Ten years ago, on the day following the fiftieth reunion of my high school graduating class, I posted “Fifty Years After“. It ended with a reference to the far-in-the-future sixtieth reunion and the line, “If I can, I will”. I did. So did another seven members of the Ansonia High School class of 1965.

Not surprisingly, that was considerably less than the nineteen who attended the all-alumni banquet in 2015 or the twenty-six who attended the our-class-only gathering the night before. There is a banquet every year that is open to all graduates with emphasis on the “5s”. I have gone to most, if not all, of those, but there wasn’t one for our fifty-fifth. That was the year of the COVID pandemic. The lack of a get-together at the five-and-a-half-decade mark was somewhat disappointing, but it is the class of 2020 that really deserves our sympathy. I thought there might be something a little special for them on their fifth, but there was not. Actually, there was not a single member of the class of 2020 in attendance. It’s hard not to try reading something into that, but it’s just as hard, as an outsider, to know what that something should be.

Ten years ago, I wrote that “We graduated smack dab in the middle of a decade that was about as turbulent and confusing, yet as filled with promise and potential, as any could be.” It feels like we just might be smack dab in the middle of another one. Of course, the decade we were born in held the horrors of World War II and was clearly even more turbulent, but that decade is outside of our personal memories. It is the 1960s and 2020s that more or less bracket our lives as adults.

By coincidence, a blog I follow published a piece a few days ago that makes some comparisons between today and the world of sixty years ago. It is here, and I encourage reading it in its entirety. Among the events of sixty years ago it mentions is the Social Security Act of 1965. That’s the act that established Medicare and Medicaid. Both are facing cuts today. Our generation also benefited from things like the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Water Quality Act of 1965, and others.

What I have just written makes me aware that my and my classmates’ adulthood more or less aligns with the rise and potential fall of numerous efforts to make life better for the general population. That, in turn, made me think of the cringeworthy idea that “We got ours. Sorry about your bad timing, kids.” Oh, how I hope that’s not true.

Classes celebrating one of the 5s are provided with a room to gather in before meal time. Our room wasn’t overflowing, but everyone there had a good time studying old photos and sharing the memories those photos, and just being together, stirred up.

Of course, classes are seated together at the banquet. Yeah, we took up a lot less room than we did in 2015. I didn’t try very hard to get a picture of the group as a professional took a posed group shot of us, and I’ll share that here as soon as it is available. Most of our class is in the foreground of the second picture, but that’s not the target. The target is every past cheerleader in attendance, lined up to lead us in a spirited singing of the old fight song.

As usual, the banquet was followed by a dance. I always skip the dancing part, but this year I even skipped the going part. In the past, the dance was held at Eldora Ballroom on the Eldora Speedway property. The Ballroom was a weekend hotspot back in the day, and going there on alumni weekend always provided a little glimpse of the past. This year, it was at the American Legion, which would not have fed my nostalgia. It is at the same location I remember, but the building is a newer one. I’ve said I would have gone if it had been at Eldora, but maybe not. Starting the drive home before midnight seems a sensible thing to do these days.

The best information available indicates that we have lost a total of sixteen members of our class of sixty-five. That means that just about three-quarters of us are still around. In that 2015 post, I mentioned that the men who were living had already exceeded their at-birth life expectancy, and that the women were getting close. We are all in overtime now. A study I found online says that anyone turning 78 in 2025 can expect to live another 11.09 years. That would cover a 70th reunion. If I can, I will.

In the first month of 1965, Time Magazine published an article that featured members of the senior class at a California high school. Ten years later, two members of that class interviewed thirty classmates for a book, published in September 1976, that inspired a TV series whose fourteen fictional episodes started airing barely a year later. The book and series were both titled What Really Happened to the Class of ’65. The image at right is from the book cover.

I was a high school senior in 1965 and I know that I and my classmates had a lot in common with the students in that Time article. There is no doubt that many of the things affecting those California teens also affected teens in every high school in every state. On the other hand, there were a whole lot of differences, too. For one thing, most of America’s high schools are not located in areas where sun and sand are so wonderfully abundant. Neither can the students of most schools be called affluent, a word that was used with justification for those California seniors. The world of 1965 impacted every senior class in America, but the senior class that Time talked of in their “Today’s Teen-Agers” article might not have been all that typical.

