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Class Reunion Stories - Lost Loves Reunited
Class reunions can be nerve-racking but usually end up exhilarating – renewing friendships, sharing memories
of the the days when we were "young and innocent." Share
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Reunions can be unsettling, compelling
Regrets and high school reunions certainly can go hand in hand, and they do so poignantly in Craig Wright's offbeat 2000 romance, "The Pavilion." The story is set at a 20-year high school reunion in Minnesota in a lakeside pavilion, one full of memories, that is about to be burned down (a metaphor that soon became obvious). Peter and Kari, high school sweethearts, haven't seen each other in 20 years, and their parting was anything but amicable. After learning Kari was pregnant with his child, Peter dumped her and went off to college. Kari had no idea Peter would be at the reunion, but he came looking for her. Peter's personal life has been a continuous disaster and he thinks Kari can change that. But Kari is married — unhappily. She is also very angry about what Peter did to her. The myriad other characters, all played by one actor, are caricatures surrounding the story. The same actor is the narrator, who fills in details and places an unnecessary philosophy around it.
From a review by Jim Lowe in the Barre Montpelier Times Argus, Vermont.
Sweethearts reunite
Internet helps connect couple who had split up in the ninth grade
Bootsie Hall broke up with Beverly in the late 1950s when they were ninth-graders at Rocky Mount (North Carolina) Senior High School.
Then for 47 years there was no contact but their lives followed remarkably similar paths. They connected at their 45th class reunion.
“He was my first love.”
“Your first kiss,” Beverly added. “And I'll be your last one, too.”
Each married other people. Both marriages ended in divorce after more than a decade. Both remarried but later lost their spouses to cancer.
“If I hadn't met Bootsie, I would never have gotten involved with anybody else,” Beverly said. “I didn't figure that would ever happen again.” Bootsie settled in Morehead City, North Carolina; and Beverly lived over 260 miles down the Atlantic coast in Charleston, South Carolina.
A former classmate started a blog to plan their 45th high school reunion and somebody wrote that Beverly should bring his trumpet and play “Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White)” — the song he and his five-piece combo used to play at high school dances and events around town.
He responded that he didn't play anymore. Bootsie wrote back and told him she was sorry to hear that.
After months of talking, they met when Bootsie stepped out of her car, Beverly said, “I had to hold onto the car because my knees got weak.
“We were right back in ninth grade,” Bootsie said.
They’ve married and enjoy listening to a recording from their wedding of “Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White)” as the lyrics echo throughout their new home:
“The story goes that once a cherry tree
Beside an apple tree did grow
And there a boy once met his bride to be
Long, long ago.”
From a story on MSNBC.
High school sweethearts to marry 55 years later
Bobby Sherman and Mary Ann Woodruff Todd met at Fort Myers (Florida) High School and went steady for two and a half years when Bobby left for the Marines. When he came home on leave he gave Mary Ann an engagement ring but when her parents found out they made her give it back. They wanted her to go to college.
45 years went by.
When they saw each other at a class reunion, both were married. But when they saw each other six years later Bobby was getting divorced and Mary Ann's husband was in hospice care. Bobby asked a classmate to call him when the time was right.
Bobby waited a few months, then called Mary Ann. “The minute he came through the door we hugged each other and it was like we'd never been apart,” she said.
“I told her I was going to marry her,” Bobby said. And he's made good on his promise.
From a story by Francesca Donlan in the News-Press, Fort Myers, Florida.
Couple meets again at 40th school reunion and marries a year later
John Rafter and Elaine Leviness graduated from Wicomico Senior High School in 1965. The 414 members of the class scattered -- to college, trade schools and jobs. Elaine left for art school in Baltimore, John to college in North Carolina.
“I made it to most of my class reunions,” said John. “I was always curious to see what people were doing.”
“I didn't go to any,” said Elaine. “I think it took me 40 years to get over high school.”
She graduated from college, married “just long enough” to have two children; earned a master's degree, worked in education and raised her boys.
John was called to Vietnam, trained as a medic, later got a degree and traveled Europe, the Middle East, Afghanistan and India.
“Reunions are a strange thing,” he says. “Sometimes you have nothing in common with your best friends from high school, and the people you barely knew; now you have all kinds of things in common.”
