A 50th high school reunion

I was the editor of this gaudy yearbook. The reunion committee provided ID badges of our former selves.

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Last weekend my high school class of 1962 had a reunion. Fifty years is real time.

I had attended our 35- and 45-year reunions so people’s appearance was no shocker. It is a bit disconcerting to see such familiar faces wearing the disguise of age. But after a weekend with my peer group I look at my present face with more respect and affection. I see in myself, like I saw in them, the gem of who I used to be and still am, the spark of my essential self. Some of the women, like me, look like our mothers but with good haircuts.

Melba and Janis, looking like their mothers only better.

 The reunion committee had asked us for updates and reflections on our lives and published these in a booklet. I was impressed by the breadth and depth of the lives people have lived. Travel, family, achievement, service blended with a remarkable integrity. My classmates have been true to themselves and to their faith. They have served the world at large and the communities where they have been planted or the one they never left. They have become beloved parents and grandparents.

What is even more remarkable, though, is that this high school class of mine still felt like a community, a group of people united by affection and common experience despite our differences. We pulled together as a high school class, though each of us played a unique role. This exercise in building community is one of this small parochial school’s great gifts to my life.

Faye

Faye Mosemann was the one who pulled me into the community-building exercise when she greeted me practically on the doorstep that first day of freshman year. I soon learned that Faye was the daughter of the pastor of the largest Mennonite church in the area, the one associated with the local college. I was the shy daughter of a farmer. And I soon learned that this didn’t matter. Faye and I became best friends.

I can’t say exactly how this class came to feel like a community and still does, after all these years. I don’t think there is any good theory of community building; you just have to do it. Music was important in our community. Faye and I and four girls quickly formed a singing group and most of the class eventually joined one chorus or another. Singing and shared classes blurred the boundaries of the cliques that high school students always form. We were a group of 50–60, a good size for community building.

Wayne and Eileen

  We also came together with a hunger to learn, a sense of being in momentous times, which was cultivated by some really great teachers. John F. Kennedy was elected president in our junior year. Faye reminded me last weekend that she came to my house to watch the returns on television—because her stricter Mennonite parents didn’t have TV—and we stayed up all night. I suspected that my parents had voted for Richard Nixon if they had voted at all. They considered their voting a very private matter.

The historian Leonard Gross, who went on to become curator of the Mennonite Church’s archives, taught for a few years at Bethany. He lectured us college style, made little Anabaptists out of us by teaching us about our origins, and made us pay attention to the news. Leonard introduced me to the life of the mind and I never left it. Delmar Miller and Rosemary Wyse introduced me to great literature and great writing. Latin became my second language because it was the only foreign language available when I was a freshman and C.J. Holloway was available to teach it. It was an invaluable foundation for learning more languages. When Leonard came to the school I took German from him and I began learning French with private lessons from his Swiss wife, Irene.

Leonard, Rosemary, Bible instructor Royal Bauer, and John Ingold, who taught me to drive on a stick shift (a lifelong gift), were at our reunion, beaming with pride and affection and looking great. How did I miss photographing them? I was caught up in the emotion of the moment, feeling a little self-conscious and high-schoolish, wondering if I lived up to their expectations.

All of our teachers were great human beings as well as good teachers. We were surrounded by good people who brought out as much good as possible in fickle teenagers. We were sheltered, protected from many of the social and societal pressures that assail adolescents. It was a stifling environment for some, no doubt, but I thrived in it.

I told my classmates on Sunday that Bethany Christian High School had spoiled me for living any kind of life but one that carried meaning and one that built community. It was a good way, I think, to be spoiled.

For more reunion photos go here.