Laughs, Tears and Hope : Grad Night: Hart High School seniors embark on a sentimental journey. Good times give way to irrepressible goodbys.

They grew up together, these children of middle-class suburbia.

Many are the sons and daughters of the baby boomers, born in the mid-1970s--back when America was scraping the mud of Vietnam from her boots and the egg of Watergate from her face.

Many of these 465 seniors graduating from William S. Hart High School in Newhall have never really stopped thinking about tomorrow; but on this night of nights they’ve embarked on a sentimental journey, perhaps for the first time believing in their own yesterdays.

And in goodbys.

On Grad Night, it’s always those irrepressible goodbys that loom over the hoopla of commencement like a date with the gallows, even as Hart’s Class of ’93 swaps congratulatory hugs and high-fives into the wee hours.

Many laugh and sing and let the good times roll, as one of seven chartered buses carries them to their post-midnight, four-hour cruise this week in the Long Beach Harbor, a $50 fling complete with DJ and dancing, all-you-can-eat Italian buffet, casino and door prizes.

They toast a year of trophies in academic decathlons and sports, of “Senior Spoof” awards for “most flirtatious,” “best buns” and “party animal,” among others.

Suddenly, the bus radio plays a pop song by Boyz II Men: “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.”

Now the laughter dies. Many sing along softly to the music on this rite of passage, their melancholy voices and the song’s title a wake-up call, a reminder that the so-called “real world” and those Grad Night goodbys lurk around the corner, poised to crash the party and wreck the fun.

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Actually, these 17- and 18-year-old alumni of Hart High School had already earned the equivalent of advanced degrees in saying goodby.

They said tearful, last goodbys unexpectedly last autumn to a popular classmate, 17-year-old Heather Sexton, the senior luau’s “Little Surfer Girl,” who died of pneumonia the week she was to be crowned homecoming queen.

And two days before Heather died, they almost said goodby to their beloved “Mr. Basey,” a high-energy social studies teacher who is the school’s wisecracking adviser to the student body.

At 38, shortly after going through a divorce, Dale Basey suffered a heart attack.

“I didn’t know that Heather had died until after I got out of intensive care,” Basey says, adding that he eventually learned that Heather had been in the same intensive-care unit with him. “She was only about 40 feet away,” he says.

Now, there’s no stopping Basey, who has shed 25 pounds but not his wit. Shortly before Grad Night, he asks one student who plans to be a fashion designer if she’ll design him “a bell-bottom shirt” to hide the bulk that remains.

And there appears to be no stopping Hart’s Class of ‘93, which boasts so many scholastic achievers that nearly 10% of the class earned grade averages of 4.0 (A) or better and 18 qualified for the National Honor Society. All told, this class racked up college scholarships totaling $1.32 million.

But then, how can Hart’s students really go wrong when the senior member of the school’s faculty is an English teacher named King Wisdom?

Today, the road many Hart graduates have traveled together since kindergarten meanders every which way:

To MIT and Stanford, to UCLA and USC. To Cal State Northridge, UC Santa Barbara and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. To the Air Force Academy, Missouri and Oklahoma State. To jobs as nurses and firefighters, to career paths still uncharted. And to classes nearby at Valencia’s College of the Canyons, the scene of Hart’s commencement ceremonies Tuesday evening.

There, as twilight fell over the throngs of graduates, families, friends and other well-wishers who packed the college’s stadium grandstand, one of Hart’s scholars and commencement speakers gave his classmates a pep talk.

Jared Halverson exhorted them to be ready for the world’s staggering changes by reminding them that William S. Hart--the silent-film cowboy actor for whom their school is named--couldn’t cut it when the talkies came in.

“Our silent movie days are over,” Halverson said. “Now, we’re entering the real world, with sound . . . . We can be the future presidents, generals and astronauts to Saturn!”

Their principal, Laurence Strauss, encouraged everyone to think ahead to their 20-year class reunion--in the year 2013.

“What will you look like?” he asked. “What will you have accomplished? What will you have contributed to your world?”

Finally, he told the class: “Our country will be so much better off when you meet in the year 2013. Take these experiences with you, build upon them and we’ll meet in a better place in 2013.”

Yet even as Strauss and most others who cheered them on Grad Night believe that Hart’s seniors will be good for America, some wonder: Will America be good to them, especially at a time of layoffs, shutdowns and cutbacks?

It’s a question that nags at Cynthia Meekins, 40, as she directs Hart’s cruise aboard the 153-foot, triple-deck Lord Hornblower and who oversees other high schools’ proms and parties aboard the fleet of her employer, West Coast Cruises.

“I see the tears in their eyes as they say their last goodbys,” Meekins says, gazing at Hart’s graduates who pack the ship’s parquet dance floor. “Where are they going once they get off the ship? What’s out there for them to do? These kids have worked hard, but it’s too bad they have to inherit all this mess in the world.”

Basey, Hart’s faculty adviser, agrees that the tomorrows for some graduates appear “dim.”

“We hear a lot of talk from kids saying they’re going for advanced degrees,” he says. “But the kids I worry about are the ones who don’t go on--the ones who’ll be stuck in entry-level jobs, making $5 or $6 an hour.”

Many of Hart’s graduates concede that even as opportunities in some fields shrink, it still comes down to coping and hoping, of picking spots, of being ready when opportunity knocks.

“I want to be a high school teacher,” says Erin Riske, a top scholar who served as Hart’s student body president and will attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “There’s always going to be room for teachers. I’m not really worried.”

Tara Ilich, president of Hart’s Class of ‘93, says many youngsters today seek careers in medicine, the environment and other fields they believe carry long-range potential. “It really depends on your major,” says Ilich, a journalism student also bound for San Luis Obispo. “And then,” she adds, her voice brimming hope, “it all could turn around for everybody, for the better.”

And 18-year-old Matt Mutert, a senior class leader who intends to become a Los Angeles County firefighter, says that even though many of his classmates remain uncertain about their futures, they cling to the notion--as he does--that economic hard times aren’t forever.

“We feel we can change all of that,” he contends.

Indeed, many in Hart’s Class of ’93 seem to echo the inspirational quotation that appeared in their printed commencement program:

Do not follow where the path may lead.

Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail .

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In Hart’s Class of ‘93, a lot of trails were blazed by females.

Besides Erin Riske and Tara Ilich--presidents of the student body and senior class, respectively--there were Rachel Kasper and Erika Gonzales, the class vice president and treasurer, both headed for UC Santa Barbara; Jeanette Lee, commissioner of publicity and an A student, bound for Oklahoma State; and Carrie Billeci, editor of The Tomahawk, Hart’s yearbook.

Others distinguished themselves as problem-solvers of the first rank.

On the morning of Grad Night, Cindy Corbett passed her nurses’ assistant exam. By midnight, as she and about 270 of her classmates waited to board the Lord Hornblower, Corbett took an impromptu plunge into that “real world, with sound” that Jared Halverson had spoken about at commencement hours earlier:

Corbett helped stabilize a girl classmate who had become nauseous, the apparent result of motion sickness from the bus ride to the Long Beach Harbor, until the girl’s father arrived to take her home.

These success stories, large and small, are the stuff of memories on Hart’s Grad Night.

And they live beyond those last, heart-tugging goodbys that Hart’s seniors now exchange as they step off the boat and--save for a handful of students who leave for a trip to Mazatlan, Mexico--reboard their buses for the long ride home in the pre-dawn.