20Below grads seeing success.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

EVERY YEAR about this time, I find myself wondering whatever happened to them - those 20Below students from yesteryear.

In my former life as features editor, I was in charge of these yearly crews of students who write, illustrate and photograph a section in Monday's Register-Guard. Each year about this time, we'd gather at Taco Loco for a year-end dinner. We'd talk about the good times, hand out a few awards and hear from the students about future plans.

Then, boom, they'd be gone. And I'd wonder: What will become of them?

Meg Hemphill and Anna Joyce, for example, two South Eugene students on the first team (1994-95). Where would they wind up?

They were inseparable, a couple of creative, zany kids - Anna our artist and the daughter of David Joyce, who did the wonderful "flying people" art at the Eugene Airport, Meg her mischievous sidekick who once wrote a column that intentionally spelled out a secret message with the drop-cap letters.

Meg, 25, is now a paralegal in San Francisco, married and considering the possibilities of joining the Episcopalian priesthood.

Anna, 25, is waiting tables in Portland, married and still very much the artist, print making her specialty.

What amazes me is how diverse the pursuits of ex-20Belowers have been. I'm watching television and there's Simon Gutierrez (1994-95), a reporter for KEZI.

I'm reading the Oregon Daily Emerald and there's Rachel Pilliod (1999-2000), who's been elected student body president at the University of Oregon next fall.

I'm speaking at a writer's conference in Gold Beach and there's Taya Noland (1994-95), who's now pursuing a master of fine arts degree in creative nonfiction at the University of Idaho. (Noland, a Marshfield High student, wrote one of the most memorable lines in 20Below history: "I go to a high school where we are chastised on the daily announcements for leaving fish guts and deer carcasses in the parking lot.")

Recently, in two weeks' time, I see a photo in The Register-Guard of Rebecca Sanchez (1999-2000), recycling trash at Lane Community College and a letter-to-the-editor from Kate Stephenson (1999-2000), a freshman at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who politely, but firmly, tells Wilderness Watch to take a hike on the Steens Mountain Running Camp issue.

WITHIN THE ranks of 20Below alums, I learn we have a guy who helped Whitman College in Walla Walla win the United States Collegiate Snowsports Association's snowboarding championships last winter (Brian Stater, 1997-98).

We have a captain in the U.S. Army in El Paso, Texas, a man who's been married for five years and has a new 2-month-old son (James Stegall, 1994-95).

All ex-20Belowers changed, some more than others.

Grace Mitchell (1997-98) of Elkton went off to Reed College, where she wrote a column about why she wasn't a feminist. "Now," she says, "I'm a radical feminist." She graduated from Reed in 2000 and is working at the Portland Art Museum.

Juli Ruckman (1997-98), whose grunge look in her 20Below days befit her artist role, now lives in Portland where she paints, works in a music store and attends an evangelical Christian church.

Sara Spettel (1997-98) has passed up journalism to go into pre-med. A senior at Barnard College in New York, the Latin American Studies major teaches English as a second language twice a week in Harlem and will work in a Spanish-speaking medical clinic in Oakland, Calif., this summer.

Some 20Below alums are doing exactly what you'd expect. Ben Kaplan (1994-95), as many of us assumed, is on his way to becoming the next Anthony Robbins. A Harvard grad, his book, "How to Go to College Almost for Free" recently catapulted him onto a national speaking tour.

Katie Lockard (1994-95), the Reedsport artist whose cartoon "Falo" featured ants and other critters, is a wildlife biologist who's currently studying the yellow mongoose in South Africa.

All, in Joni Mitchell fashion, seem to have looked at life from both sides now, none perhaps more than Nicole Speulda (1994-95). She's worked at Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. Shared a house with 20 other international students in Belfast, North Ireland, during "marching season." (`I averaged four hours of sleep in the middle of a neighborhood that erupted into bonfires and rock, bottle and stick throwing.') Attended a conference in Turkey. And is soon to leave for a new job in D.C.

For now, she's bagging groceries back home at Albertson's.

Bob Welch can be reached by calling 338-2354 or by e-mail at [e-mail].