A Gathering In a Class by Itself : Lake Hughes: This weekend’s reunion for everyone who ever attended the tiny school is probably the biggest event to hit town in 40 years.

The town of Lake Hughes is a pine-scented, scenic speck sitting on the San Andreas Fault due west of Lancaster.

Snuggled against the Angeles National Forest, its 500 residents--many of whom make the 100-mile round trip to Los Angeles each workday--choose to live in the remote location because of its small-town atmosphere and what they wake up to each morning.

Forest ranger John Damann says that from his east-facing window, he can see past Lake Hughes to the San Gabriel Mountains, all the way to Mt. Baldy. His west-facing windows look out on Pine Canyon. The early-morning quiet is broken only by sounds of nature, and the air is clean and crisp.

Almost everyone here knows everyone else, as well as everyone else’s parents, friends, dogs, habits and business.

According to resident James Lewis, 50, it’s a 1950s kind of place where the lessons you learn as a kid stay with you for life and the friends you make are your friends forever.

“I left Lake Hughes to live in Montana for 18 years and, when I came back last year, it was like I never left. I’d pick up a conversation with someone like it was broken off yesterday,” Lewis says.

Although limited job opportunities or the prospect of a long commute have driven some away, many former residents keep coming back, if only to visit.

This weekend, a lot will be coming back.

All former students of Lake Hughes’ only school, established in 1889, have been invited for two days of renewing friendships and pursuing fun.

They’ve been making reservations with the organizing committee and the American Adventure Resort, where most of the festivities will be held. Returnees who stay at the resort can camp in their RVs or take a cabin. Also, local residents are extending hospitality to those who have moved away.

This is probably the biggest event in 40 years, bigger than the legendary Sunday barbecues Eli Munz used to have for a few hundred friends back in the ‘50s.

“I think everyone’s excited about what’s going on,” says Damann, 46, Munz’s grandson.

“Most of the people who settled up here around the turn of the century were farmers and homesteaders,” says former teacher Josephine Williams, 80. “They helped each other and looked out for each other, and that feeling has never really left.”

Attendance is expected to be somewhere between 500 and 5,000, Lewis says wryly, adding that he’s gotten calls and letters from all over the country and from other parts of the world.

“This has turned into a big deal because we all know we’re going to see people we haven’t seen in years,” Lewis adds. One of the main attractions will be a visit with Williams. She was the town’s only teacher from 1934 until 1947 and then went on to become an official in the Los Angeles County school system.

She was in her early 20s when she started teaching in Lake Hughes and, for years, all the little boys were in love with her, Lewis says. “In addition to giving us a good basic education, she taught us values and because of that, she was a tremendous influence on us all.”

“She was a beautiful lady then and she is beautiful now,” Lewis adds.

It is an opinion echoed by many students.

Some families sent three or four generations to one of the three buildings that served over the years as the school in Lake Hughes.

The original frame school was built beside the lake. It had one room in which grades one through eight studied together.

After it burned down, a brick school was built in 1924. It had an upstairs and a downstairs but still only one teacher. It is now a Presbyterian church.

In 1954, the third Lake Hughes school, now called Hughes Elizabeth Lake Union School, was built 1 1/2 miles from the first two schools, with several classrooms and--for the first time--a real cafeteria. To this day, it is known as the new school.

On Saturday morning, celebrants from all the schools will gather at the American Adventure Resort, a rustic campground with a pool and several man-made lakes as well as a large hall, to socialize and have breakfast. The socializing will continue through a barbecue, between 3 and 6 p.m., followed by an awards ceremony and dance. Sunday morning, there will be another breakfast and more socializing.

But the highlight of the two-day affair will be a Sunday afternoon visit to the second Lake Hughes School, where the reunion organizing committee is planning to exhibit all the old yearbooks, pictures and memorabilia recording a century of events and people.

It will be a time of remembering and renewing, something committee members have been doing a lot of in the past year.

“When the committee started going through the pictures, we all had a good laugh,” Lewis says.

“There was one of Prince, the German shepherd dog who used to come to school every day and sit in the classroom while we were all studying.”

“The dog came to school every day with Darnie Blasdell until Darnie graduated,” Williams says.

