At This Reunion, Catching Up Could Take Awhile

College graduates do it. So do high school graduates.

And today Rosewood Avenue Elementary School, Class of 1960, will gather in Hollywood for a class reunion.

“Everybody cracks up when I tell them I’m going to my sixth-grade reunion. And I crack up too,” said Sonia Preiser, a Long Beach adult school teacher.

“People roll their eyes. They’re amused, then they’re amazed,” agreed Steve Kipnis, a real estate agent from West Los Angeles.

Despite its unusual nature, about half of the 70 sixth-graders who were promoted out of the Westside elementary school 37 years ago are expected to attend the reunion, which starts at 4 p.m. at the Nichols Canyon home of former classmate Sandy Rivkin.

“I’d never heard of an elementary school reunion either,” said Rivkin, a 48-year-old printing company executive. “I can see how people laugh at the idea.”

Planning for today’s party has been underway for more than a year. The former students agree that the 1950s were more than just the good old days. They were great days.

“It was a cute and innocent time. In sixth grade we were an age that is the last time people aren’t going through identity crises,” said Joanne Fradkin, now a cosmetics expert who lives in Hancock Park.

“I don’t know if I’ll recognize everybody. But I’d want to see these people Saturday more than people I went to high school with.”

Rivkin has enlarged a copy of the sixth-grade class photo to 4 feet by 6 feet and has ordered deli food, soft drinks and beer for today’s poolside get-together. Things will be informal because there’s really no protocol for what’s taking place.

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The neighborhood around Rosewood was a comfortable place to grow up 40 years ago.

The streets were less crowded than today. The sidewalks were safer. Merchants and residents were friendlier.

Kids would hang out at the Rexall drugstore over at La Cienega and Beverly boulevards, reading magazines from its news rack and getting their pictures taken in the store’s curtain-enclosed photo booth.

They bought sodas at Gale’s Coffee Shop next door and killed time at the Beverly Park amusement center--a wondrous play land where the Beverly Center is now located. Instead of the parking garage that now helps define the shopping center, there was a dusty pony ride.

“It was a fun neighborhood and a carefree time,” said Bob Reiss, 49, of Los Alamitos. A member of the Class of ‘60, he is now a manufacturing company vice president.

“Everybody in the class lived in the neighborhood. We played together after school. We were in Scouts together.”

It was a time when moms stayed at home and had plenty of time to devote to PTA bake sales. Children walked to school--and walked to the movies at the Fairfax Theater.

“There weren’t the social pressures at that age,” said Reiss. “There wasn’t that boy-girl thing you find as you get older.”

Rosewood Elementary School doesn’t seem to have changed much over the years, according to the former students.

Several classroom teachers who were there in 1960 are still around. At least one of them--Milton Elfman, who was a sixth-grade teacher that year--has made plans to come to the reunion.

One thing has changed, though. Kipnis, who lives about six blocks from the campus and has children of his own in Rosewood’s kindergarten and third grade, won’t let them walk to school.

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Plans for today’s party were mapped out over a patio table at Farmer’s Market. Seven of the former classmates met there for lunch one Monday a month for nearly a year.

“We kept joking if we sat there long enough we’d probably run into the whole class,” said Rivkin. “Sure enough, one day we ran into Susan Tannenbaum sitting at a table across from us. She’s coming Saturday.”

In all, 52 of the 67 surviving class members were located--one in Denmark. Attendees are coming from as far away as Arizona and Oregon. Three of the former students are deceased.

“None of us are that skilled with the computer and the Internet, so we did things the old-fashioned way. We used the phone book,” Reiss said.

The reunion committee ran into a few surprises along the way. The boy everyone considered the most popular in the class now is a surfer in Malibu and has refused to come to the reunion. The boy known 37 years ago as the class bully--who reportedly served time in jail after his school days--couldn’t be located.

Kipnis said any members of Rosewood’s Class of ’60 who weren’t contacted can reach the reunion committee this morning at (310) 854-4958.

“Maybe Edith Tabakman will call,” he said. “I’ll pick her up if she wants to come to the reunion. I’ve told my wife that I had a crush on Edith when I was a kid.

“My wife just laughs.”