There were some 50 to 60 attendees at the casual "mixer" meeting on Friday evening. Some people had travelled from as far away as New Hampshire, Michigan and Colorado. 1955 class members, according to notes on display, are now scattered through most of the 50 states, with Arizona and Florida vying with the home state, Kansas, in the double figure league.
A sad, but inevitable, inclusion was a lovingly prepared display, made up of photographs from the school yearbooks, of all those class members who are known to have died since 1955. The proportion is thought to be: around 178 still on planet Earth, from a total of 250 students in the 1955 graduation class. Not bad! It was sad to note, among the memorialised, a youthful photograph of my husband's best friend from school days and beyond, his nickname, "Z". We had attended his funeral in Wichita a few years ago.
On the lighter side, there was a fun display of some pages from the school's yearbook listing graduating students' "Pet Peeves and Future Plans". Husband's contribution went like this:
There he is (in the bottom photograph) with two re-united classmates. The lady on the left very kindly extracted three items from her scrapbook and put them in his keeping: two poems he had written, and an article, with his photograph (below), mentioning some of his doings.