In 2005, the class of '65 planned to celebrate 40 years. John was on the reunion committee; Elaine made the trip.
He called in October, on his way to a scuba trip in the Keys; they had dinner. He called on the way home. Then they traveled between Maryland and Florida.
“We were trying to figure out how to spend more time together. John said 'well, one way we could see each other more is if we get married.' It was the worst proposal in the world.”
They marvel at their parallel lives: they've lived in the same Baltimore neighborhood, visited the same vacation spots. John's best friends now live in the house where Elaine's mother grew up. “Maybe the time was finally right – our parallel lives finally crossed,” said Elaine.
From a story by Jackie Jennings in the Delmarva Daily Times, Salisbury,Maryland.
High school sweethearts again
Mike Cravens, his mother and sister moved to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the summer of 1965 while Mike's father was overseas in the military. Linda Decker was the girl next door. “She showed up on my doorstep with one of her girlfriends that summer and welcomed me to Cape Girardeau,” Mike said.
They attended Central High School and by their junior year, started dating and became serious. When they graduated in 1967, both attended Southeast Missouri State University but found dating too hard in college. They ended their relationship during their freshman year and didn’t see or speak to one another for 36 years.
Linda completed college, married, had three children and after 30 years of marriage and a wonderful life was widowed.
Mike was drafted, spent two years overseas, after college, married and became an Air Force pilot, lived all over the world before settling in Alaska and working as a pilot for the Alaska State Troopers. Mike always thought about Linda.
In September 2003, Mike returned to Cape Girardeau to visit his mother, who was ill. He visited Linda's mother a retirement community and gave her a letter to pass on to Linda.
Linda had been widowed for five years and was lonesome. They emailed for four months, spoke on the phone, exchanged pictures and finally met in St. Louis.
On the plane, Linda told perfect strangers what she was doing and asked if she should really be doing this. “I hadn't seen this man in 36 years -- it was crazy,” Linda said.
The people she shared her story with encouraged her and even offered phone numbers so she could update them after the reunion.
Mike was waiting with a handmade sign that read “Mike looking for Linda.” Once he saw her he pulled out another sign that read “Found her -- again.”
They continued to visit but at each visit they found saying goodbye more difficult. Mike lived in Alaska, Linda in Florida.
Mike made the 7,000-mile move to Orlando and they married on the same date Mike had asked Linda to go steady 40 years earlier.
From a story by Jennifer Freeze in the Southeast Missourian, Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Older couples find romance worth waiting for
Mary, 64, and Stephen Bullock, 66, graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a year apart, married different people, moved to different states and saw each other at the occasional class reunion.
Fast forward 40 years. Divorced from his second wife, Stephen moved back to Rocky Mount and soon began dating Mary and a year later, they married.
Finding love later in life is becoming increasingly common as more of today's midlife and older people show a tendency to date and marry, said Linda Fisher, research director with AARP in Washington, DC.
“I think you see a very different mindset when you are looking at people who are in midlife and older. It's a stage when you've been through a lot of things, and you've developed a lot of confidence in your own judgment that you may not have had when you were younger,” Fisher said.
Having been married previously, the Bullocks made sure everything with their past was finished before they started their future. Older couples are usually past the pressures younger couples face when trying to figure themselves out as well as their mates, Fisher said. “They've had enough experience to feel a little bit more confident in who they are and probably not to feel they have to remake themselves to satisfy someone else.”
From a story by Laura McFarland in the Rocky Mount Telegram, Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
Reunions helped bring Brentwood couple together
Jeanne and Otto Hess met in sixth grade at PS 89 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York. We were part of a group of friends who hung out together, always having fun going roller skating, sleigh riding or dancing.
Otto married Jeanne's best friend and Jeanne married a man Otto played baseball with. Their 1945 graduating class always kept in touch. At their 30th reunion both were married to others. At the 50th class reunion both were divorced.
Not long after the reunion, they started hanging out again as they did in school. Jeanne suggested they take dance lessons at Brentwood High School. When dance lessons ended, Otto asked Jeanne to join an art class with him.
When they took a vacation together to Virginia they liked the area so much they bought a house in Richmond and the following year were married. But they moved back to Long Island because they missed their families.
From a story in Newsday, Long Island, New York.
