Update 9-23-14

Hi,

 

First, from Tom McPartland:  We're up to 64 people coming to the class of '64 reunion on October 10th, and the number is still growing.  The latest -- Mary Kay and Claude Chirico, Alicia Allen Locascio, and Harriet Kauff Willing.  We also have a growing list of people wanting to play golf -- 8 for Friday and 8 for Saturday.  And the door is open to meet any fellow Valley Stream South alumni.  Only 17 days left.

 

[Rich -- Related, I got 3 notes this week from people in the class of '65, saying they were planning to come to the reunion.  I gently reminded them that the class of '65 reunion isn't until late next April.  And I quickly got back 3 variants of:  "I know I'm old.  But not senile."]

 

Also related, from Barnet Kellman.  This was sent to Steve Gootzeit and copied to me:  This weekend, my middle daughter turned 21, and we were celebrating together in New York City.  She took us to a super hipster antique/thrift store in the “Dumbo” section of Brooklyn, and it was selling the scout hat you and I wore at the 50th Boy Scout Jamboree in Colorado Springs in 1960.  $48 -- certified antique!  I thought of you immediately.

 

In the present, from Barbara Blitfield Pech:  Greetings good people.  I was recently challenged to take a pie in the face for the team for breast cancer awareness and my group, Bosom Buddies.  Granted this is not a Hollywood scripted production, but it is what it is.  I'm ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille.  Pink hugs to all.

 

[Rich -- Also, someone wrote in, concerned about those statistics about the class of '64 of my Ohio college friend.  "40 out of 300 gone already?  Is it a certain life style?  Recently, an ICU nurse told me they get so many patients in their late 90s and early 100s that they don't think twice about it any more."

    I wrote back:  It may be different diets.  That class of '64 was in a meat-eating, smoking, farm-surrounded, Midwestern city.  The Valley Stream class of '64 seems smarter, with fewer former classmates gone -- only 18.  And at least 2 of them were 1960s casualties, one war related.]

 

[Rich -- Vaguely related:  I was giving a test on Saturday, and while telling the students the date to bubble on their SAT grids, I mentioned it was the 30th anniversary of the debut of "The Cosby Show."  I'd heard that on NPR.  I knew better than to expect that any of the 16-year-olds would know who Bill Cosby is, but I asked anyway.  No one.  Of course, I didn't know who Wallace Reid was when my grandmother mentioned him when I was 16.]

 

Finally, a long piece from The New York Times, forwarded by Marilyn Horowitz Goldhammer to Judy Hartstone and then to me.  This is all of it, so you don't have to chase down the link.

    A 50th High School Reunion and a Generation to Follow

    By Robert Strauss.  September 19, 2014

    Cherry Hill, New Jersey -- Tony DeGirolamo and Dick Worthington had been seeing each other for a while when they decided to go on a date to the Garden State Drive-In a half-century ago. “We started smooching and looked up, and there was one of our teachers in the next car. A little uncomfortable,” Mr. Worthington, 68, said with a chuckle, as he reminisced recently about that evening. Now they have been married for 45 years, and drive-in movies are mostly a distant memory. Today, the drive-in spot is occupied by the Crowne Plaza hotel, where the Worthingtons, along with about 100 former classmates, gathered on a recent Saturday night for the 50th reunion of their Cherry Hill High School West graduating class.

    Fiftieth reunions are not new, of course. They’ve been celebrated for decades -- by small numbers at first, and larger numbers as more people lived long enough to put a party together. But this year, there is one difference: the Class of 1964 is the first graduating class of the post-World War II baby boom and the leading edge of the generation retreating -- however reluctantly -- from the center stage to the backlot of retirement. When they graduated from high school, the Vietnam War was escalating, the Beatles were arriving, the cities were burning from the rage of race riots and Cassius Clay was becoming Muhammad Ali. Today, a black man is president, the climate is changing and the millennials are taking over. Two future presidents were among the graduates that year -- George W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton, although neither attended his 50th reunion, apparently. So were future stars like Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton and Dolly Parton.

    Some of the graduates, like Mrs. Worthington, who moved to Cherry Hill from Camden, N.J., at age 15, started life in the cities and became part of the great suburban migration that helped create prosperous post-World War II communities like Cherry Hill, where housing tracts and shopping malls replaced the sprawling acres of family farms that had helped create New Jersey’s reputation as the Garden State. Even without the special milestone this year, it’s not unusual for 50th high school reunions to be big sellers, said Dan Gottlieb, a psychologist and host of the program “Voices in the Family” on the Philadelphia National Public Radio affiliate WHYY, who comments on social trends. People attend this one who have never gone before.

“I think there is an unspoken message. You don’t know whether you will ever see any of these people again,” said Mr. Gottlieb, adding that he reconnected with about 50 people at his Atlantic City High School 50th reunion this summer.

