Reunion Season

I am at my 50th college class reunion, held one year late due to COVID.  

The college has an inscription of a quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the wall next to an entrance gate. He described a procession of graduation and reunion classes, lined up in order of age and graduation date. He said those oldest classes he saw were followed by "the far longer train of ghosts. . . reaching back into eternity." We are all part of a river of generations. Old institutions assure us that the river continues. Reunions remind us that we aren't alone.

I knew it would be difficult to stay current on the blog while traveling. Friends offered me guest posts. We get by with a little help from our friends. 

Journalist Tam Moore is one of them. He is about 15 years ahead of me in the cycle of life. He reads this blog when it is first posted in the morning. He finds typos and grammar errors and points them out to me, a huge gift to me and to readers.  He had his own reunion story for me.

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Tam Moore

This is the season.

Graduations of significance for high school and college students. Reunions, or thoughts of reunions-to-come for graduates.

I’m deep into thinking about and planning for the 70th reunion of my Corvallis High School Class of 1952. Sometime, maybe 50 years ago, I started writing a periodic newsletter for the class, and assembled everyone’s contact information into a data base. Ever since, I’ve been the scribe who keeps classmates in touch each other. When it got around to the 65th reunion in 2017, I figured it would be the last. But, the longtime friends who gathered that year for a three-day affair said they wanted to do at least one more reunion.

So here we are, just getting going with the planning at the end of May and setting a target for the third week in July. That’s a short planning time, but I can tell you this is going to be a different kind of a reunion—worth the effort. All because we endured the pandemic, and many of us learned new skills which weren’t even imagined 70 years ago when we marched on stage to receive our diplomas.

This July’s reunion is going to have at least two Zoom connections, on two different days. People we haven’t seen in years will have the opportunity to talk with, and see, classmates gathered in the old home town. It should be a wonderful way to end the reunion cycle – after all if we tried for a 75th, everyone of us would be over 90-years old and chances are unfit for travel.

What’s so special about reunions? There are fun things, like the time Dick Olson—who was mostly bald when we graduated – showed up wearing a wig. Folks at the big gathering in the Corvallis Elks Club kept pointing toward Dick and saying “who is that guy, he looks familiar.” Then he peeled off the wig, exploded into the big smile we all knew from school.

After the first couple of reunions – we settled on every five years—people are interested in people, and they tend to get out of the social groups which formed in school. There’s lots of mixing. Discovery of shared experiences. Remembrances of silly things we did long ago.

We were all children growing up in the Great Depression, shaped by our parent’s roles during World War II. The Korean War started two years before we graduated, and the military or consideration of the draft were realities when we got our diplomas in 1952. A lot has happened since then.

Thanks to our pandemic-learned Zoom skills we’re going to be able to talk about it, one more time.