89-year-olds wed after sparks fly at school reunion
Roberta Mahan and August Offer met at Brackenridge High School's 70-year reunion.
In a world obsessed with young love, or love among the rich and famous, this is an everyday story of exceptional love, found not in life's prime but toward the end of two lives fully lived. Both are 89 years old.
“You are a testimony of hope for all of us,” Rev. Buckner Fanning told the couple in front of about 200 friends and family members.
Like typical newlyweds, they like to marvel at the forces that united them. Mahan lived alone for 25 years since her husband died. After retiring as a journalism teacher at Sam Houston High School, she stayed socially connected. She kept up with old students, joined a dinner club and worked out with a group of women three times a week. She dated frequently, but never seriously.
Offer, retired from Missouri Pacific Railroad and lost his wife in 2004 but kept up less with high school pals than his group of World War II veteran friends. He decided — at the last minute — to attend that fateful reunion lunch. The group of original graduates had thinned over the years so the gatherings were open to family members and usually drew big turnouts. By the time he called, reservations were closed.
“They almost didn't let me in,” Offer says. “It was divine intervention.”
Sitting one chair away from him, Mahan didn't pay much attention to Offer until she heard him mention that he hated eating meals alone. She picked up on it and invited him to her dinner group. He suggested they should get together to reminisce about old times. She invited him to her house that afternoon.
The couple seems giddy. Every morning, they coordinate their outfits to match. Offer makes coffee, while she reads the newspaper to him. Driving in the car, they always hold hands. They linger over breakfasts at a neighborhood diner, just the two of them talking, sometimes stopping only when they notice the lunch crowd has arrived. And in one of the greatest benchmarks of his affection, Offer has even begun watching Mahan's soap opera.
They attribute their longevity to staying active.
From a story by Karisa King in the San Antonio Express, San Antonio, Texas.
Love Anytime
Carol Olson, senior columnist for the Contra Costa (Walnut Creek, California) Times recounts this story about a friend.
When my friend Ginny lost her husband, she felt her life was over. She was alone, scared and filled with sadness. Her beloved little dog was her only companion when she was home, and when he passed on, she thought love never again would comfort her. But she found a new puppy to help fill her lonely hours.
Then, she went to her 50th high school reunion in Ohio. There she found a former classmate, Bob, who had carried a torch for her. Since that meeting, she and Bob have found love together, and during their last visit he asked her to marry him.
Both of their families are thrilled for the couple, who look and act like teenagers in love. I couldn't wipe the smile off Ginny's face if I wanted to. The sparkle in her eyes is bright enough to light any room. The joy emanating from them is overwhelming, and you feel younger being touched by its glow.
Wedding bells ring out at reunion
After his graduation from Kelso High School in 1965, Doug Clark went 35 years without seeing his high school sweetheart, Lizabeth “Betsy” Argle—until their high school reunion five years ago. From time to time they asked mutual friends how the other was doing. They each showed up alone to the reunion and the rest is history!
Before the 40th reunion, classmates watched as Argle walked down the aisle and married her high school boyfriend. The two decided to tie the knot at their class reunion because “It was a reunion that brought us together and it seemed appropriate that a reunion marry us,” Clark said.
The couple received help preparing for the wedding from high school pals. The minister is a classmate, the flowers were arranged by a classmate, the cake was made by a classmate—another Class of ’65 project.
From a story by Marissa Harshman Longview Daily News, Longview, Washington.
Valentine's Day every day for long-lost sweethearts
Sandy Millin was determined there would be no more men.
Her two divorces weren't the only things getting her down. Two years earlier, her hernia surgery went terribly awry and she woke up from a three-month coma to realize she would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She was resigned to being alone.
Then one morning, her phone rang. It was a paralegal from her lawyer's office. An old boyfriend had tracked her down and wanted to reconnect.
She scribbled down his phone number. Memories of Chuck Marshall were good. Definitely good, she said.
So Millin took a deep breath and dialed.
They'd met in 1962 at a party in San Antonio. Sandy was in high school, living with her mother and sisters while her dad was serving in Korea.
Chuck was also in the military and lived nearby Lackland Air Force base.
During the party, he spotted a cute girl. Amid the blaring '60s music, Chuck asked Sandy to dance.
