The Class of '76

My 25th high school reunion was not a very happy occasion. We were the class of '76, the Bicentennial Class. Perhaps more than most we looked forward to a bright future We were the generation that invented the internet. We saved the medical students on Grenada. We faced the Y2K virus and beat it. We saved Kuwait. We won the Cold War. We had plenty to celebrate. But we chose to hold our reunion on a saturday in mid-September. That's right, the saturday after 9/11. Harry Carson, the class prisident was our big sucess story. He was a millionaire with a seat on the NYSE and an office on the 35th floor of the Trade Center. By the time we got together we all knew he had been at work when the planes hit. As far as I know his body was never recovered.

Andy Warren didn't make it either. He joined the Air Force a month or so after graduation. A bunch of is went to the Battle Creek Balloon Festival on the Fourth of July. We watched General Steve Ritchie, the only air ace on active duty at the time, fly in, climb out of his fighter plane, and swear in a couple of dozen new recruits, including Andy. A couple of years later Andy was killed when a helicopter crashed into his plane during the botched hostage rescue. That really hit Dave Trask hard. he works for the company that made the hoses that caused the crash. All in all twenty-six of us made it to the reunion out of forty-three that graduated. Of the rest most had moved away or we had lost track of them. Becky Thatcher died of cancer. To no one's surprise Darryl Tucker was in prison. Most of us had married , some of us miore than once. most had good jobs, a few didn't. Overall our class had not fared much better or worse than any other.

One of the things we did was to dig up the time capsule we had buried just before graduation. I was given the responsibility for opening it up and pulling the stuff out. The first thing I pulled out was a cassette tape. War (the musical group) had just came out with the song Why Can't We Be Friends? We had adopted it as our theme song. The night before graduation we must have played that tape a dozen times. We all sang along; some of us rather drunkenly. Unfortunately no one thought to bring a casssette player to the reunion. Jenny Beale saved the day by downloading it to her iPod from Napster. somehow we connected it to an speaker and then tried to remember the words.

The next thing I pulled out was a flag. We weren't necessarily more patriotic than any other class, but we were the Bicentennial Class. The flag was sort of our thing. It was folded in the triangular shape beloved of Boy Scouts and soldiers. It had draped the coffin of Jenny Beale's older brother when they brought him back from Vietnam.We were probably less anti-war than our urban counterparts because we knew too many guys who had been over there.

Next I pulled out a suppliment that the local paper had published about the presidential candidates. I remember Harry earnestly assuring me that if Jimmy Carter was elected we would go to war before his term ended. He was too much of a wimp, Harry insisted. Someone was sure to push him intil he had no choice to declare war. It never occurred to us that he would be too much of a wimp to declare war. Later that fall Darryl used the Jimmy Carter interview as an excuse to buy a Playboy. We all read that interview, even the girls. The guys also paid close attention to the centerfold. That centerfold was still on Daryl's bedroom wall when he was arrested ten years later.

The last thing I pulled out was a copy of the yearbook. We had all signed it, and I had even taken it around and gotten signatures from the principal, most of the teachers, and even the janitor. Tucked in the back of the yearbook were the essays we had written predicting what life would be like twenty-five years later. Suffice it to say that none of us were likely to be hailed as prophets.

We originally intended to hold the reunion on the fourth of July, but that had not proved feasible. Maybe if we had we wouldn't have gotten tso drunk. I'm sure we would have enjoyed it more.The inauspicious date is undoubtably why no one has ever suggsted another reunion.