In Pennsylvania: A Time on the River

By Frank Trippett

Some of the girls of the May Court were on board, vestiges of beauty lurking after the erosions of the decades. The boy most likely to succeed was in the crowd, a preacher now. Both of the class's sets of twins were on hand. One of its two black members was present. The other had been glimpsed around town years ago, but where he was now was a mystery here in Kittanning, Pa., a hilly little county seat on the Allegheny River some 45 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, homelike if not home to the members of the Kittanning High School class of 1948.

In all, 119 of the 221 classmates converged on the diesel-powered stern-wheeler Liberty Belle for the cruise that was to cap their 30th reunion, a four-hour voyage up the river into the darkness and back, a roast beef dinner and dancing to a three-piece band. It was a stirry night of boozy merriment, insistent camaraderie, an interlude of urgent small talk and the irresistible pursuit of ghosts.

There, up from a Washington suburb sporting an ice cream suit fit for Cab Calloway and a wife who made it known she had met Liz Taylor, was the kid who had been the class's best dancer. There, gowned in lavender and telling of an ended marriage while speaking of her new companion as "my fiance, my roommate, whatever," was the girl who had been head majorette. There, with the conspicuous tan and the bleached hair, baring a leg in a comic chorus-line kick-who could that be?

By now, the 60 or so classmates who had gone to the earlier parties were no longer puzzled. But some 60 more had waited for the climactic boat ride to join in, so the inevitable protests of recognition -"Oh, I remember you!"--still rang out as the passengers mingled among tables and chairs arrayed on the Liberty Belle's three decks.

Such cries were first heard five days before, when about 30 gathered in the nearby mountains to drink, sing and roast wienies around a bonfire that set off the most extended reunion ever staged by the class. It was also the most rained-on reunion. Drizzly weather beset the wienie roast and transformed it, and the parties of the next two nights, from al fresco to al canopy (a stately funeral tent was provided by Class Member Jack Kennedy, who had stuck around Kittanning and fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming an undertaker). There was no sign that the rain damaged the spirits of the celebrators, not even those who had forsaken sunny climes to attend.

In from Fresno, Calif., for his first reunion since graduation, Procter and Gamble Executive Jack Simpson claimed convincingly that he was delighted to be there, jostling hip to hip with dozens of others under a dripping canvas before the bonfire finally got lit. "It's marvelous," said he, and went on to muse on time's familiar way of shrinking one's childhood world: "When I was a kid, that Allegheny Bridge was the Golden Gate. Today I realized I could clear it with a 9-iron."

Old Kittanning (founded 1796) had shrunk not only in mind but in reality, its population down from 7,700 in 1948 to 6,490 today, thanks in part to the migration of people like the class of '48. Fully 100 members wound up living more than 50 miles distant from Kittanning, 56 of those out of state. Other things had gone from town too: Paul's, the soda fountain that had been a favorite hangout; the trains on which some kids had commuted from nearby communities to consolidated Kittanning High School. Still, progress had not made a detour. One brand-new hangout, Winky's, a burger joint of gleaming glass, metal and plastic, had just gone up on a site made available by the demolition of a grand old mansion designed by Stanford White.

The town's civic travails hardly preoccupied these classmates. Indeed, it was rare to hear them allude to even the epochal events--the Korean War, television, the black revolution, the assassinations, the sexual revolution, the Viet Nam War, inflation, Watergate--that shook and transformed the world into which they graduated in 1948. Mostly, along with beers and highballs and a bit of close-harmony singing, they indulged in chitchat and banter about those things that any sane person of 48 (as they all were, give or take a year) knows to be the important matters of life: marriage, children, divorce, death, friends, health.

It was easy, then, by the clear day of the cruise, for even an outsider who had been hanging around to glimpse some of the private realities that lurked beneath the surface of things. An outsider could learn that there, joyfully swaying to a modish beat on the main deck's dance floor, was a woman whose husband had killed himself not many years ago. And that the bouncy little man assiduously declaring affection for one and all--"I love ya! I love ya!"--had been the shy little-boy-lost-in-the-corner all his high school days. And that the burly farmer looking on would soon marry off his last daughter and would probably never quite cease grieving over the death of his only son, at twelve, in a tractor accident. And that the bleached blonde doing the comic kick was the wittiest girl in the class and had wound up in Florida unmarried and happened to be the twin of that sedate ma tron who had married a classmate and raised five boys. And that the perky, petite woman with the Myrna Loy face, the one doing the jitterbug, had raised two kids alone on $50 a week and, though cheerfully recalling the name of the man who had sung at her wedding, preferred not to mention the name of the chap she had married and divorced two decades ago.

And there, seemingly all over the place, table-hopping and backslapping, was the man who had sung at that wedding--Johnny Lindeman, almost bald, clearly the spark of the whole reunion, thoughtful, everybody's friend. Decked out in bright red trousers fit for an interlocutor. Moved back home a few years ago after working as an organizer of high-minded causes down in Washington.

Moved back after a divorce that distanced him from his four children. Running the family florist business with a brother now that his father had been immobilized by illness. Looking happy and even jubilant tonight. Good singer, John ny, best in class. Not a bad actor. Played George Gibbs in the senior production of Our Town and still thinks of Grover's Corners when, from soaring Pine Hill across the river, he looks down on the tilted strew of toy buildings that are Kittanning.

The girl who played Emily Webb had married a classmate and settled in town and, though she wanted to come, stayed away from the reunion because she was sorrowing over the recent death of an infant grandchild. Still, it was easy to imagine that the memory of her Emily was hovering about, reminding them all again, as she does in the last act: "It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another."

Surely (since what else is a reunion for?) these aging children, most of them, were looking to make up for lost time as their vessel labored up the river into dark ness only to come home to Kittanning in darkness still.

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