High School Reunion Thoughts

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial/ opinion page staff

Published by the StarTribune

November 10, 1968

   A CLASS reunion is both sobering and rewarding--sobering because it is a forceful reminder that though time may be a great healer, it also breeds bald heads, bulges, gray hair and wrinkles. It's rewards are obvious. Old schoolmates are fun to see.

Teton County High School, Choteau MT

   I attended a reunion of my high school class in connection with the dedication of a new building. The happening was at Choteau, Mont., and what this town of 2,000 has acquired as an educational plant exceeds the wildest dreams of those long-gone grads who tend to assume that the old town off in the boondocks will never change.

   MORE THAN HALF of those in my class, which numbered less than 20, returned for the reunion. I wouldn't have recognized more than a couple had we met on the street, and some seemed to have difficulty placing me. I afterward expressed amazement at this and the best I could get from my wife was a satirical "How strange!"

   Everything considered, though, the class was well preserved. Nobody walked with a cane, nobody complained of arthritis, nobody was overly stout, and nobody bored his fellows with pictures of, and monologues about, the grandchildren.

   At the reunion dinner, everyone ate with gusto and the conversation, while not always glittering, was adequate. That old one about the absent-minded sculptor even got a laugh, which indicated a praiseworthy resolve to make the best of things.

   Everyone told what he'd done since graduation. In the group were teachers, secretaries, a social worker, housewives and farmers. Some had traveled abroad, one wintered in Florida, and one, who had made a major hobby of photography, told of hunting caribou and white wolves with a camera in the far-north permafrost country.

   After listening to the many colorful experiences, I was numbed into near silence and, when my turn came, could only mumble abashedly about a trip we'd once made to Cape Cod and about how we'd had a hamburger and hot-dog stand during the depression.

Choteau MT 

   But the town and the high school impressed me even more than the reunion. Before landmarks began falling into place I suspected I was in the wrong town. The old stone grade school had been razed and the vacant lot we once crossed en route to school now was the site of a hospital. To further violate memory, a business section had sprung up south of town, where there had once been little but a shack or two and a flour mill.

   AS I LOOKED at the colorful school auditorium and the big gymnasium, I thought of the town's first high school building, where the little second-floor gym doubled as a study and assembly hall, and where the backboards were bolted to the end walls and where, had it not been for the low ceiling, baskets could have been thrown with little difficulty from the center circle.

   But the great thing about returning to the home town after a lapse of years is not the new buildings but the old friends with whom you can chin about an unhurried yesterday--about the pool hall and livery barn, the Saturday night dance and the fishing--and the days rich in time that made urgency an affectation.

   When the visit ends and you leave the old friends, and the town becomes lost in distance--the town you regarded when a boy as the center of creation --there comes a vague emptiness and you wonder how long it will be before you pass that way again.

GUTHRIE

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