Jake’s 50th high school reunion

The women looked fab at mine, and I am no younker. Nor they.

 

Our Class of '76 had 299 members.
We had a First Reunion in '77 -- we're a college town and a fair number of people stayed home for college. Probably 100 people showed up for the first reunion, then the 5th in '81.
Then they switched gears and had reunions for the 10th and 20th (the last one I attended.)

I think we were supposed to have a 25th in 2001 but it got scotched in the aftermath of 9/11. I missed the 30th in 2006 and the 40th in '16. If I'm able to go, I guess I'll probably show up for #50 in '26.

I remember at the first reunion, three people had died. By the 10th, about a dozen, and a few more by 1996.

 

This story belongs here more than on the 9/11 page.

Gwen and I are both Spirit of 1976 as well, and our 25th reunion was scheduled for California, the Saturday night after 9/11. When the FAA halted all flights immediately after the attacks, and hearing stories of friends and co-workers landing in Flyover Country towns and having to rent cars to get home, we held little hope that they'd get everything up and running by the time of our flight Saturday morning.

Gwen and I discussed it and felt if planes began flying again, that next day would certainly be the safest day in the history of passenger travel, so we kept our fingers crossed.

As luck would have it, Delta called us Friday night and confirmed the airport would be open by 5 a.m. the next morning but couldn't guarantee a plane, a pilot or crew for the 8 a.m. ATL-OAK flight. At the time, we were still renting an apartment in Norcross, so I told Gwen to set the alarm for 3 a.m. and we'd take our chances. Turns out several tens of thousands of other people had the same idea, for when we got there, the line for check-in went all the way out of the lobby and into the South Terminal parking lot.

Well, to everyone's surprise, the line actually began moving. We got to the ticket counter around 6, and it probably took another hour to get through security. So we were at the gate with plenty of time to spare, just like everybody else. What we hadn't anticipated was how the shutdown had affected the whole system. With planes and staff scattered all over the country, even a major hub like Atlanta only had on hand the equipment that had landed or hadn't taken off on the morning of 9/11.

We were lucky to have a plane but no pilot or crew. Eventually, a crew without a plane was assigned to our gate. And two pilots who lived in Atlanta but weren't scheduled to work that weekend were called into service, eventually making it through the mob scene outside. So we took off about three hours late but the flight was as perfect as any I've ever been on, and we made it to the reunion with a couple of hours to spare.

Apparently, we were the only ones from east of the Rockies who were able to make it. Wish I could say the event was worth the trouble, but the same kids who ignored us in high school were just as stuck up as middle-aged adults. I don't think we're going to make the same effort in 2026, unless we're out there for some other reason.

Even at the fifth reunion, there were already a handful of memorials, the saddest being a girl who had moved to a remote part of Nevada and choked on a piece of food before emergency crews could save her. I'm guessing of the 421 graduates, probably less than 375 of us are still upright. There's usually an obituary that pops up on the Classmates page every few months.

Several have had cancer or heart attacks. But a few are California-specific. One was a professional hang-glider who was killed during a competition. Another was an expert in mountaineering who died of an embolism while on an expedition in the Sierras.

 

I've never been to a high school reunion, but I heard that at my 5 year reunion multiple people were kicked out of the bar and an ambulance was called for one person. I wasn't surprised.

 

Class of 1986, and have been to zero of my high school reunions. I do know that some of the people who were indiscriminately fucking back in the day apparently were still indiscriminately fucking 25 years later, because at least one marriage was destroyed as a result of that year’s reunion.

 

Every time my high school senior class has had our reunion, the dorkus who organizes it makes a big show out of calling for the football team to stand up during the banquet so we can all applaud our valiant warriors of the sacred gridiron.

Our valiant warriors, a preseason favorite to contend for the regional championship, went 0-10 our senior year.

 

Pretty sold trolling, methinks.

 

Oh, no, not this guy. He was on that football team, too.
He still goes to the games. Wearing his high school jersey.

 

Oh. That’s just sad.

 

The vaunted Dave Campbell's Texas Football magazine went on sale this summer, and put out an edition with our local team on the cover to commemorate last year's season. I assume the magazine did this for a bunch of schools, maybe just the bigger ones, because our local team was a stunning 1-9 last year. The bright spot is that the team, obviously, did not go to the playoffs so marching band season ended early as well.

Sincerely, a proud dad of two marching band kids