Small School, Big Reunion Northport Organizer Hopes 1,000 Graduates Will Descend On Town Of 312

Author Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, but Northport High School graduate Dale Broderius knows that’s nonsense.

“I can tell you one thing for sure,” Broderius said. “He never lived in Northport.”

A couple of successful authors did live there, though. Writers Donna (Anderson) Anders and Linda Lael Miller are planning to return to Northport on July 1 for what promises to be the biggest-ever reunion at the little school that doesn’t understand what can’t be done.

Things such as sending seven teams to the world finals of the Odyssey of the Mind academic competition since 1989, even though the school can no longer even afford a band class. Or class of 2000 graduate Vanessa Velez heading off to Yale University this fall.

Retired Army Col. Stanley “Sock” Johnson, class of 1955, will join Anders and Miller in addressing up to 1,000 alumni expected to attend the reunion. Anders, class of ‘54, has written numerous pulp thrillers and is an instructor for the Writer’s Digest School. Miller, class of ‘67, is a prolific writer of bestselling Western romances.

Reunion chairman Broderius, class of ‘55, also has a faulty sense of the impossible. Otherwise, he would never have supposed 1,000 people could pack into a town of 312.

Of course, a sensible person wouldn’t have thought the 500 Mustangs who showed for the last reunion, in 1995, could have been accommodated.

That year, the reunion committee invited some 800 people who graduated in 1972 and earlier. This year, everyone who’s graduated since the initial class of 1908 is invited, although the oldest-known surviving graduate is from the class of 1925. The reunion-goers are being directed to just about every motel from Colville to Rossland, British Columbia.

Broderius looks on the bright side: “Do you realize you could have grown up in Spokane instead of Northport?” he told fellow alumni in a reunion invitation. “This is your chance to say thank you.”

Like many other graduates, Broderius left Northport to find work. There hasn’t been much of that in Northport since the town’s lead smelter was dismantled in 1922. Broderius, who now lives in Airway Heights, thinks Northport graduates developed a can-do attitude to compensate for economic hardship.

So he and other reunion organizers are confident 1,000 people can go home and have a good time re-creating their prom, watching former cheerleaders reprise their moves, competing in golf and softball tournaments, and just reminiscing over old photographs.

To order tickets at $25 a person, write to: Mustang Roundup 2000, P.O. Box 430, Northport, WA 99157. Any profits will benefit the school.

To order souvenir shirts and ball caps, call Jerry Matteson at (509) 732-6151, or write to him at P.O. Box 430, Northport, WA 99157.

For more information, call (509) 732-1000, send e-mail to jbutorac@plix.com or rphillips@plix.com, or point your Internet browser to www.northportschools.org.