High School Class Reunion

Sue and I are spending a lot of time preparing for our 45th high school class reunion. Gads, we’ve been out of high school for almost half a century?! Yep, ‘fraid so.

We graduated in the same class from a fairly small school. Our class had 47 members. Four of our classmates are deceased, and we have no address information for a few members. There are three marriages in which both spouses were in our class, including Sue and me; there was a fourth, but they divorced many years ago.

We have attended our 25th, 30th, 35th, and 40th reunions. Over a year ago, we began making plans to attend this year’s reunion. We also volunteered to assemble, print, and distribute an up-to-date class directory, with postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. This is quite a project. We sent out 38 letters, to the last-known addresses that another classmate has kept. He is very active for our class. He still lives in our hometown, arranges our reunions every five years, and sends flowers to funerals of classmates (from the class). He provided us with his address list, and we took it from there.

We have received 18 responses, which we believe is a good percentage for this type of project. I scanned each class member’s senior photo from our yearbook. We will print each person’s senior photo with his/her current address information. I designed a half-sheet layout in Word, with four photos and address blocks on each side of each half-sheet. We will prepare a half-sheet cover sheet. We also scanned the masthead from the last high school paper of our senior year, and added the last cartoon in that paper, which was drawn by a classmate. We will have the booklets printed and bound at Kinko’s, with a clear plastic cover, black vinyl back, and plastic-covered spiral binding, which allows the booklet to be opened up and laid flat, when using it. We will also send out updates and corrections for people to mark up their copies, when necessary.

Sue is really into scrapbooking, and she decided to create a scrapbook of our senior year, to share at the reunion. We have scanned many items, documents, and memorabilia, and Sue has purchased the book and other neat things to include. She has begun working on it, and I’m really eager to see the results.

We will create and print some peel-and-stick labels with each person’s senior photo, to use as name tags (without names, of course). We also will try to emulate a neat item we encountered at Sue’s old church’s 100-year celebration last fall. Someone had printed paper labels with photos and text related to the church’s history. They then wrapped them around foil-wrapped Kit Kat candy bars and made them available as eatable “souvenirs.” I have created the appropriate-sized labels, using six different scanned items related to our class. This will be a lot of work, but should be really neat at the reunion.

I am also considering creating one or two music CD’s, using many of our favorite pieces of music from our high school days, to play at the reunion.

Our entire project will cost quite a bit of money, especially the directory printing and distribution. Two classmates offered to help with the directory expenses, but we declined their offers, choosing instead to make this a gift to the class.

Who knows whether we will be around for the 50th reunion, or how many classmates at this one will not be around in 5 years? We decided to enjoy the 45th as much as possible. If we are still able to attend the 50th, we’ll probably try to top what we are doing this year. Another project to look forward to…