About 5 o’clock last Saturday night, I stepped into 1962.
I didn’t feel any different at that moment. I don’t think I looked any different. Neither did my wife. Except that for her, last Saturday night brought together alumni of Ancaster High School (in Ontario). And for her it was a chance to see and hear the impact of nearly 50 years on some of her former classmates, as more than 400 ex-students and faculty gathered to celebrate the school’s golden anniversary. At one point, one of her former classmates summed up the general feeling of the reunion.
“Too little time,” she said, “to remember so much.”
The weekend-long gathering actually attracted about 2,000 former students of the school. And the organizers of the 50th anniversary celebration kept those attending busy with the kind of fare that’s often associated with events such as these – a golf tournament, a reception of current and former staff members, several pub events and a fun run led by some of the school’s former athletic coaches and encouraged from the sidelines by, you guessed it, some of the school’s former cheerleaders shouting some “Sis-boom-bah!”
But the high note of the weekend was a dinner and dance inside the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum at Hamilton Airport.
“At the very least, you’ll feel very much at home next to all those vintage aircraft,” my wife kidded me.
Actually, I found the people-watching much more interesting (at least on this occasion) than the airplane watching. There was a former high school football star, his former girlfriend (they had different spouses), a high school thespian who went on to become a doctor, a number business course grads who built enterprizes with their names on them, and a woman who became an ER nurse. There were guys who had no doubt been nerdy back then, and gals who were had no doubt been knockouts in those yearbook photos. And then there was the high school’s perennial gym teacher, who my wife suggested “hadn’t changed a bit.”
I remember my own high school reunion from a number of years ago. My former secondary school was Agincourt Collegiate Institute (outside Toronto). As I recall, the reunion took place during the school’s 75th anniversary celebrations. So, the reunion weekend re-assembled men and women who had graduated from the place as early as the 1930s, and others as recently as the ’80s. Naturally every grad gravitated to his/her own time period, looking, listening and wondering “if that’s who I think it is.”
I had actually become involved in the event planning, volunteer recruiting and display set-up at my reunion. Because it seemed appropriate back then, I sat with as many graduates as were willing to be interviewed and video-taped their recollections and reminiscences of life at ACI.
I think what struck me most about the recorded comments was the angst most felt about being in high school: What would my peers think of me? Would I be considered cool or uncool? How would I ever survive frosh year? How well would I do in this or that subject? Would I make Ontario scholarship? I hadn’t expected to find as much uptight-ness among my fellow students as I did.
I certainly felt that kind of tension in my first year of high school – Grade 9. But after that, I managed to make friends with peers who had many of the same interests and aspirations as I did. We turned out to be the school’s “artsy” types. We staged variety shows. We pushed for annual school musicals. We incorporated cheering the school teams from the sidelines into nearly Vaudevillian entertainment for all.
To placate some of the school’s stuffed-shirt administrators, we even volunteered to turn the daily school announcements into recorded skits with a cast of zany characters with lots of inside humour thrown in. It was a perfect arrangement: The vice-principal and teachers weren’t burdened with the humdrum of the announcements. And we got our kicks performing blackouts and radio sketches on the school’s PA system every day!
And when we got together at our 75th school reunion, we discovered that our old PA sketch group had become teachers, professors, lawyers, doctors, politicians, ad executives … and yes, the parents of another generation of high school students. But attending my wife’s high school reunion allowed me the luxury of taking in the festivities from a distance. I enjoyed stepping back into 1962 with her.
And just in case you were wondering, I don’t think she ran into any old flames, last Saturday night at the dance. Thankfully, none of them showed up.