Karl Rove and Kathy Loveless

I was a member of the 1966 Olympus High debate team, and so was Karl Rove.  Rove went on to become a top advisor to President George Bush, and a key strategist for the conservatives in the Republican Party. He came back to SLC on February 8, 2018, to accept an alumni award from Olympus High and to speak at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute.  My friends had told me Karl Rove was in the class behind ours and that he was the partner of star debater Keith Roark, whom I knew well in high school and who is a bit of a colorful character himself.  Roark missed our 50th Olympus reunion because he was defending a murder trial!  For the life of me, I couldn't remember Rove, so I went to his speech at the Hinckley Institute to see if he remembered me.  He didn't.  I didn't try to refresh his memory by pointing out that I was the debater that the team nicknamed "Squeaky."

   

There was another face from the past at the Rove speech.  Rove pointed out to the audience that his first foray into politics was acting as campaign manager for Kathy Loveless, who was running for a University of Utah student body office.  Kathy was in the audience and waved excitedly.  Kathy was the "girl who had it all" in my class in college, including being chosen as a Miss Utah.  She and I later worked together at Bonneville Pacific, where she developed power plants and I documented them, and we have been friends ever since.  Kathy is now a widow, after the death of her husband, Scott, another SLC lawyer.  It is odd how paths cross.