“We hit it off,” said Sandy. He was attracted to her ability to draw, paint and sculpt. She treasured his good looks and their endless conversations.
For two years, Chuck and Sandy were inseparable. Chuck brought Sandy to his first high school reunion.
But a year later, Sandy's father got transferred to an Air Force base in Charleston, South Carolina. Chuck visited in 1964, but then left the service and moved to Houston. “We kind of lost contact,” he said. He became a commercial photographer and married, coincidentally, to a woman named Sandra.
Meanwhile, Sandy married a military man in Monk's Corner, South Carolina. “A marriage to get away from my parents,” she said. “That wasn't love.”
Chuck's 38-year marriage was a little better, but in the last few years, things got dull, he said.
In 2004, Chuck went to another high school reunion in Pittsburgh. He had a great time catching up with old friends. But the one person he hadn't heard from was Sandy. “I had no idea what I was going to do; I just wanted to talk to her . . . so I hit the Internet.”
After a few tries on free and paid search sites, Chuck wasn't much closer to finding her. He started searching county records. That's when he discovered Sandy embroiled in lawsuits stemming from her surgery. He called her lawyer's office and talked to the paralegal. A half-hour later -- two months after he'd started searching -- the phone rang and it was Sandy.
They talked for over an hour, catching up on the past 41 years.
“It was almost like we hadn't been apart,” he added. “It was amazing.”
“It was like being awakened from a long, horrible dream, and finding there is something good out there,” she said.
“For the longest time after I got divorced, I was in the mindset that I wasn't going to get married again. I just didn't know what love was,” she said. “Then, low and behold, he drops in.”
From a story by Janette Neuwahl in the Daytona Beach News-Journal, Daytona, Florida.
Old flames
Lisa went to her 20-year class reunion and she and her husband bumped into his high-school sweetheart. “I was fine,” Lisa said, “But it was awkward for his old girlfriend.”
Run-ins with former flames can ignite jealousy and arguments over a number of emotionally charged issues.
Keep your cool. If you run into an ex, introduce your spouse or partner immediately.
If you are the new spouse or partner, smile and be polite.
If you are shy or suspicious, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. It's probably better to not ask any questions.
And if your spouse or partner is looking a little too long, pull him or her aside and confide your feelings privately.
They might not even realize they're making you uncomfortable.
From an article by Lisa Nicita in The Arizona Republic, Phoenix, Arizona.
Reunion weekend brings back college romances
Regina Kraus hadn't been back to the Seton Hill campus since she graduated in 1969, even though her husband, Bill, has visited his alma mater, St. Vincent College. So she was looking forward to a return trip to a joint campus reunion to the places where their fledgling romance blossomed some 40 years earlier.
“I just thought this was a great way for us to go together,” said Regina Kraus, of Mill Hall, Clinton County.
And they're not the only ones.
More than 600 marriages between students at St. Vincent, in Unity, and Seton Hill, in Greensburg, have occurred over the years.
So the campuses hosted the “Union Reunion”, bringing back dozens of the couples who met each other through interactions between the two colleges before they went co-ed and before Seton Hill became a university.
“During that period of time when the social relationship was strong, many, many marriages (took place),” said Jim Bendel, alumni director at St. Vincent. “Why not celebrate that relationship?”
So he and Ellen Greiner, alumni director at Seton Hill, assembled a committee to plan the events.
Laurene and Zoltan Kristof, of Unity, headed the planning group. Laurene, a 1964 Seton Hill graduate, met Zoltan, a 1963 St. Vincent alum, during a co-ed summer philosophy class at Seton Hill. To the Kristofs, the number of marriages between students from the two campuses isn't surprising. “What you have to understand is Seton Hill was women and St. Vincent was men and we were the only act in town,” Laurene Kristof said.
The schools held mixers. Seton Hill women cheered for St. Vincent teams. They appeared in theatrical productions at each other's campuses. They even shared a few classes.
Couples from the 1950s to the 1980s came from as far as New Hampshire, New Mexico and California.
Reunion attendees gathered for a welcome-back party Friday. Part of Saturday was spent at Seton Hill for a prayer service, brunch and tours before heading to St. Vincent for Mass and dinner.
