Fifty years ago, when I collected my high school diploma, I don’t remember wondering where everyone would be 50 years later.
We were mostly wondering where we’d be after the ceremony. At home with the relatives? Or if we were lucky, with our friends chomping on a double cheeseburger with two sauces at the drive-in.
But now, five decades down the road and with a reunion in view, we’re hunting down lost sheep with Biblical zeal. No one in the Akron Firestone Class of ’65 is safe unless he’s moved out of state and his name is Smith or Jones.
I know this because in a weak moment, I volunteered to join the hunt. After all, who would want to miss the big 5-0?
Within moments, I received an Excel spreadsheet with 347 names and their last known addresses and phone numbers. A number of lines were highlighted and bore the sobering notation “DEC” for deceased. Others were either missing in action altogether or their e-mail addresses were.
“I’ll take the first 100,” I said. It was not lost on me that the first 100 had already been worked over pretty well, probably for the 45th, before searchers succumbed to exhaustion.
With that, I started after the MIAs with a vengeance. But it didn’t take long to figure out that if they were still out there, wearing the same oddball name as in high school and living somewhere in NE Ohio, they’d have already been found. Anyone who had managed to avoid us for five decades required special snooping skills.
Too cheap to subscribe to an online reunion service, I instead took a one-month free trial on a genealogy site. This fed the cheery obsession of finding obituaries of classmates’ parents, in hopes of turning up sought-after “survivors” – classmates and their current city of residence.
Don’t sell it short. Obituary-chasing led me to my glory moment – finding a woman who had evaded us for nearly 50 years because she was listed – complete with her new name and location – in her mother’s obituary. From that, it was easy enough to find her e-mail address on a business site and send her a message. Although this scored me a giant compliment from reunion organizers (“You should work for the FBI”), my “catch” as so far not responded.
I want to think that she’s been busy or lax about checking her inbox. But many days have passed and still nothing
To those with addresses but no phone, I have sent letters expressing great hopes for their attendance and a request to phone me with a phone number or e-mail address. But it’s been two weeks, and not one phone call. Not even a stomped-upon envelope stamped “Return to Sender.”
This has led me to the reluctant conclusion that with reunions, some folks may not want to be found. They may not care “whatever happened to ….” They may not be interested in our tradition of dragging our boom boxes to the same drive-in we used to cruise on Friday nights. And unbelievably, they may not be hankering for another crack at the award-winning double cheeseburger with two sauces.
All the same, I believe they secretly want to be found. And wheedled. And begged to come.
Then at least they can boast to their friends, “I hated high school. I will never go back. But they sure do want me.”
Copyright 2015 Pat Snyder
