The 50th High School Reunion

I really need to tell you a little about the Class Reunion. It was the 50th Reunion for the Class of 1960 of Johnson High School in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

I didn’t go to any of the other reunions because I thought that it would just be another time when a bunch of people who didn’t really know each other sat around trying to impress each other with lies and BS. After talking to some good friends who attended all of them, I found that I was exactly right.

There were 506 who graduated in the Johnson Class of 1960, and probably about 300 attended. For my reader’s information I graduated 55th, and that was with a schedule that included: three years of Latin, two years of French, Geometry and higher algebra, biology, chemistry and physics, three years of history/social sciences and three years of English. My senior year, I was the only boy in a class with 22 girls who took advanced English. This class concentrated on teaching you to write themes and reports at a college level. It was one of the best classes that I ever took. Well, that is enough about that.

I was really happy that I didn’t encounter any of the nonsense that occurred at the earlier reunions. It was like retirement had become a “leveler” and everyone was back to being classmates.

Johnson was a blue-collar high school on the Eastside of Saint Paul in 1960. In some ways the movie “Blackboard Jungle” could have been filmed there. It had the usual amount of cliques and groups that were exclusive, but there was more ability to bridge from one group to another, and to have friends that were in many different groups. I was fortunate to have friends in several groups.

There were some really “badass” guys wearing the black t-shirts with their cigarettes rolled up in the sleeves. There was an area in the parking lot where smoking was condoned (it was of course illegal unless you were 18), but there was a lot of times that people were caught smoking in the bathrooms. Sometimes when you went into the boy’s bathroom, the air was actually blue because of all the cigarette smoke. The “Charlie Brown” of the late fifties song was alive and well at Johnson.

The strange and wonderful thing is that this class produced at least a dozen PhDs, (including one who worked for NASA) a couple of MDs, a couple of DDS’s, and ten or more CEOs of major corporations. But we won’t go into how many were incarcerated or ended up being shot during the commission of a crime. That would be just a “guesstimate” at any rate.

Most of those that attended shared some fondness for each other, and I would have loved to have been able to spend more time with them.


…and that’s the absolute truth…give or take a lie or two!