Why we go to our class reunion
By Paulette Tobin
In a few weeks, the Eureka High School Class of 1973 will get together for its 30-year class reunion. Registrations are trickling in, so I don't have a good idea yet of how many classmates will attend. But if our past reunions are any indication, we'll have a good turnout, and it will be a good time.
This will be our fifth class reunion since we
graduated on
I've been looking at the reunion pictures in our class scrapbook, the one Chris Heupel McGrann has done such a good job of keeping up over the years. Those photos sure bring back a lot of fun memories. Our five-year reunion in 1978 was at the lakeside picnic shelter. According to the clipping from the Northwest Blade, we drank beer, roasted a hog, hung out and played softball. About one-third of our class attended the reunion. In the photos, a lot of the guys have long hair and sideburns (although it may have been the last occasion on which any of us saw Wayne Frey whisker-free) and a lot of the girls have Farrah Fawcett Majors hair. Jim Fischer is wearing a white cowboy hat and lots of people are wearing bell bottoms. Several classmates are already married, or have brought their girlfriends/boyfriends/fiances to the party. In one of the photos, I'm smoking a cigarette and looking bored.
About two-thirds of our class showed up for our 10-year reunion in 1983. The class photo, taken the night of our banquet at the VFW, shows a lot of the guys wearing suits and ties and girls in dresses and hose. Our classmate Elmo Herman, now a pastor, gave the invocation that night and VJ Smith was master of ceremonies. Sheila Rau Rahja had just had a baby, and Chris Heupel McGrann was just about to deliver her first. Lots of people brought their spouses to the reunion, and there were lots of little children at the family picnic the next day at the lakeside picnic shelter. In one photo, Debbie Isaak is wearing a white cowboy hat.
At our 20-year reunion in 1993, we had a hog roast at the picnic shelter AND a steak fry at the country club. By then, Wayne Frey was in full-facial hair mode and in none of the photos are any of our classmates wearing suits, ties or panty hose. There are still quite a few little kids at the family picnic, and some bigger kids, too. Cindy Neuharth Hofland put together a fun slide show for the program at the country club, and VJ Smith had us all in stitches with his program. He read excerpts from Santa Claus letters that some of us had written to the Northwest Blade when we were 5 years old, and messages from former teachers, some of whom I'd been trying to forget for 20 years. The photos show that I am much fatter than I was in 1983. I look happy. Many of the photos are of us hugging each other. My favorite photo is the one of Myron Mettler and Larry Kauk singing karaoke. There are no photos of anyone wearing a cowboy hat, which is too bad.
In 1998, at our 25-year reunion, 42 of our
classmates showed up. We had a party at the picnic shelter Friday
night, a Saturday morning coffee and a golf outing, and a dinner and
dance at the VFW Saturday night, leading Gary
Krein to coin what became our reunion catch phrase: "We just
didn't have enough free time!" (We also discovered that we were no
longer able to consume two 16-gallon kegs of beer in one night.)
Charlie delivered a great program at our Saturday night dinner.
Debbie Isaak
Stickel brought a whole huge box of long-stemmed red roses.
Gerard Beutler announced he was going to
continue to host this Web site for our class. One of my favorite
photos in the scrapbook shows Robert Stamp wearing a crop insurance
cap and holding an ice scraper he won as door prizes, the latter
which must have come in very handy at his home in
When I look at these photos, I feel lucky to have
grown up in a place like
Of course, not all school memories are good ones, and class reunions are not for everybody. Some classmates will not be able to attend because of scheduling conflicts, others because it's just too far and too expensive. However, I hope that no classmate will stay away because he or she is worried what others will think about his/her appearance and/or circumstances after all these years. Let's face it -- all of us have taken our lumps and bumps, made mistakes and had our bad times over the years. We're old enough to be comfortable with who we are and what our lives have become, and still young enough to come together and have one really great party.
So I hope to see many of your in
(Paulette Haupt Tobin grew up on a
farm near