High School Confidential : Class Reunions May Make Up for Any Anguish Spared During Adolescence

HIGH SCHOOL REUNIONS are high-risk affairs, fraught with disillusion, shock, regret, pain and, if nothing else, profound nostalgia.

The poignancy of high school has been captured in such recent films as “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Back to the Future” and the earlier “American Graffiti.”

Having recently attended my wife’s 50th high school reunion and having found myself forgotten by a classmate of hers who was one of my serious girlfriends, I wonder why we subject ourselves.

Ruth Tobkin of Wilmington has sent me a newsletter recapitulating the 53rd reunion of her class--Banning High School--and the memories it stirred. She thinks of that era as “kinder and gentler,” though it was deep in the Great Depression, and she notes that her class has had only seven divorces out of 94 marriages.

The anguish of high school days is reflected in some of the anecdotes reported in the newsletter.

A girl remembered for her timidity recalled walking down a hall and seeing two classmates, a boy and a girl, so absorbed in their conversation that they were unaware that the girl’s panties had fallen down around her ankles. Mercifully, the raconteur did not disclose their names.

A class member named Art Powers recalled that the same thing happened to his girlfriend one day when he was walking her to the Granada Theater. “She nonchalantly picked up the garment, put it in her purse, and they continued on.” Ever the gentleman, Powers declined to give his self-possessed classmate’s name.

They remembered the stringent economies forced on them by hard times: “We brought our bag lunches and envied anyone with a tuna sandwich. Lunch in the school cafeteria was a rare treat.”

Another hardship was caused by the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, which closed the school building and forced classrooms into tents. Roy Beal remembered that his favorite teacher, Mae Corwin, was killed in the earthquake when the driver of a car in which she was riding lost control and crashed.

Beal also remembered an excursion to see President Hoover as he passed through the harbor to catch a cruise ship for South America.

Of course, as in “American Graffiti,” boys would be boys. Bill Nott recalled that he and three others took the wheels off the principal’s car and poured sugar in his gas tank. They were never discovered, luckily for them. The principal, Mr. Comerford, evidently was not a man to be tampered with: Walt Peterson recalled being in a seventh-grade gardening class that Mr. Comerford taught. When a senior insulted the class and refused to apologize, Mr. Comerford bodily threw him over the fence.

Conrad Thompson remembered a painful trip to the principal’s office after he had lit a firecracker in English class; Tillie Newbrough Appel remembered when students in Mr. Freed’s bungalow math class set fires in the wastebaskets.

Audrey Ann Welch Brown still remembered when Art Dominguez, who sat behind her, whacked her on the head with a pencil until the pencil broke. I remember pulling the golden curls of a girl named Ruth who sat in front of me. She was my girlfriend up to then, but she never spoke to me again. She knew a male chauvinist pig when she saw one.

But nobody ever stabbed a teacher in the back.

Harold Everly recalled a macabre experience. After World War II he found himself greeted with astonishment by old classmates who had thought he was dead. He learned that his name had been erroneously entered on a plaque honoring Banning High School students killed in the war.

They remembered when the grounds of Banning Park Mansion had been covered with snow--artificial snow laid down for a scene in “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (with Shirley Temple).

Italo Guggiana remembered with some pride that his voice-class teacher told him that he could remain in the class only if he didn’t sing.

Finally, the newsletter plaintively asks: “Is this our last goodby?”

As for those stories about the two embarrassing incidents, I’m skeptical. In all my years of girl watching, I never saw it happen.