Braving a Reunion

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

Jeanette and Debbie dancing on a table in study hall (1973, 8th grade.) Once the teacher left the room, it was ours.

BRAVING A REUNION

When Rick, a former grade school classmate, found me via the Internet last summer, he suggested that we locate the others and have a class reunion.

At first I was excited. Then my enthusiasm waned – reunions can be awkward. After a 35-year separation, would we have anything to talk about for more than an hour?

Even though I had loved those grade school days, it might be best to preserve my memories as they were, perfect and self-contained.

Our Class of ‘77 began in the fall of 1964 when 25 little Pawnee Rock punks started kindergarten together.

Over the next decade, our class size stayed around 19-20. Some kids moved away but others moved in, and we traveled through the years as a team.

A friend in Kansas City once mentioned that her daughter had a new set of classmates every single year. That lack of continuity seemed sad to me because I considered school to be a tribe experience. My class was a crew of compadres, chums, co-conspirators.

Pawnee Rock High School closed and the Class of ‘72 was the last group of Braves to graduate. My classmates and I hung around through ninth grade, and then in 1974 we split up, attending schools in Macksville, Larned and Great Bend.

Eleven of us attended this class reunion on May 23 and we were given the incredible opportunity to tour the Pawnee Rock school building, which is presently owned by a bank.

We took up where we had left off: laughing. We were 14 again. As my friends and I walked down the hallways and stepped into the classrooms, the lunchroom, the gym, our stories poured like a summer rain.

We recalled the red and green cardboard “bricks” in kindergarten. Girls built houses and the boys plowed them down.

Standing in a grade school classroom, we paid tribute to Mrs. Schmidt, our vocal music teacher, by singing a few lines from “Senor Don Gato.”

As we surveyed the lunchroom, Darla, a slow eater who tried her best not to get in trouble, said, “Don’t ever make the mistake of hiding food in your milk carton.”

“Remember Mrs. Latas and her cottage cheese?” Marilyn asked, referring to our sixth grade teacher. “She brought cottage cheese every day for lunch – and she’d pour ketchup in it.”

In sixth grade we watched films (separately, boys and girls) about the facts of life. The first day of seventh grade our teacher showed us a paddle; it turned out that he wasn’t afraid to use it. Another teacher chose to punish us by assigning pages of the Congressional Record for us to copy in longhand.

In ninth grade, we baked bread, read “Romeo and Juliet,” and learned how to parallel park.

Over the years we had pledged allegiance to the flag, tagged each other in pom-pom-pullaway, learned to play trumpets, saxophones and drums.

We were good kids, but did not always present our best selves. Sometimes we were unkind to each other, and naturally we tested our teachers, learning their limits of good cheer.

“Now what teacher in his right mind would tell his junior high students that he was afraid of snakes?” Jeanette asked.

For two hours, memories spilled all over that school building. Then we met at a restaurant and talked for at least five more hours.

It felt good to be in the presence of people who had known me even before Mrs. Franklin taught us addition facts. And my classmates hadn’t changed much in the past 35 years – their personalities, gestures, and ease of laughter had remained the same.

It was after that tour, after we recalled the aroma of homemade rolls in the lunchroom, after we looked for “the ghost in the band room,” that I realized that this class reunion had turned into one of the happiest days of my life.

During our grade school years, some of us spent something like 1,800 days in each other’s company. And somewhere along the line, our lives melded.

We were just small-town kids, negotiating our way through childhood, together.

Copyright 2009 ~ Cheryl Unruh