On Memorial Day weekend, I attended my 70th high school reunion. Because of the plague, a year ago I didn’t even dare go to my brother’s funeral, so this was my first inside gathering in over two years.

I remember my first reunion in 1953. You understand that it was not a class reunion but, because the classes were so small, a gathering of everyone who had ever attended St. George High School. My class graduated 18 students, the second largest class to graduate up to that time. The largest was 22.

In 1953 the roll call began with the oldest graduates from the first class, which might have had five members in 1905. Harriett would stand, her ancient 65-year-old joints creaking in her 1940s type of old woman dress, and celebrate the days when they attended classes in Tenants Harbor in “the old sail loft.”

After a seemingly endless amount of reminiscing, the roll call churned up through the teens and the ’20s to 1932, when my mother graduated. She was the resident piano player and, when the time came, she would mount the stage and give us harmonic direction as the older members belted out a song about going to school in Good Old St. George.

All this time I was sitting in my seat, trembling, with sweat running down my back, knowing that when they came to the most recent graduating class, I would have to stand and try to croak something that resembled my name.

Mother was 37 when I graduated from high school. For so it was in those days when some former classmates were grandparents at 32.

This was the case in John Gould’s wonderful novel “Our Croze Nest,” which was set by a cove not four miles from my home.

As I recall, my sister Sonja, class of 1955, was the old maid among her classmates when she dropped out of college after one year and got married at the ripe old age of 19.

Attending the St. George High School plays was a memorable part of my childhood. In 1947 I remember seeing my next-door neighbor, True Hall, play the villain in “Dirty Work at the Crossroads.” And another time, on the same boards, seeing Arnold Hocking perform an operation that entailed pulling out a connected string of hot dogs.

This was high entertainment years before most of us had even heard of a television set.

When my turn came in 1952 and 1953 I was in the class plays. In one I will never forget, my role entailed kissing a very pretty girl until we were interrupted. The fact that she and I had practiced diligently for weeks didn’t make it any easier when we stood before 90 adults in a packed Odd Fellows Hall. Time takes on a new dimension when you are scared to death onstage. And when John, who was supposed to interrupt us, couldn’t make his entrance because there was a chair in the doorway, I finally threw back my head and cried, “Where the hell is he?”

This bothered me for over 50 years until I learned that some of Jack Nicholson’s best lines were those which he improvised.

Times changed, and there came a day when Robert Dennison, who worked for IBM, showed me how to print out the banquet notices and address envelopes with a computer. It was an advanced machine that could print 250 envelopes before needing to be recharged with 250 more stored on a cassette tape. The machine peeped cheerily as the printer rattled them off.

Because I was the only person who would do it, I was elected president of the association and one year was able to prevail upon the great Marty Engstrom to entertain us with a humorous slide-show presentation of his adventures as a weatherman on Mount Washington.

So there are benefits to be enjoyed when one has been entrusted to make executive decisions. I missed a few reunions when my lungs would no longer tolerate the cigarette smoke.

I didn’t care for school, and the most important class I took was typing. Although some St. George boys had gone through Castine and become Navy officers during the war, none of us in my generation even considered college. I was proud of my ignorance and my poverty. It was not until my brother graduated in 1958 that he pointed out to me that we would be insanely rich if we were to work our way through Gorham Normal School and become teachers. He figured that by the time we graduated in 1962, teachers would be making a cool $3,000 a year.

You should ask me if I ever actually got anything out of what you might consider to be worthless high school alumni meetings.

At the 1989 alumni banquet I was speaking from the stage when I focused my eyes on my date, a powerful woman in the back row, and said, “Marsha. Will you marry me?”

The humble Farmer can be heard Friday nights at 7 on WHPW (97.3 FM) and visited at:
www.thehumblefarmer.com/
MainePrivateRadio.html

Copy the Story Link