57th?

There must have been some mistake. Earlier this week I got a note in the mail inviting me to my high school class reunion. The number they used was "57th".

That couldn't be right. There must be some mistake. 57? Good grief! That's how many varieties of food Mr. Heinz says he makes, or the street Bruce Springsteen sings about. But number of years since I graduated from South Charleston High School? 57? Get serious. So I did the math: 2007 take away 1950 equals...yep, 57. It's still hard to believe.

South Charleston High School, home of the world famous Black Eagles, is the only high school in a West Virginia river town which was, to me those 57 years ago, a great place to be a teenager. Never mind the chemical plant smells and the surrounding poverty; they were just accepted as part of life. And the biggest part of that life, for me, centered around dear old SCHS, pictured above. (This is a recent picture of the building, now a Middle School, and you had better believe that back then we didn't have air conditioners sticking out the windows. In winter we walked ten miles through the snow, too. With shoes, though.)

The reunion invitation also served as an invitation to pull out the dusty 1950 Class Yearbook, and sure enough, there on page 14, pictured between Pat Reel and Mae Owens (apparently we didn't put much stock in alphabetizing), was photographic proof:

Slowly a few of the other names and faces began to come back to me, drifting out of the 57 year old mist. My neighbor and friend George Telford, who raised rabbits and helped (occasionally) with my paper route. Bob Turley, another close friend who taught me to master the flippers on pinball machines. Patsy Hughes, who always seemed to be everywhere and always seemed to be smiling. Ginger Schramm, the clown that every class seems to have. Another neighbor, Betty Richards, who was, I think, my first "girlfriend". And who can forget the otherwise anonymous "Cheese", so named because of his ever-present halitosis.

The yearbook helped recall the teachers, too. One I remember still was our music teacher, Miss Lucy Jackson, who inspired us not only to sing but to enjoy singing. Then there was Mr. Beverly, the patient gym teacher who tried in vain to teach me to somersault. And our adviser for the school newspaper, Mr. Keys, who first instilled in me a life-long love of words. And don't, for heaven's sake, forget Miss Clara Smith, who must have taught Moses when he was a boy, and who had us memorizing poetry before we understood what it meant:

"To every man there openeth
A way and ways and a way;
And the high soul treads the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low;
And in between on the misty flats
The rest drift to and fro;
But to every man there openeth
A high way and a low,
And every man decideth
The way his soul shall go."

(See? 57 years and I still remember it!)

There were neighboring high schools back then: the effete Charleston and Stonewall Jackson over in the "big city", St. Albans and Nitro out in the sticks, and our arch-rival Dunbar across the river. They were all public schools, of course. There weren't enough Catholics, I suspect, to qualify for a parochial school, and private schools were those things across the mountains in Virginia that were simply off our radar screen. None of them could have compared to SCHS.

There were close to 200 of us back then in the Class of '50, though Lord only knows how many are still with us. I dunno: maybe I'll go to the 57th reunion to find out how many of them, in between on the misty flats, I've outlived!