Class Reunion A Bittersweet Encounter With Past

Last month I went to the 36th reunion of the West Valley High School class of 1960. I had skipped all but the 20th, but this time they combined 1960, ‘61 and ‘62 so one of my best friends and I decided to go together.

The reunion was at Riblet’s Mansion, which is now the Arbor Crest winery and a wonderful place to review old memories. Elizabeth and I started down memory lane first thing in the morning. We had the advantage of her daughter Katherine, a Spokane engineer, as a chauffeur. First stop was breakfast with two other friends, laughing about how we perceived each other then. Marilyn had been the majorette and now is a youth counselor. Julie had been the one with the wonderful smile, always optimistic and ready for fun. I learned at breakfast that we shared a family history of alcoholism. She had seen me as confident; I had seen her as happy. I now think we both were just sleepwalking, bent on survival.

Elizabeth and I continued on to our old neighborhood. Her house in Millwood was still the same - wellcared for with an equally well-tended garden. Even the neighborhood was almost like the one she walked through on her way home from school.

The house our classmate Susan had lived in was still the biggest. It had looked like a castle to us in the 1950s. Millwood had changed, not the buildings. But the Sugar Bowl, Little’s Dime Store and Sonny’s grocery were gone. The old high school had been torn down and replaced by an Albertsons.

It seemed like only 10 years had passed, not 36, as we headed up Empire past the paper mill to the small house my family lived in, just past the Trent Drive-In theater. The theater we used to sneak in on summer nights was gone, but the cement plant was still there. My mother’s garden was gone and so was the barn. A house had been built on the empty lot next door where I kept my horse. The hardest thing was that all but one of the trees were gone. Those trees had been friends.

We used to swim in the Spokane River behind the cement plant and then go up to the stone garage that held Riblet’s cable car. We would stand on the bottom cable, arms stretched to hold on to the top one and walk out over the river. If you had the nerve to bounce, the wave you started would keep going, hit the rock and come back to you.

We walked through the fields near the river, remembering the bachelor buttons and buttercups we once picked, thinking of the classmates we might meet. We decided to head out Trent to where St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church once stood. Even though I was Episcopalian, I had gone to vacation Bible school there. Elizabeth’s grandfather was buried in the cemetery. We walked among the graves and read the names we had grown up with: Aherns, Blessing, Blaylock, Dillon, Holmes, Moore. We found some of our classmates who had died in car accidents, drowning, the Vietnam War.

As teenagers, we were wild sometimes, too, adventurous but lucky. I had my first beer graduation night and we got stopped by the police. The officer drove me home and dropped me off, and I never told anyone.

We talked about good times at Newman Lake and Liberty Lake, Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox on the way to Coeur d’Alene. We remembered school outings to Castle Rock and so much more before heading to the reunion barbecue.

Riblet’s had so much meaning for me. We lived just across the river and I always wondered who Mr. Riblet was and what was up there.

We passed the Hutton Settlement on our way to the reunion and, oddly, it brought back the most poignant memories of one of my best friends, Jim Thurber, class of 1959, whom I have not seen since high school. When I remember the hard times, he comes to mind as an intelligent, caring, unique person whom I would love to talk to again. He and his brother lived in one of the cottages at Hutton, but we never met there and I never asked him why he was there. Friends didn’t ask questions like that then. Any of us with troubles just didn’t invite friends to our homes.

Winding up to Riblet’s was exciting. The house and grounds were so interesting, just the kind of rock walls and projects - a chess set, dance floor, pond, terrace - that would have intrigued me as a kid. Mr. Riblet and I might have had something in common. I looked down at my house, for the first time, from across the river.

The reunion was fun. One of my high school friends, Judi, came to her first reunion and she looked so familiar I wondered how we had let 36 years pass. Why had neither of us made the call.

I was a little scared that night, half the old kid and half the new adult. Corky Smith rescued me. He had always been one of the funniest, and he still was. We walked around together, checking in with every one of the class of 1960. There were new beards, mustaches and spouses. All were open to the old friendships and memories that had gotten us through. One small group of us (we missed Larry, Ardis, Joan and Leslie) had gone through 12 years of school together. Joe was still a heartthrob. Chuck was still a charmer. Maybe next time we’ll all be there.

Reunions are bittersweet; they make you ask too many questions. You remember the bad as easily as the good. But I’ll go to the next one. Every single person was open; I had the feeling that with this grown-up group we could all fit in. I can still feel the loving spirits of those I shared so much childhood time with.

I brought back to Seattle a nice chunk of my past.

xxxx

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jennifer James The Spokesman-Review