Hugh Sidey's America: You Can Go Home Again

By Hugh Sidey

There is a primal undertow that captures the hearts of most Americans 10 years or so out of high school and sweeps them back to stand in chalky reveries, reaching for a faded moment of innocence.

It seems to be a kind of biorhythm, perhaps not all that different from those that seize swallows and salmon. And it is now epidemic in the U.S. This year the National Association of Reunion Planners estimates that nearly 30 million of us will defy distance, age and pinched wallets and go home again to high school. Between Easter and Thanksgiving there will be 25,000 high school reunions. That is judged by some demographers to be the biggest institutional movement of people annually within the nation.

So there I was, like a thousand other graduates from 26 states on a summer weekend, hurrying toward my tiny (pop. 2,074) hometown of Greenfield, Iowa, to say farewell to the two weary high school buildings so long the heart and soul of that small patch of prairie. All living graduates out of the 3,819 given diplomas over the past 85 years had been summoned.

A low, sleek new high school on the north edge of town has replaced the two stolid, red brick rectangles. And it seems something akin to a death in the family. The desire to stand one last time in the embrace of those weathered friends was simply overpowering for all of us.

Last spring Marian Piper Thompson (class of '39) picked the notice of the reunion out of her mailbox in Townsville, Australia. There were 10,000 intimidating miles between her and her high school. "I'd decided I could not afford a trip this year," she said. "But when I got the letter I knew I couldn't stay away."

Jay Howe ('58) had an easier journey. He hoisted a WELCOME sign over his front porch, then walked across the street to the grounds where his grandfather ('11) and his father ('32) were schooled. "This is something," he marveled, noting that 2,000 people -- including more than a third of all the living graduates -- had come to the reunion. "Has to be a record."

The town's adversities may actually have strengthened the student bonds. The farm economic crisis of the 1920s, followed by the Great Depression in the 1930s, pushed the people inward. World War II froze town development. Even after the war, Greenfield was ignored by superhighways and shopping malls. The kids manufactured their activities among themselves, mostly at high school. "We truly got to love each other," said Darlene Don Carlos Marshall ('45).

Public high school was an American invention, ironically flourishing most in the Depression, when struggling parents poured what resources and energy they had left into high schools, hoping to give their children a better life. About 82% of Americans now graduate from high school. There are 150 million grads alive and aging, and most of them at one time or another feel the inner tug and will go to a reunion, which in reality is a rendezvous with memory.

Ivan ("Goat") Brown ('42) drove from Jacksonville, Florida, eager to spin his story about the Halloween night he loaded an outdoor privy on his old Plymouth and set it up in the school yard. Margaret Coffey McGrath ('29) of Chevy Chase, Maryland, laughed when she recounted cutting classes to attend a football game in a nearby town. "My mother drove us," she said, "but we got punished anyway. We had to memorize the preamble to the Constitution."

Lucile Adamson Slocum ('44) from Minneapolis had a special memory to honor. Her English and drama teacher, Miss Spence, had opened a world of meaning and beauty for her. Back in the shadowy gym she felt again that bright, intense figure coaching her kids through the class plays. Dorothy Spence Illson later became head of Life magazine's copydesk in New York City. She died two years ago.

Retired farmer James Law ('14) of Stuart, Iowa, sat in his wheelchair relishing the stories of playing on an undefeated football team and knowing the greatest school legend of all time: sprinter Chuck Hoyt ('14). Hoyt learned to run chasing ponies on his farm. "He was all legs," chuckled Law. Some legs. Hoyt took his first train ride when he was 14, to the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, swept the 100-m and 220-m dashes. He was asked to be on the 1912 Olympic team, but his widowed mother needed him home. Besides, she insisted, he was too young, and there would be another Olympics in 1916. War smashed his dream, but he went on to set a world record in the 220 and coach at the University of Michigan and Yale.

Old Greenfield High -- one small seedbed of America -- was still feeling good about itself this summer. And as a huge prairie sun went down, the grads jammed into the gym for the last dance. When the music ended after midnight, the floor was still crowded, the alums savoring every heartbeat.

Greenfield police chief Bob Miller wrote the final entry. Not one incident of bad behavior was recorded. Quite a nice report card for the end of a long, long high school term.