    In Cherry Hill, Jean Benenson Hummel, 68, had never been to any of her reunions at the Cherry Hill High School West class of 1964, even though she lives only 15 miles away in the small town of Atco, N.J. (Back then there was only one high school. Now there is also a Cherry Hill High School East.) But this year was different. “It’s hard to pin down,” she said by way of describing her lack of interest in the earlier gatherings. “Maybe I just didn’t know about some of them. Maybe I avoided it for no reason. But for some reason, when I found out we were having a 50th, I got all set to go.”

    Mike Saltzburg, star baseball pitcher; Tommy May, all-South Jersey lineman; and basketball star Bill DeAngelis, a member of the Athletic Hall of Fame, were there, too. So was Susan Scott, now a United Church of Christ health care minister. “Back then, I was a little more conservative and tried to convert people,” she recalled. Katherine Goddard Adams and Ellen Glassman, who still live in town, were there, but so were classmates who flew in from California, Florida and the Midwest. Barbara Smith-Lombardi, who became the committee chairwoman for the Cherry Hill reunion, had not been to any since her 25th, even though they had been celebrated every five years. Someone in the class obtained her e-mail address and got in touch, Ms. Smith-Lombardi said. “It got around to talking about whether we would have a 50th and he said, ‘If you go, I will,’ ” she said. Then another friend encouraged her to organize it. “It’s funny, I was never that person in high school, but once I started looking up people, I couldn’t stop. Maybe it was just completing a cycle I wanted to do.”

    Although there is only anecdotal evidence, Jane Bluestein, author of “High School’s Not Forever” said more people seemed to want to attend reunions after 25 or 50 years, the so-called round numbers, but especially as it gets later in life. “I frankly think there shouldn’t be reunions until, say, the 40th,” said Ms. Bluestein, who graduated from high school in 1969 in York, Pa., has a doctorate in education and now lives in Albuquerque. High school, she said, is a troubling time for many, in its whole or in part, and it may take a while to realize that life after high school is not predicated on the things that matter during those years.

“We are all going through a lot of changes -- physically, hormonally and psychologically. We are trying to have autonomy, but our needs for that are rarely met,” she said of the high school years. “But some time afterwards you know you wouldn’t walk behind someone you work with and make fun of him or criticize the shape of friends’ bodies in front of them. When you are finally over all that, then it’s time to attend a reunion.”

    Bob Marshall, a former Time Inc. lawyer, was chairman of the 1964 reunion at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.. It was a full-weekend affair attended by 103 of the 240 in the graduating class that included George W. Bush. President Bush was not there, but at his father’s 90th birthday party in Kennebunkport, Me., instead. Nonetheless, the turnout was striking, Mr. Marshall said. He attributed the attendance in part to the fact that the school was an all-male boarding school at the time. Unlike those who go to a day school and live at home, he said, he and his friends had closer bonds for having been with each other 24 hours a day. “But the main thing I heard was that this would maybe be the last one someone would come to and the last chance to see those people who created the memories,” said Mr. Marshall. “People aren’t, say, going to come to a 55th and then stop. You have to be realistic. Your lives change now, and you’re not as likely to come from California or Canada for something like this.”

    No one in the Cherry Hill class was as famous as Mr. Bush, but the classmates reveled in the notable alums they had. On the “In Memory” board with 54 other deceased classmates was Andrea Dworkin, the feminist known for her writings against pornography. And Mr. DeAngelis did get to play one season, 1970-71, with the Nets when that team was in the American Basketball Association. “We had a lot of people who have had good lives. It was the baby boom and our parents mostly came out of the city to Cherry Hill to give us the best of things,” Ms. Smith-Lombardi said. “Fifty years later, it looks like that worked.”

    Facebook, email and other forms of social media have enhanced the urge to come to a 50th reunion, said Ms. Bluestein. “I have realized that a lot of the people I have reconnected with through Facebook are interesting people,” said Ms. Bluestein, who is president of the education consulting firm Instructional Support Services Inc. “I think that in the last few years, that has happened to a lot of people, and it enhances the idea of coming to a 50th” -- to see your almost-new friends, or at least the ones you have reconnected with that way.

 

The repeated upcoming reunion information:

The class of '64 reunion:  Friday, October 10, 2014, 6 to 11 PM. $70 per person, cash bar.  Hyatt Regency, Hauppauge, New York.  Committee phone numbers: Tom McPartland 570-223-2577. Ken Silver: 631-463-2217. Bette Silver: 631-463-2216.

The class of '65 50th Reunion:  April 24 through April 26, 2015, Hyatt Regency, Hauppauge.

The South '65 e-mail addresses:  reunionclass65 . blogspot . com  (please remove the spaces)

The South '65 photo site:  picasaweb . google . com/SouthHS65  (ditto)

 

Rich