Some of the most popular kids will be coming back to town again in June. The Naperville High School alums will have plenty to celebrate. Logging 65 years since graduation day is no small thing.
I sat down with a reunion organizer this week. Jean Anderson said all of the 1949-50 senior class officers at what was then the only high school in town are expected to attend the mid-June reunion, which will start with cocktails and catching up at her downtown Naperville home: Bruce Boecker, the class president; Jim Dudley, vice president; Valerie Uebele Dudley, secretary (Jean’s cochair and, yes, Jim’s high school sweetheart, long his spouse); Nancy Nelson Drummer, treasurer; and Bob Clemens, who was Student Council president that year (and later hired by The Sun as a photographer).
The gathering will continue a long string of reunions that have taken place faithfully, every five years, since commencement.
“We haven’t missed one,” said Jean, the former Jeanie Kester, who will turn 83 in April. “We were a pretty close-knit class.”
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And they still are, as far as I can tell. Jean – who lives with her husband, Bob Anderson, in the same fabulous old Naperville house where her mother was born in an upstairs bedroom long ago – keeps in touch with her former school chums, a connection made vastly easier since email arrived. But she has no idea exactly how many in the graduating class of exactly 100 are still living. She and Valerie recently sent out fliers letting everyone know about the reunion, but they really don’t know how many to expect.
“Right away, one (classmate’s son) responded that his mother just died,” she said. “There’s too much of that.”
They aren’t likely to dwell on who’s absent among them, though. There will be lots of reminiscing, and plenty of exploring to do. The classmates will dine together on both nights of the weekend-long event, but their days will be open.
“We’re going to leave everyone to their own devices,” Jean said. “Most people would like free time. If they don’t live here anymore, they want to see what it looks like now.”
They’ll surely notice big differences from circa-1950 Naperville. The town had barely 7,000 residents the year they all graduated, at the threshold of a decade that would see the population swell by more than 84 percent.
With relatives active in the city’s business community since the mid-1800s, Jean and her family go way back. But so do her classmates.
“Some of these kids have roots that go way back to the beginning of Naperville,” she said, leafing through the 1950 edition of the Arrowhead yearbook.
In their high school heyday, it was the sort of community where everybody knew everybody else, “and everybody else’s business,” she said. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s become a less special place, or less spirited in its human interaction, as the years have passed.
“You lose something when you get size,” Jean said. “We still have a wonderful town, but I don’t think it’s any more contentious than it used to be. … People are who they are.”
And that remains true, no matter how many years go by.
Twitter @scarlman