What I Learned at My 50-Year High School Reunion

However nerdy we were, we are now all cool.

By
Published July 25, 2024
illustration of woman attending her high school's 50th reunion
Jared Oriel

My friend Juliann wore a colorful Lilly Pulitzer shift dress and lipstick in bold “look at me” red.

She’d turn heads on any day, but on this day, her presentation was particularly keen. It was our 50-year high school reunion, that once-in-a-lifetime weekend when insecurities installed as far back as in the first grade return like emotional boomerangs.

Juliann slathered her lips in a fresh coat of crimson and whispered to me: “You see Larry over there? He teased me from elementary school on because I was overweight. He tormented me! By our 20th reunion, I had lost weight and wore a size 8, and I walked right up to him and said, ‘Hey, Larry! Who you gonna call Fatty now?’”

Ah, reunions — the universe’s opportunity for a redo.

Today, Juliann and Larry are friends. She is thinner than he is, as if that matters. There’s no such thing as a wallflower at a 50-year reunion. If you’re brave enough to show up, you’ve bloomed.

The smart kids, the jocks, the cheerleaders, the stoners, the beauty queens, the theater nerds, the band nerds, the lonely nerds — after 50 years, we’ve simmered into one stew.

I’ve been to every reunion of Lake Worth High School’s Class of 1974. I felt comfortable in high school as a solid member of the B Team. If my acne had cleared up, I might have had a shot at the A Team for one hot second, but I found the B, C and D teams more interesting anyway, as people with something to prove often are. Hence, I became the editor of the school newspaper.

Here’s what I know after 50 years…

Roots matter. High school puts people in containers, like flowers planted in rows. This one’s tall and skinny, this one’s squat and bushy, this one grows only in direct light and this one relishes the shade. No matter how differently you blossom, there’s value in being rooted in the same place.

My class was cultivated in a literal hothouse: Lake Worth High School, built in 1922, the oldest continuously open high school in Palm Beach County, Florida. By 1974, many of our classrooms were still not air-conditioned. In this peaty mix, our class of 505 grew, and we smelled peaty, too — all those teenage hormones mixed with sweat and chlorine from the school pool and salt from the ocean two miles away, just point your bike due east.

Winds of change turned up the heat in 1971, when we were sophomores. Forced integration brought forced busing — and launched us into a wider world. We proved resilient.

It’s never too late to be kind. Take it from Juliann and Larry — one apology can heal decades of hurt. And who knows what secret fears a classmate might feel?

A woman wearing sunglasses approached me at this reunion. “Hi, Jan, you won’t remember me,” she began. “I only went to Lake Worth High for my senior year, then I moved away.” But when Laurie Proffitt told me her name, I did remember. “You have the most beautiful blue eyes,” I said. Laurie pulled her sunglasses down — and sure enough, there were those crystal-blue eyes, now with a few wisdom wrinkles.

Laurie had moved to the Midwest and lost touch with us, but when she heard about our reunion on Facebook, she thought, “Why not?” Now she’s back in the fold with her new old friends.

It can take time to become comfortable in your own skin. I’ve known Marc Gold since I moved to Lake Worth in fourth grade. My 9-year-old mind reduced him to kid-code: “Smart, nice, semi-cool dude who lives over by the ballpark next to the tall and smart Ken Simmons.”

Marc was shocked when I told him I always thought he was cool. He thought he was the world’s biggest nerd, and so unsure of himself compared to Ken, who announced in elementary school that he would become a veterinarian. If not for one classmate of ours — the kind and model-beautiful Vicki Mason — Marc said he might have never felt he belonged. “Vicki had a way of making me feel I was special,” he said.

He was speaking to Vicki’s high school sweetheart, her husband, Tom, at Vicki’s memorial dinner.

Too quickly, old friends become absent friends. Vicki died April 18, the day before our reunion, of complications from the dementia that stole her voice but never her smile. Ken Simmons did become a vet — one of the most successful vets in Florida. He died five years ago when the Piper Saratoga he was piloting vanished in bad weather during a flight to the Bahamas. His wife, Alice, and their two golden retrievers perished with him.

Nearly 50 of our classmates are gone now, though they remain with us at every reunion … especially now.

Life requires us to begin anew, over and over again. Vicki’s husband Tom must now begin anew without his love of 52 years. Juliann has outlived two husbands and now enters another new chapter — retirement from her education career. Two other high school friends are facing divorce after being married for 45 years.

One of them, Pirjo, felt bereft when her husband left, but she knew where to find comfort and courage. She got in her car and drove to Massachusetts, to the home of her dear high school friend Jan. “I drove through New York City twice!” Pirjo exclaimed, hardly believing her bravery.

Life is a mental and physical traffic jam of transitions. They keep coming, and we must keep going. That’s the biggest lesson from my 50-year reunion: when life calls us to begin again, it’s our old friends who remind us that we can … because they were there when we first began.

 

Have any of you attended a high school reunion? How did it go? Let us know in the comments below.

Jan Tuckwood is an award-winning journalist who was associate editor and revenue content director of The Palm Beach Post for 30 years. She’s also a former fashion editor of The Denver Post, and her work has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Glamour magazine, among other publications. She is the editor of five books, including the official history book of Palm Beach County, and she is the co-author of Too Young to Be Old, the 2022 memoir of Diane Gilman, HSN’s “Jean Queen.”