Playing the hand of a lifetime

A group of lifelong friends has found that the secret to preserving happy memories is to keep those memories alive at the poker table.

For one Monday a month since 2005, seven men who share nearly 70 years of history gather to play cards at the La Cañada Flintridge home of Dr. Mike Missakian.

The retired radiologist moved in with daughter Maylene Glidewell, also a physician, shortly after his wife passed away, bringing with him this simple ritual rooted back in his schoolboy days.

Each of the seven, now in their early 80s, graduated in 1947 or 1948 from George Washington High School in south Los Angeles, where the poker ritual began, with the gamblers playing for matchsticks.

All of them also went on from high school to attend college at UCLA, and most had already known each other from the halls of L.A.'s Horace Mann Junior High School.

Though marriage, careers and other life events have spread the friends out over three counties, games continued off and on throughout the years after each returned from military service in the 1950s.

"As life goes on you realize how rare it is to have a friend, a real friend — somebody that you don't want something from and they don't want anything from you," said Bob Creps, 80.

If there's a spokesman for the group, it's Creps, a former naval officer who made a career in the electronics industry and who now lives in Calabasas.

If there's a jokester, it's John Foder, Ed.D., who made a career in health education and who continues to write at johntfoder.com. He resides in Santa Barbara.

If there's a foreman, it's Fred Gherardi — Freddy Flintstone, jokes Foder, as Gherardi's life's work was in his family's L.A.-based masonry business, American Marble & Onyx.

Foder described Bill Nickerson, who ran his own insurance brokerage in Lomita and now who lives in Palos Verdes Estates, as quite skilled in the art of B.S. But if anything, he's a model of patience. Creps, it seems, is always interrupting him, or completing his sentences for him.

There's also Vince Punaro, of San Bernardino County, who has the youngest children and who brings an uncommon lust for life to the table.

He sits next to Missakian, the happy host and careful listener who the UCLA grads have long forgiven for completing his medical degree at USC.

Let's call Ed Azarian, a private investigator who worked in an Army intelligence unit in Germany, a reliable fact-checker for stories of good times past.