Where’s Doni? Help Solve a Hoover High Mystery
Some of the three dozen student portraits, taken in the 1970s, that arrived in the mail recently at Hoover High School with notes written on the back to someone we only know as Doni.
UPDATE: With the help of several of her old Franklin Jr. High and Hoover High classmates, the mystery of Doni is solved. Thanks to everyone who responded.
Sadly, Doni J. Faupel, a 1976 Hoover graduate, passed away in St. Petersburg, Florida on March 7, 2016. A brief obituary on the website of a funeral home there listed her mother, a brother and sister, and some nieces and nephews as her survivors. The storage bin where the dozens of 9th grade portraits were found must have been hers at some point. The fact that she kept them with her all of those years suggest that the relationships Doni forged in her schooldays remained important to her and were the source of fond memories for the rest of what a few who knew her report had been a difficult life.
The upcoming season of commencement and looking ahead is a good time to remind ourselves that these are the days. The future is a promise that isn’t always kept. Celebrate not just advancement and graduation, but friendship. The mysteries of life continue. Rest in peace, Doni.
As if Hoover High School principal Cindy Flesch doesn’t have enough work caring for current students!
The school’s mail delivery one recent day included a packet of old student portraits like a collection of vintage baseball cards (minus the market value). They came from a man who grew up in Indiana and found them in his storage bin in Florida. He has no idea how they got there.
Based on the names of various local photography studios stamped on the back and the many references to Roosevelt and Hoover high schools in the handwritten forget-me-not messages, he dropped the pics in the mail like a bottled message plunked into a stream flowing toward Des Moines.
“It is all a mystery to me,” reads the last line of the enclosed note from D.W. Stiles of St. Petersburg, Florida.
And now to us, too.
Homeroom 110, Cotten’s class, Class of ’76, Joe’s party, an admonition to “keep your hands off Howard” … those are just some of the clues scribbled on the backs of the puzzle pieces from the pictorial time capsule. The pictures belonged to “Doni,” a “cute chick.”
Our theory is that these were students from the old Franklin Junior High, which opened in 1951, reached a peak enrollment of more than 1,500 in 1960 just prior to the opening of Merrill and Meredith, and closed in the late 1970s. At the time these photos were taken, when students finished 9th grade at Franklin they went on to high school at either Hoover or Roosevelt, depending on their home address.
Assuming these photos were exchanged between Franklin classmates in the spring of 1973, Doni was clearly bound for Hoover the following fall. But Flesch scoured the Husky yearbooks for what would have been Doni’s high school years (’74-’76) without finding her there.
Did Doni move, possibly to Indiana or even Florida, before graduating from high school in Des Moines? Who knows? Maybe you? Doni, are you out there somewhere?
If you attended Franklin, Hoover or Roosevelt in the mid-1970s and may know Doni – or recognize anyone in the slide show below – drop us a line at news@dmschools.org.
