Kindergarten Ties Bind the Class of ’49

The Super Bowl was playing on two televisions in the house, but members of a Sherman Oaks kindergarten class who gathered Sunday for their 40th reunion took little heed of the big game.

“Some dolphins or tigers are playing against some people from San Francisco, right?” said Ron Hood, 45, of the face-off in Miami between the Cincinnati Bengals and the San Francisco 49ers, which was being shown on televisions in the den and living room.

Instead of closely following the game, Hood and some of his classmates from the 1949 kindergarten class at St. Francis de Sales School spent most of the afternoon posing for television cameras and reminiscing.

The reunion, held each Super Bowl Sunday since 1980, was attended by about 10 class members living in Southern California.

“It’s a little like climbing into a time machine,” said Hood, a recreation professor at Cal State Northridge who lives in Green Valley, as two TV camera crews filmed the gathering.

Those attending the reunion, held at the Granada Hills home of Dick Yeakel, were members of the first kindergarten class at the Roman Catholic school. Many of the 64 children enrolled in the class, which met in two sessions, stayed friends through high school, said Yeakel, 45, a security company executive.

“We were all war babies, and our parents helped start St. Francis and stayed really involved,” said Suzanne Kiechle, 44, a voice teacher and Studio City resident.

Skip Lusk of Woodland Hills, a 44-year-old movie company executive, will never forget some of those events. He still has a trick knee from being slammed against a wall at St. Francis during “pom-pom tackle,” a soccer-like sport involving body contact, he said.

After graduating from high school in 1962, most of the St. Francis baby boomers went their separate ways, Yeakel said. But a core group of three kept in touch and founded the annual reunion nine years ago.

“All these guys just seem to have a positive attitude, which is more than I can say about a dozen guys you’d pick out at random,” said Mike Hershey, 43, an equipment operator who drove more than two hours from Hemet to attend. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”