the rest of the trip.
TAYLORVILLE, Ill. — The money had been raised. The invitations had been sent. The banquet was set. But in the weeks prior to our May 14 event to honor students who’d missed out on so much because of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, a question gnawed at me:
Would any of the students show up? And, if they did, would they consider the event an obligation, the equivalent of being forced, by parents, to eat their vegetables?
After all, the early returns hadn’t been promising: a week after invitations were sent to 102 students and their parents, only 13 people had said yes.
I didn’t express it to Cathy Schaeffer, the St. Mary School sixth-grade teacher I was working with on this bizarre plan to throw a party in a small Midwestern farm town for sixth-graders now graduating from Taylorville High, but I was worried.
I hoped. I prayed. I remembered that quote my mother loved about how we can’t control the wind, but we can control the sail, even if this seemed like trying to sail with no wind at all. But then, what could I do?
On Tuesday, May 12, Sally and I flew from Eugene to St. Louis, which is 90 minutes south of Taylorville. On the morning of the event, an omen of sorts arrived. After attending a Mass to celebrate the 2026 Taylorville High graduates, I was introduced to a mother and her 18-year-old son.
“They’re here from Arkansas,” I was told. “This is Rebecca Schriver and her son, Payton. He was part of that 2020 sixth-grade class but moved away.”
“And you came back for this?” I asked
“Yep.”
“Rebecca,” I said. “How long was the drive from Arkansas?”
“Seven hours.”
I relaxed immediately. Goodness, it was like that final-scene line from Bert the Cop in It’s a Wonderful Life — the movie on which the Eugene-Taylorville connection rests — regarding war hero Harry Bailey arriving to honor his brother George: “The fool flew all the way up here in a blizzard!”
That night, our guests — 150 of them, as it turned out — were greeted by a “You Are Now in Bedford Falls” sign as they arrived. The mood was festive and the kids dressed to the nines. In keeping with the Wonderful Life theme, each table was named for a character in the movie.