“I actually made the dog a diploma so he could graduate with Darnie.” Prince was “probably the best-behaved kid I ever had.”

Williams is one of the town’s most revered residents. She is not sure when her grandparents moved to Lake Hughes, but she knows that her mother was born there in 1886.

Her mother met her father, an engineer working on the California Aqueduct, at a country dance in town. After they married, the young couple lived in various construction sites along the new waterway.

Williams’ family moved to Van Nuys when she was in elementary school. But she returned to Lake Hughes when her father was sent to Switzerland on another project. “I had spent summers with my grandparents at their home here,” she says. “But when my father was away, we came back and I went to school here. My aunt was my teacher.”

She still lives on the ranch that belonged to her grandparents.

After attending Lake Hughes School, Van Nuys High School and UCLA, she got her teaching credential.

In 1936, she married for the first of four times, and had a daughter and a son. That marriage ended in divorce; she outlived her other three husbands.

Last year, her daughter, who was known to everyone as Mary Jay, died of a crippling disease. But Williams’ son still lives nearby and visits almost every morning.

Although many townspeople have called Williams the greatest influence on Lake Hughes youth, her life was never as easy as her quiet, confident manner suggests.

“In 1944, my daughter got polio and it was a hard time,” she says.

“Mary Jay sometimes needed treatment in Los Angeles and I wasn’t able to take her there. In those days, there weren’t a lot of substitute teachers in Los Angeles County who were willing to travel to Lake Hughes. And if I had gone to Los Angeles, there would have been no school.”

So Williams depended on the kindness of friends. There always seemed to be someone willing to take Mary Jay into town, she says. That’s just the kind of place Lake Hughes was.

If it was also the kind of place where there were no secrets, a lot of the information people had about their neighbors was positive.

“We all knew what everyone else was doing,” Williams says. “For example, everyone in town knew that Hazel Lewis, Jimmy’s mother, would always take in another child.”

Williams explains that there were lean times and hard years when some parents had to go elsewhere to find work or for other reasons. Many left their youngsters at the Lewis home. In fact, Williams says, when her son was 13 and things at home didn’t suit him, he moved in with James Lewis’ family.

“That’s right,” says Lewis, laughing. “In addition to my four brothers and a sister, I never knew who I would be tripping over when I went to bed or who I would find sitting at the breakfast table.”

Like his siblings, Lewis attended the second Lake Hughes School and graduated from Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster. His father was a firefighter, tax assessor and U. S. Forest Service employee. “Lake Hughes was the neatest place in the world to grow up,” Lewis says. “It was far away from the city. All the kids had horses and dogs.”

Lewis married and settled down, but the marriage was troubled. Not even a change of scenery in Montana helped, and divorce followed.

Lewis went into the trucking business with Virginia Tanner in Missoula, and their relationship became more than a business association.

With the approach of Lewis’ 50th birthday, the couple decided to relocate their business to Lake Hughes. They will be married soon, he says, but both have been so busy with the reunion that they haven’t had time to think about that.

Lewis became chairman of the reunion planning committee, and one of the first people he enlisted was John Damann.

Damann is a Munz--as in Munz Lake, Munz Road and the Munz Ranch--on his mother’s side.

“My great-grandfather homesteaded here in the late 1880s, and my grandfather and his brother grew up here, built homes here and opened up Munz Lakes Resort, which is now American Adventure Resort,” Damann said.

He attended Lake Hughes School and worked summers at the resort with his brothers when he was growing up. After high school, he went away to college but his heart wasn’t in it. He became a U. S. Forest Service employee specializing in fire prevention.

From the window of his Lake Hughes office, he can look across the street to the resort and ranch his grandfather once owned. “The Munz Ranch had nine bedrooms and four baths, and both an electric and wood-burning stove in the kitchen,” he says. Damann regrets that the ranch is going to be subdivided and the ranch house will probably be torn down.

“Well, things change,” Damann says regretfully.

Even Lake Hughes.

“Going over the pictures and things has made us realize what we’ve got here,” Lewis says. “We were so lucky to have been able to grow up, to have the experiences we have had. All of us on the committee are real glad we had this time to remember everything.”

This weekend, a lot more people will have an opportunity to reminisce.