Three Cheers for Crescent

Crescent Heights High School Reunion
Friday, Oct 8, 2010

Greg’s friend, Tom Tait, (who, by the way is responsible for getting him into the foreign service) is on the Crescent Heights High School Reunion Alumni Executive. That is how Greg knew that there would be two events – a tour of the school on Friday and a dinner and dance at the Thornecliffe Community Association on Saturday. Greg drove in from B.C. to attend the reunion and to look for the class of 1960. That looked like the perfect chance for me to come along and look for the class of 1958. Fran Van San, a member of his class, lived up on 16th Avenue and attended Briar Hill School, and also Crescent Heights High School and is another amazing force on the organizing committee.

Greg and I took the tour of the school, visiting the sewing classroom for me, and Greg standing at the doors of the mechanics classroom, saying how sweet the smell was, and wishing again that he could have taken that elective, but it was always full or didn’t fit into his schedule. Between a longing for automotives and the art class (which didn’t fit his schedule either), he had a chance to look at a past not lived.

The tables were set up so that you could find someone from the class of the 40’s ’50’s, the ’60’s, the 70’s. I couldn’t find anyone from my 1958 class until later in the evening when I saw Barbara Rawsthorne, my old Mormon friend from elementary school and Diane Card, my Mormon friend from high school.

Greg and I had walked the halls, finding the graduating pictures of both of our classes.

I slipped back to that spot later, alone. I was hoping that someone in that class might be there, lingering over the pictures on the wall. I read through every name and looked at each picture. We were a composite high-school with both academic and technical streams. Home-rooms and option interests sorted students, so there would be kids there I knew from church, but didn’t really compute were in my year at school. That recognition was fun, as was the exercise of looking at the young faces of my then friends. One guy even had the collar of his jacket turned up. How rebel was that!

The reunion invitation asked people to bring along their old school sweaters, their old beanies and Bugles. My year book burned when my garage went down. I couldn’t find one piece of memorabilia, not even a pin, but I recognized the sweaters and the football jackets that some of the men wore. Greg jogged my memory about youthful lust for those items – too expensive for some of us to buy. And the high school letters – a big red “C” – I got one for being on the volleyball and basketball team and every subsequent year, a bar was presented at the yearly Academic banquet. I just didn’t have the dollars to buy one of those great sweaters to put it on. Greg laughed and said yes, those sweaters or frat jackets were signs of having arrived. He had neither, either.

We visited the cafeteria. Lemming-like, I was driven to look for the spot where my group sat – a studious little bunch that wolfed our lunches in 15 minutes – 20 max -- and headed out to the study hall for the rest of the lunch hour. I wanted to reach into my pocket and bring out $.25 to drop into the box, then pick up a carton of chocolate milk.

Greg said that the biggest disappointment of the night was that so much had changed. He was hoping that it would have all been the same – but there were new wings to the school, new photographs on the walls and a new paint job on the auditorium where the school operetta had been presented.

I don’t know who had more fun, Greg or me. His best story of the night was from a woman who introduced herself to an old classmate, and the classmate said, “I don’t think I remember you.”

She said, “Well, we dated for two years.”

My best time of the night was singing the old school song with the band: “Three cheers for Crescent / hip hip hurray / She is the school we fight for each day ....” Even Greg remembered the words a few lines into the song. My second best time of the night was the tales from someone from the class of 1943 who stopped to chat with us. Two classes of Grade Nines from Balmoral Junior High School have had yearly events since they got to Crescent, meeting over the years to have a spring lunch together. Now those who can still dtrive and are still alive, arrange to pick up the others. They mostly trade stories about their grandchildren he said, though they all agree that education with private interests, special-interests, and home-school has changed the democratizing slice of life they had in their classrooms.

Saturday, Oct 9 2010

I didn’t know if I would meet any more people on the second night than I had on the first night. Greg knew that his old friend’s Rotary Club was catering the BBQ for the evening, so he had hopes of meeting at least one more person.

Greg heard the that our high school had no strong alumni association until someone left a significant bequest in their will to the high school. There was no mechanism to process the money, so the funds that are used by the Calgary Board of Education. That is how an alumni association for our school was born. A golf tournament is held yearly.

A big reunion happens every five years and this year’s reunion was created to create the data base for the next reunion – an email data base with a request that each of us should get in touch with 10 people we know from our class so that the size of the reunion would double.

High school dances were held after boys basketball games. The bleachers were pushed back and records spun, though I was too shy to have ever stayed for those. I am wondering now if I was afraid I would be asked to dance and didn’t know how, or that I wouldn’t be asked and be a humiliated geek. Either way, I shot out that gymnasium door before the dancing had begun in those days.

Greg danced me through every possible step combination last night – a little rumba, a little cha-cha, some two step, and the jive, a little swing. I did ask Greg to count out the rumba for me for the first few measures. Then I was good to go. Our hardest song to dance was the one where the singer’s rubbato on melody line made us both laugh about how hard it was for our feet to keep up a steady rhythm when there wasn’t one.

Part of the time we sat at our banquet table watching other dancers. You could tell which of the guys had been snappy dancers. It didn’t matter what shape their upper bodies were in, some skinny as rails, other bulbous, their feet could really talk the dance steps of the 50’s and 60’s.

“I made the biggest mistake of my life. I married right out of high school.” I heard that phrase many times on Friday night when people would begin to answer the question, “What have you been doing over the years?” Ouch! A hard question for more than the women. Surviving long enough to get to the reunion is actually a feat in itself, at least for some who were in my graduating class.

The woman I sat by at the banquet was from a class the year after me. She had taken one year at the University of Alberta, Calgary Campus, as I had. Of course we hadn’t known each other, because the first year of university was all that was offered, and then you made a transfer. She went to UBC, and straight into a PHD chemistry stream. She belongs now to the Artists Association of Alberta, and this week auditioned to play in the Calgary Baroque Orchestra. Her aunt from the class of 1941 was across the table from us. She lived on Crescent Road, a 3 minute dash before 9 am got her to the high school on time. She said, of living in that prime real estate location, that the saddest moment of her childhood was when the Mormon Crescent Road Chapel was built and she lost what had been an empty lot / miniature golf course.

Each decade came to the front to have their picture taken. I sat by Donna Suitor, a woman who grew up one block over from 16A, the street we lived on.

Greg phoned this morning to ask me how I had survived the exercise on the dance floor last night. I wanted to tell him that I could have danced all night.

Arta

PS Our tour guide was a CHHS student who took us to her own history class room. On the board was written, "Think for yourself. Your teacher may be wrong." I have no idea why that that has touched me all day.