Class reunions are measure of who we were, and are
Debbie Gardner
By Debbie Gardner
debbieg@thereminder.com
I've only gone to one class reunion of any kind - my high school's 10-year reunion.
To me, it was a bit of a disappointment. Other than the two surprises – one young man who was on the top of the assistant principal's daily troublemaker list showed up in a state trooper's uniform, another quiet kid came in the sackcloth and ashes of a religious order – most everyone still seemed to be pretty much the same kind of person.
Never one of the "in" crowd, even as a married woman with a solid career as a writer, I felt like an outsider.
I think that's what fascinated me so much about the documentary, "Turning Pages," that's the focus of PRIME's feature story this month.
I wondered what it was like to look back across 50 years of living.
Bob Van Degna, one of the producers of the documentary about the Schenectady. N.Y. Niskayuna High School class of 1962, felt much the same way when he conceived the project.
"When you think about your 50th reunion (in high school), you think they are going to drive you there) in a bus, or bring you in a wheelchair," Van Degna said. "['Turning Pages'] says we're 68 but we're not giving up, we still have a lot to do.
"It was great to show a generation that is so alive and still out doing many things," he added.
Don Wilcock, who also helped produce the film, said the experience of making the film itself was a kind of testament to his generation.
"Here we were at 68 years old making a film, doing something somebody might be doing if they were 20 years old and had just graduated from film school," Wilcock noted.
A seasoned interviewer accustomed to cutting to the quick with music celebrities, Wilcock said he went "right for the jugular" in his interviews with fellow classmates, trying to uncover "What is a 68-year-old person like and how different are we from our parents at that age?
"The thing that got me, none of these people we interviewed [were] sitting an a chair reading books all day," he added.
Van Degna said the biggest surprise for the three producers, none of whom were friends or even acquaintances in high school – was discovering how little any of them really knew about the people the went to school with every day.
Anna Polesny, the third producer, noted that the trio learned one of their classmates had lost both parents while in high school.
"No one knew," she said. In another case, a very bright boy who had brilliant parents lived a life that, today, would have been considered neglect.
"He said, 'They fed me, that's about all,' during the interview" Polesny recalled. "[Interviewees] talked about things for public consumption that you don't talk about at a dinner party."
The rapid changes in society in the late 1960s and 70s were also a theme that permeated the interviews. Pat Shumann, a classmate who now lives near Polesny in Northampton, Mass., recalled how different society seemed to her when she moved from upstate New York to Boston in 1967.
"You could see a lot of the morals changing. With Vietnam you could see a lot of self-expression going on," Schumann said.
The swing culminated for her when, after a battle with infertility she became pregnant at 32 and, "The nurse asked me what I wanted to do."
That she said, was an example of the shift in women's rights to their own reproductive heath brought about by Roe vs. Wade.
Polesny said classmates talked about many things – divorces, open marriages, illnesses, the death of children. Within the 25 people, they did cover a lot of the changes their generation saw. But even Van Degna admitted that, if he had to do it again, he would have looked to broaden the scope even beyond the topics touched upon.
"Someone asked me, 'If you had done the film on the different high school in town, the urban one, would it have looked the same?'"
Still, as Wilcock observed, it seemed 50 years out of high school, everyone they spoke to had somehow reached a point where they had "found their bliss."
Perhaps that's the lesson. Aging, as one classmate observed, "is mandatory."
So are the ups and downs of life.
Maybe I should try and make my next high school class reunion.
