Attention, class! Mrs. Lien-Ahrndt is having a party for you

Carole Thorburn has but one item on her bucket list. She wants to throw a joyous reunion for 700 people she hasn't seen in as many as 50 years.

Thorburn, 82, was a highly popular third- and fourth-grade teacher in Minneapolis from 1961 to 1985. Her students at Sheridan Elementary School, where she taught from 1961 to 1968, knew her as Mrs. Lien. Then the divorced Mrs. Lien did something giggle-worthy, at least from the perspective of a bunch of 9-year-olds. She remarried and became Mrs. Ahrndt. She then spent about 15 years delighting students at Windom (1970 to 1978), the now-closed Walter Hines Page, (1978 to 1982) and, lastly, Burroughs, (1982-1985).

In 1985, she abruptly quit teaching to care for her husband, Meldin Ahrndt, who suffered from congestive heart failure. It was the right thing to do, but she never stopped thinking about her students, several whose cherubic wallet-sized photos she still guards with her life.

"Some teachers don't remember from year to year who their students are," said Thorburn, a twice-widowed mother and grandmother. "I just made them a big part of who I am. They're embedded in me."

Thorburn grew up on the North Side of Minneapolis, one of four children of a chemist father and homemaker mother. She became a bookkeeper after high school, later returning to college to get her teaching degree.

For 25 years, Mrs. Lien-Ahrndt reveled in teaching "the whole child," back when there was far less pressure to focus on test scores. She taught siblings year after year, and also many of their parents who took night classes so they would be better equipped to assist their children with basic subjects.

After seeing the movie "The Bucket List," she got an idea. She'd rent a party room (or, heck, the Convention Center) and host a great big gathering, with food and laughter and color-coded nametags that would identify which elementary school each now-grown child attended.

Just one problem. She is having little luck tracking down students, a strange reality in the age of Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and classmates.com.

So far, the former Mrs. Lien-Ahrndt has found only 20 or so students for a reunion she's tentatively set for Jan. 8, 2011. While delighted by those students' responses -- most via Facebook and most beginning with "OMG! Mrs. Ahrndt!!! -- she wants to hear from more. Hundreds more.

A major challenge is remembering full names and correct spellings of children who are now nearing retirement age, as well as having to account for moves and marriages.

Sitting on a couch in her sunny living room in the northwest suburbs, Thorburn pulls out a lined notebook to reveal several pages of names she has written from memory. Martha, Janice, Rochelle, John, Steve, Matt, all of them listed under big capital letters, such as 'W' for Windom.

"I'd love to find Molly," she said. "And Buffy. Such a sweet girl."

She found one student in an Edison High School yearbook, another in the phone book. Reactions to being found have been universally ecstatic, with all planning to attend her reunion.

"It's so funny to have these memories flood back," said Chad Reichwald, 38, a lawyer who was in Mrs. Ahrndt's third-grade class at Page in 1982. "From nursery school to Page Elementary to Field Elementary to Anthony Junior High to South High to the University of Minnesota to William Mitchell, my third-grade year is my most memorable, and Mrs. Ahrndt was a big reason for that."

Another student e-mailed her a confession: "I had a crush on you."

Diane Wrona Cook, 56, of Elk River, a former third-grader at Sheridan, remembers that Mrs. Lien "never, ever" lost control of the class. And she noticed little things. "'Diane, you've got on a new top. It's very pretty.' She always held a special place in my heart," Cook said.

"She took a lot of pride in being a teacher. It wasn't just a job to her."

Reuniting with all her students would mean so much to her, too. "If I could just announce that Mrs. Lien-Ahrndt is trying to find all these people," Thorburn said, pushing back tears.

You bet. Mrs. Lien-Ahrndt is trying to find all these people. If you are one, or might know someone who is, please send her a message on her Facebook page. Search by the name Carole Thorburn, or visit www.tinyurl.com/lien-ahrndt.