Why I attend reunions

Why do people attend reunions? BSR's Susan Beth Lehman contends that high school and college reunions "enable us to breathe with our whole lives and return temporarily to the place where we were— where we belonged, whether we knew it then or not." (See Susan's "Remembrance of a first love" by clicking here.)

My motives are a bit different. I go to reunions to solve the riddles of my youth, to grasp the possibilities of the present and find inspiration for the future. Consider seven examples of wisdom I've gleaned (for better or worse) from reunions of my Class of '60 at the Fieldston School, a wonderful progressive private school operated by the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

Does good triumph?

In high school I sometimes wondered: Who will ultimately exert the greatest influence on my classmates and me? Our idealistic teachers? Our materialistic parents (as I perceived them then)? Or our earnest but largely clueless peers?

In my case, the answer seemed clear for many years, or so I thought. During a chance conversation in the football team's dressing room one afternoon after practice during my senior year, I casually referred to someone as "the sort of Pollyanna who thinks the good guys always win in the end." To my surprise, one of our starting tackles, a huge classmate named Dave Kann, replied, "But they do."

"Come off it," I scoffed.

"In the short run, yes, of course, the good guys often lose," Dave insisted. "But over the long sweep of history, they do win in the end. Think about it."

I did think about it, and Dave's thesis ultimately went a long way toward shaping my worldview as a journalist and commentator.

Dave subsequently moved to California, where he became a teacher. Not until our 35th reunion did I have a chance to remind him of that conversation and how profoundly it had affected my life.

To which Dave replied: "I was wrong."

Best of both worlds

With the advent of the Internet some ten years ago, I once jokingly remarked to my wife of 40-plus years, "You know, at this point in my life I don't really need a wife. What I need is a full-time, live-in computer technician." Imagine my surprise upon discovering, at my 45th high school reunion, that my classmate Hal Freedman enjoys the best of both worlds: He is married to a computer technician. At our next reunion I hope to learn the answer to the logical follow-up question: What is Hal's secret with women?

Neither a hunk nor a jock

Talking about women— when I reflect on my high school years, the thought occurs that, for guys, the business of "getting a girl" really had nothing to do with any specific girl. A teenage boy in the '50s "got a girl" by being somebody. If you were a hunk, or a jock, or a class politician, or a brilliant student, or a great dancer— so went the theory— girls would be attracted to you.

(This notion still persists and no doubt always will, because there's some validity to it. Numerous sociological and anthropological studies have confirmed that, in any society or species, the female instinctively gravitates to the highest-status available male.)

Nevertheless, one boy in my class merited none of the aforementioned labels (hunk, jock, etc.) yet always seemed to have a flock of girls in tow wherever he went. That was my classmate Arthur Miller. What was his secret? I wondered back then.

Upon reflection in later years, I concluded that, unlike the rest of us boys, Arthur studied girls to learn what they wanted. He always seemed to be current about things that mattered to girls, like the latest pop songs.

At our 50th reunion, two years ago, I finally got a chance to bounce my theory off Arthur. He rejected it immediately.

"It's not true," he claimed. "I never conducted any study of girls. I was totally clueless. I didn't know what I was doing."

Then what, I asked, explained his unique appeal to girls?

Arthur thought a bit more. "I liked to talk," he finally concluded, "and girls like to talk— and most boys don't like to talk."

A teacher's nightmares

My senior math teacher, Evelyn Rosenthal, was a tough and exacting old bird (she was actually all of 48 at the time) whose classes reminded me of a trip to the dentist: If you survived, you had a terrific feeling of accomplishment afterward. (For another view of Miss Rosenthal by BSR's John Erlich, click here).

For years after I graduated, Miss Rosenthal figured prominently in my anxiety dreams. Not until our reunions— which she attended faithfully until she died last December at the age of 99— did the terrifying Miss Rosenthal reveal herself to us as a human being. At our 30th reunion, I approached her.

"Do you know," I told her, "I still have dreams about you."

"Nightmares, I suppose," she replied.

"How did you know?" I asked.

Miss Rosenthal proceeded to explain that she too was haunted by anxiety dreams at the very time she was inducing them in her students. In one dream, she said, she'd be standing in front of a class that refused to come to order. In another, she'd walk into her classroom, only to find no desks in the room. In a third, she took the wrong subway to school and wound up in the East Bronx instead of Van Cortlandt Park.

"I haven't taught in 19 years," she told me, "but I still have those dreams." Who knew?

Across the racial divide

America's most blatant social evil in the "'50s was neither poverty nor racism (that word hadn't yet been coined) but race prejudice— discrimination on the basis of skin color. Fieldston responded to this pernicious practice by seeking to create, within the school's walls and grounds, something approaching the ideal of a color-blind society, where the color of one's skin mattered no more than, say, the color of one's hair or eyes.

My class of more than a hundred included four black kids— which seems like a minuscule proportion today but was actually high for private schools back then. But we weren't supposed to notice that they were black. Any recognition of differences among blacks and whites was implicitly verboten.

Once, in a conversation over lunch, my classmate Julie Adams made a passing reference to "what would happen if I got on a bus in Birmingham." She was greeted with an awkward silence. We whites simply weren't supposed to acknowledge that black kids might be dealing with issues different from our own.

I presumed that my black schoolmates were as grateful as I for the extraordinary experience of a Fieldston education. Their frustration at having to sublimate their cultural identity never occurred to me. At our 50th reunion, two years ago, Julie— who, as Julie Strandberg, has been the founding director of Brown University's dance program for some four decades— set me straight.

"When no one else was around," she said, "the black kids used to gather under the stairs for mutual support and sanity." As I said, who knew?

Odd couples

One side benefit of reunions is the friendships that develop among grown adults who thought they had nothing in common in high school or college. My Fieldston classmate Bob Liss, for example, was a superb athlete back then but socially awkward; my classmate Richard Mandel was athletically awkward but the life of every party. They moved in different circles and had little to do with each other.

But at our 25th reunion Bob and Richard discovered that they shared some common interests and life experiences. For example, both had been pressured by their families into attending law school, and both had rejected the law for other pursuits— Bob as a psychologist, writer and basketball coach (and occasional BSR contributor), and Richard as an educator (Philadelphians will recognize his name as the former headmaster of Miquon and Friends Select schools).

Or consider my classmates Nancy Russek and Peter Heiman. In high school Nancy was an artist, a cheerleader and the best dancer in our class; Peter was a serious student, a math wizard, a classical pianist and a devotee of Gilbert and Sullivan. If they exchanged five words in our six years at Fieldston, I'd be surprised.

Yet at our 45th reunion, they too developed a friendship. When Nancy died suddenly of heart failure in 2006, she was in the midst of rounding up classmates to provide an audience for Peter's late-life second career as an operatic baritone.

Hope for the future

Probably my most inspiring reunion experience occurred at my 50th, two years ago, when I learned that one of my classmates was getting married for the first time, at age 67. The pros and cons of marriage aside, her news provided a refreshing reminder that, at a time when nearly one-fifth of our classmates have died, life may still hold some surprises in store for the rest of us— and some of those surprises might even be good ones.♦


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