Greetings,
 The Simon Gratz High School Alumni Association, Inc. (SGHSAA) a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation that was founded in 1990. Our primary purpose is to assist the students at Simon Gratz High School in achieving their academic goals.

Our Mission Statement:

1.Develop strategies for utilizing the resources of the  SGHSAA, Inc., and the unique talents of our supporter, to enrich the lives and to enhance the educational opportunities of the current students at S.G.H.S.   

2. Develop an ever growing association of Simon Gratz High School Alumnus, drawing upon their professional, political and social affiliations, to provide enjoyable social events to achieve our fund raising goals, to support and sustain projects and programs that are beneficial to the students accomplishing their academic goals.

Purpose and Objectives

• DEVELOP BROAD BASE INVOLVEMENT FROM GRATZ FAMILYReach out to former students of Simon Gratz High School, especially recent
              graduates.
              Reach out to staff and teachers.

• PROVIDE ACTIVE PARTICIPATION TO SCHOOL AND STUDENTSMentoring programs
  Career Day programs
  Volunteer at school: communicate desire to help at level that will be most  effective.
  Strive for consistent commitment.
   

• ASSUME THE ROLE AS POSITIVE ROLE MODELS Develope vehicles for giving back.
  Develop or participate in ongoing programs.

• DEVELOP AND MAINTAIN COMMUNICATIONS

            Appoint a school liaison
           Become and maintain visibility at school and in the community.

Billie Holiday, Live: A Biography in Music

By NAT HENTOFF
February 12, 2008; Page D7
"Billie must have come from another world," said Roy Eldridge, often heard accompanying her on trumpet, "because nobody had the effect on people she had. I've seen her make them cry and make them happy." Lady Day, as tenor saxophonist Lester Young named Billie Holiday, still has that effect through the many reissues of her recordings, including the recently released "Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles" of the 1933-44 sessions (Columbia/Legacy, available on Amazon) that established her in the jazz pantheon.
I grew up listening to those sides, which infectiously demonstrated -- as pianist Bobby Tucker, her longtime pianist, noted -- that "she could swing the hardest in any tempo, even if it was like a dirge . . . wherever it was, she could float on top of it." But none of the previous reissues, as imperishable as they are, have as intense a presence of Lady as in the truly historic new five-disc set "Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings 1934-1959" on Bernard Stollman's ESP-Disk label (on Amazon, in stores, or at espdisk.com).

Lady Day at a recording session

This is a model for future retrospectives of classic jazz artists of any era because researcher and compiler Michael Anderson, in his extensive liner notes, provides a timeline of her jazz life -- describing the circumstances of each performance in the context of her evolving career. One example: a live radio remote from Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in 1937 when the 22-year-old singer "began a special association with her comrade, 'The Prez,' Lester Young" -- grooving with the Count Basie band in "Swing Brother Swing."
Producer Anderson is a veteran radio broadcaster (including gigs at WBGO-FM in Newark, N.J., and with Sirius Satellite Radio) and a former jazz drummer. He was in Sun Ra's fabled visionary Arketstra and led bands of his own. As Mr. Anderson was growing up, collecting jazz records, "in my early teens," he told me, "I would have a Billie Holiday day each week where I only played her music."
His devoted immersion in tracking down performances by her from around the country takes us, for example, from an after-hours Harlem club, Clark Monroe's Uptown House, in 1941 to the Eddie Condon radio show in 1949, where Holiday dedicates "Keep on Rainin' " to Bessie Smith, whom she heard on records back in her hometown, Baltimore.
There is a series of extraordinarily moving sets at George Wein's Boston club, Storyville (from which I used to do jazz remotes), in 1951. Billie, backed by just a house rhythm section, is more deeply affecting in "I Cover the Waterfront," "Crazy He Calls Me" and other songs here than in any of her studio interpretations.
Six years later, she was on CBS TV's "The Sound of Jazz," for which Whitney Balliett and I had selected the musicians. In a sequence still being played around the world, she sings her own blues, "Fine and Mellow," with Lester Young among the players.