ROGERS — Uninvited visitors to the Rogers site on Google Groups will find only a picture of Rogers High School’s pipe-smoking mascot and a boilerplate explanation that only members are allowed.
Inside, those whose membership has been approved by a secret board — so secret the group’s founder won’t say whether it exists — reminisce about old times in Rogers. They post photos and quiz each other about Rogers history.
“I don’t know if it necessarily accomplishes anything other than just a good feeling,” said C. Schell, a 1965 graduate of Rogers High School who now lives near Seattle.
Schell is the group’s most prolifi c contributor with 427 posts.
Jim Lingle, a Rogers lawyer, known in the group as Esquire Jim, started the group somewhat accidentally.
For the past four or fi ve years, he e-mailed back and forth with friends from high school then sent a compiled version of the messages to an ever-expanding group. Much of the e-mail was dedicated to announcing births, deaths and other local events.
The group expanded, reaching about 100 members, and Lingle became overwhelmed, he said.
“I was just going nuts,” he said.
Enter Emily and Paul Neaville, siblings who helped Lingle move the list to Google Groups earlier this year.
Now members can and do start their own posts without going through Lingle. Topics have included high school rivalries and the resulting pranks, old drive-in restaurants and muscle cars.
“If you’ve seen ‘American Graffiti,’ you have a pretty good idea,” Schell said.
The group now has 233 members.
Too many members might be bad for the group if the volume of posts got too high, Lingle said.
For now, he fi gures more members will bring more interesting stories about Rogers. The group is also a place for old classmates to reconnect, he said.
Kathy Neal graduated from Rogers High School in 1967 and now lives in Little Rock.
“It’s a connection with home,” she said of the group. “I have reconnected and gotten to know people that I didn’t know in school.”
Lingle said some members already think the group is too big. They liked it better when everybody in the group knew everybody else.
Now the only thing all the group members have in common is an interest in Rogers, Lingle said.
Still, there is cohesiveness and focus in the group, said Emily Neaville, a 2000 graduate of Rogers High School who works in Washington, D.C.
Neaville said she is not sure of the group’s future. She wonders if members will get tired of telling and reading old stories.
“But realistically, if you think of the way people tell old stories off-line, I don’t think they will get tired of it,” she said.
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