You’ve got two choices. You can be bummed out by 2020. Or,
you can embrace it, keep your sense of humor and keep a family tradition
flickering.
The 13 women who visited French Lick Resort earlier this
summer prefer the latter. The coronavirus kept their gathering was a little
smaller than usual, but the Thiemann-Whitty reunion officially chalked up one
more year at French Lick Springs Hotel — they first started coming in 1991, and
next year they’ll be celebrating 30 years.
They’ve been coming long enough to remember the
pre-restoration days of French Lick, when wallpaper peeled off the walls and
some of the lamps didn’t have lightbulbs. Their 2020 reunion may have been a
year like no other. But the spirit was just as vibrant as every prior summer
they’ve gathered at French Lick.
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| The matriarchs of the family, proudly showcasing that W+T=Fun at the Whitty-Thiemann reunion. |
“We thought, ‘Us girls have so much fun, we should just
still keep getting together.’ So 30 years ago we decided we would do that at
French Lick,” says Carole Thoman, who’s made it to nearly every one of those
reunions over the last three decades.
“We’ve had people come as far as Atlanta and Florida and
California. They don’t want to miss it if they can possibly help it. We’ve got
four generations now.”
Quirky games are always on the itinerary. One year it was
making bridal dresses out of newspapers. Another year it was making something
out of Spam. That was for the “hillbilly” theme, as each year’s get-together
comes with a different theme as well.
This year’s theme was so very 2020: hell and the
Pluto devil (French Lick’s famous mascot). They even got custom-made black
Pluto masks with a red devil to go in everyone’s goodie bag, along with
devil horns, hand sanitizer and bug spray (for the resort’s sporting clays
range which they tried for the first time this year).
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| A bit bigger group in one of the prior years at Hagen's Club House Restaurant |
And because you need a little levity to survive these crazy times, they cheers-ed to Corona beers in the group’s designated “party room” and made a game out of guessing each other’s temperatures at the resort’s daily temperature checks. It’ll make for a good story to tell to the fifth generation someday. Just like one of the first years they visited in the early ‘90s.
During their visit, the movie “Blue Chips” was being filmed
in French Lick. For the parade scene that was filmed downtown, they had a bird’s-eye
view from the upstairs window of the dime store, owned at the time by a
relative of one of the ladies. They even bumped into famed basketball coaches
Jim Boeheim and Jerry Tarkanian, who were part of the movie, and got a surprise
visit from them later in the day.
“We invited Boeheim and Tarkanian, just kind of
sarcastically, up to our party room and they came up there. Had a beer with us,”
Carole recalls with a laugh, and there are certainly a ton of those on reunion
weekend.
They even snap pictures with the veteran bell/valet guys who
greet them at the hotel every year on the second weekend every July. Without
fail, for the last 30 years.
“Especially this year it was great, because you just kind of
forgot everything that was going on in the world, and just laughed,” Carole
says. “We just love French Lick. It’s just perfect for us. We just have a
ball.”