I can’t really make a case for my class being any more typical. I don’t believe anyone ever used the word affluent to describe my school, but neither were we impoverished. Whether or not statistics support it, we thought of our parents — farmers, factory workers, and a few professionals and business owners — as middle class, and we lived, more or less, in the middle part of the country. Our school was not equidistant from the coasts, but it was sure a long way from either and, except for some images conjured up by Beach Boy tunes playing on the local AM stations, not much influenced by them. Unlike that California class featured in Time,  there weren’t 506 of us. There is no reason to think that the size of our class was unique, and if you get really picky about precisely when diplomas were issued or other details, it can even be varied slightly. But three score and five seems right, and it’s the way we’ve always thought of ourselves. We were the Ansonia High School Class of 65 of ’65.

We graduated smack dab in the middle of a decade that was about as turbulent and confusing, yet as filled with promise and potential, as any could be. The nation’s president had been assassinated during our junior year. The Times issue that carried “Today’s Teen-Agers” also had an article on LBJ’s inauguration after winning the November election and one about a Dr. Martin Luther King visit to Selma, Alabama. 1965 was the mid-point of the Vietnam War (November 1, 1955 to April 30, 1975) and the first year that regular US combat troops, and not just “advisers”, were used there. By decade’s end, violence would end the lives of Dr. King, another Kennedy, and some 50,000 US soldiers. But the last half of the 1960s also brought us electronic calculators, the first artificial human heart, the beginning (as ARPAnet) of the Internet, and men on the moon.

We came together this week, some of us, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of our graduation. The school is still small, and each year the Alumni Association organizes a gathering for all of its graduates. That was held Saturday as usual. Not usual was a Friday evening gathering organized by some classmates who put in a lot of effort to make this year special. Twenty-six class members and our class sponsors met for dinner at one of the area’s nicer restaurants and had a great time sharing stories and trying to identify each other. The fun and reminiscing and even the eating continued at the nearby home of a classmate (Sharon Bickel) whose gracious invitation for desert was accepted by just about everyone.

Nineteen of us also made it to the annual banquet on Saturday. All alumni and the current year’s graduates are invited with the “5s” (5th, 10th, 15th, etc.) getting some extra recognition that includes having a room set aside for their use. The jokes and chatter pretty much picked up from where they had ended on Friday.

The special treatment continued at the actual banquet and even included being first at the buffet line. I’m guessing that the fifty-year class is given this particular honor because this seems to be the point at which attendance peaks. That seems to likely be true of us. There were fourteen of us in 2005 and a half dozen in 2010. The fellow in the dark coat at the right of the first picture is Tom Brewer, one of the classmates who, as I mentioned earlier, put in a lot of effort to make this year special. Others were Ed Ault, Carolyn Baker, Tim Barga, Bob Birt, Rick Jones, June Snyder, and Charlene Steed. Rick not only helped with organizing things, he represented our class with one of the most entertaining “speeches” ever delivered at an alumni gathering. I put “speeches” in parentheses because, while there were many useful observations and insights, the humorous content and great delivery made it seem almost a performance.

The final event of the alumni gathering was a dance at Eldora Ballroom, where the class of 1965 was once again at the head of the line. Many of our 1960s Fridays and Saturdays were spent at this big hall, which is part of Eldora Speedway, listening to The Jokers or EG and the Bumblebees.

So what did we do during our five decades as adults? In other words, what really happened to the class of 65 of ’65? We got married and had kids. We got divorced and remarried. We served in the military and went to places not the least bit like Darke County, Ohio. We went to college, and some (unlike me) even graduated. None of us became doctors or lawyers or Indian chiefs, but we did become accountants and engineers and business owners. Some of us found success and happiness in fields such as teaching, healthcare, and law enforcement that make communities worth living in and, yes, a lot of us stayed in or returned to the communities we grew up in for that very reason; They are still worth living in.

Spending time looking back on those good ol’ school days with those who made them good was great fun. Not everyone had the option. As might be expected, contact information could not be found for a few (only 3), so they didn’t get an invitation to respond to. Also to be expected, but saddening nonetheless, is the fact that nine of our classmates are no longer living. One, whom I’ve written about before, most recently here, died in Vietnam less than two years after graduating. The others died of various causes over the other forty-eight years.

Twenty-six and nineteen are respectable numbers. There’s a good chance that Friday’s gathering was the class’s biggest since graduation. There is also a good chance that it will never be equaled, but it might. When we were born, life expectancy was not quite 70 for females and five years less than that for males. Us guys have already beaten the odds; The gals are close. Now that we’ve made it this far, they tell us we’ll average another 15 or 20 years, so there should be plenty of us (or them) around to celebrate the 60th anniversary. If I can, I will.

Addendum 26-May-2015: It is usually only a fraction of the photos I take that make it into a blog or trip journal post and the public is spared (most of) the really crappy ones. I have been asked about other pictures and decided to just post all of the photos from the weekend in my seldom-used Flickr account. They are here, re-sized but otherwise unedited.