From a story by Jennifer Reeger in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
High school sweethearts tie the knot —- just 47 years after proposal
At Northside High School in Atlanta, a track star named Gerry Purdy and a horse-loving senior named Alicia Grant were preparing to graduate. They had been going steady for two years and were certain they would marry and spend the rest of their lives together. But like so many young couples, they had different ideas about when that would happen.
On graduation night, they went to a party where Gerry had a wild idea: Why didn’t they run away that night and elope? Alicia said she wasn’t ready; she wanted to go to college first.
That fall, Gerry went to Clemson on a track scholarship while Alicia studied journalism at the University of Georgia. They tried to stay in touch, but it was hard in those days before cell phones and text messaging.
Their last date was a dance featuring the Platters, a doo-wop group known for songs such as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. They knew they were growing apart.
They would not see each other again for 45 years.
A few years after they parted, Gerry moved to California, earned a doctorate in computer science at Stanford and became a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and technology analyst. Alicia stayed in Georgia and went to work for Delta and then the mobile home division of the Bendix Corp.
By the summer of 2006, both in their 60s had been married twice, with eight grown children between them. Their second marriages had lasted more than 30 years but seemed to be unraveling amid talk of divorce.
That’s when the e-mail arrived: The Class of ‘61 was holding its 45th reunion.
Thanks to the Internet, there’s no shortage of ways to track down people from the past these days. ZabaSearch, Classmates.com and other Web sites make it easier to find old friends and lost loves. One of the sites —- Maidenname.net —- plays to the longing and wondering many of its visitors feel with a come-on line that asks, “Where is she now?”
When Gerry received the reunion e-mail, he had been reading a novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” about a couple whose life is complicated by a strange condition called Chrono-Displacement Disorder. At a moment’s notice, the husband would zoom through time and leave his wife behind, perplexed.
It wasn’t that hard. All he had to do was go to the Yahoo user group for the reunion, and there she was: Alicia Grant Mitchell.
Gerry sat down to write her an e-mail. It should have been simple for a man who has published several books about computing (and is working on one about their love affair): Hello, remember me? Are you going to the reunion?
Instead, he labored over the note for hours.
“Here I was, a venture capitalist who had traveled around the world,” he said, “and something like this reduces you to an elemental level. All you care about is getting attention from an attractive woman.”
He pressed “send.” She responded.
After a few days of e-mails, Gerry was ready to make the next move: a phone call. He wrote everything he wanted to say on a 3-by-5 card, as if he were making notes for one of his technology talks. He wanted to stay on message.
Alicia was in a parking lot when her phone rang.
“This is Gerry.”
“Gerry who?” she answered. “I don’t know any Gerrys.”
He realized the problem immediately. In high school, he had pronounced his name Gary. Years later, he acquiesced to the way most people said it —- Jerry.
When he explained that he pronounced his name differently now, she thought to herself, “He’s gone weird.”
They recovered from that shaky beginning and soon were racking up 3,000 minutes a month on their cell phones. They fell into a happy time warp, reminiscing about their old days together when he was a wiry boy with a flat-top and she was a petite girl with a pageboy.
They talked about her horse shows. His track meets, where he set a state record in the javelin throw. Their dates at the Southeastern Fair, the 7 Steers restaurant, the Piedmont Drive-in —- all gone, like so much of the Atlanta they had known.
They laughed about the time Gerry went to North Carolina with Alicia’s family, and the motel manager knocked on her door with a warning: “I just wanted to alert you that a man is running around the parking lot in his underwear.”
“I think that’s my daughter’s boyfriend,” Alicia’s mother replied. Running shorts were a bit shorter in the early ’60s.
Barely a month after the first e-mails, Gerry finally came out and said what they both were thinking as he waited for a flight in the Las Vegas airport.
“You know what’s happening here, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re falling back in love.”
They arranged to meet over Labor Day weekend in Florida.
Later that month, at the class reunion in Atlanta, everyone could tell they were an item.
Gerry and Alicia decided to live together. That autumn, just three months after their first contact, he left California and moved in with her in Atlanta.
As Gerry slipped a golden band on Alicia’s finger, he almost burst into tears thinking about how long it had taken.
His bride was wearing the charm bracelet he had given her 47 years before, when their hearts were young and their future seemed so obvious.
From a story by Jim Auchmutey in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta, Georgia.
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