Ilene Misheloff (Ace of Hearts, California)

[pensive music] It's hard to overstate just how perfectly average Dublin, California is in the late 1980s.

This was a place where suburbia was synonymous with safety.

Elementary school kids walked home from school, knew their neighbors, and played outside.

High schoolers gabbed on the phone for hours deciding what to wear to the dance, where they would inevitably jump around to Paula Abdul or slow dance to Phil Collins.

And 13-year-old Ilene Misheloff fell right in that in-between stage of becoming a young adult and still enjoying her childhood alongside her friend Liz Allan.

We just got to play, and we got to have a great time together.

And I remember, um, during lunch recess, and we would all hang out and talk about, about life.

Couple weeks earlier, it had been raining, and we had gone...

We got into a water fight, and we were, you know, stepping in the puddles and making each other soaking wet and had to go call the office so that we can get some new clothes and stuff like that.

So we were just kids, and, um, and, you know, having, living the kid life and having a good time with each other.

Liz met Ilene during their eighth grade year when they ended up in the same friend group.

Ilene was the tall girl in the group.

She had a close-knit family, a mom, Mattie, dad, Michael, a twin brother, Brian, and an older brother, Robert.

And she was kind and a good student, all As and Bs.

Liz and Ilene were in the same last period science exploration class, where they did the most 1980s junior high thing, dissect frogs, though Liz had a different partner.

I chose this partner for dissection, and she would take the, uh, whatever we were dissecting and make it alive and jump onto my desk.

The frog jumped onto my desk.

The heart was beating on my desk, [laughs] like, and I was very squeamish.

And so Ilene would tell me, "I- next time.

We'll be partners next time, and I won't do that to you."

For as much time as Ilene gave her schoolwork, she gave her hobby even more.

She spent nearly all of her free time, up to 30 hours a week, at Dublin Ice Arena, where she was a competitive skater.

These were the years of young Olympic hopefuls, and for as small as Dublin was at the time, just 24,000 residents, this was a good place to be for hopeful skaters.

Brian Boitano and Kristi Yamaguchi both actually skated at the same rink for a while.

She was probably good enough to go to the Olympics, but we don't know, 'cause, um, she was taken too soon.