|
Reunions Renew
Friendships
|
||
|
Sheffield High Class of 1956 to celebrate 50th Reunion June 2-3
Tough as nails, hard as bricks; Sheffield High, Fifty-six! ---Aaron Newborn, SHS Class of 1956
|
||
|
Looking back over the span of almost 50 years since my graduation
from Sheffield High School on June 5, 1956, I am struck by my thoughts of
people more so than events. I
know that the conventional wisdom expressed by planners of reunions in
their efforts to encourage attendance at a reunion is "Let's get
together and remember the good old times we had as youth."
I mostly remember the people in my life back then—classmates,
teachers, our principal--Mr. Carl Boley, some store keepers, my family,
fellow parishioners, and a host of others.
Don't get me wrong, there are outstandingly memorable events in my
mind's eye, but my strongest and most emotion-filled thoughts concern the
personalities and character of those people with whom I had contact. Of course, I have learned over time that my original opinions
about some of those folk were wrong, and I have come to have a better
understanding of them as I have learned more about them.
One of the best ways to learn more about one's classmates is to be
active in some aspect of the reunion planning that forces you to make
contact with them. In my
case, it was the creation of a website that I developed solely for the
purpose of generating enthusiasm among classmates to attend our
"Golden" reunion, this year.
I have sent letters,
sent e-mail, made telephone calls and talked face-to-face to many of my
classmates, asking them to participate in the creation of the website
(www.shsclassof1956.org). Many
have sent photos, memorabilia, short stories from their memories about
"the good old days" and our teachers.
When this give and take began to occur, I received more than the
physical things or memories of high school that I was begging for.
I began to sense the warm feelings of friendship.
Almost without exception, when I was able to make contact with a
classmate, I could feel the welcome and the cooperation that made this
project so rewarding. Classmates
with whom I had never really had a relationship are now faithful "pen
pals"—or, rather, "e-mail pals."
Classmates with whom I had had close friendship in grade school and
high school, but whom I hadn't seen or talked with in ages, are again fast
friends. I have been truly
blessed by this experience. I would like to relate a few of the special stories. Aaron ("Ron") Newborn didn't attend junior high school with those of us who went from Grade 1 to Grade 12 in the Sheffield City School system. In high school, he didn't participate in things like band, football, camera clubs and the like. He and I probably never spoke with each other, except maybe in passing. As a D. O. student, he was busy learning a vocation by practical experience. Even then, he demonstrated a creative streak and a rich sense of humor. He wrote the winning skit at the State D.O. Convention. Luckily for me, he responded to one of my plaintive pleas for materials by supplying me with a transcript of his skit, written and acted by him for the very first reunion of our class. It was a roast of classmates by characters representing Miss Mary Ella Hammond, our science teacher, and Mr. Boley. When the reunion planning committee agreed that it would be a good feature at one of the reunion events, I contacted him and he has been working on updating the "roast" enthusiastically for the upcoming event. More importantly for me, however, is the friendship that has evolved from only "acquaintance-ship." We have a relationship of mutual respect. I have hoodwinked him into thinking I am a brilliant, hot-shot webmaster, and I find him to be witty, knowledgeable, trustworthy, supportive and willing to help in any way I ask. He's full of great ideas for the website. He's great fun, tells great stories and speaks like an anchorman on the evening news. He's an example of the metamorphosis of "passing acquaintance" to friend. Bucky Locke is an example of an even greater metamorphosis. I didn't particularly like Bucky, because of an altercation in grade school that had occurred years before high school and my willingness to hold a grudge. I doubt that we ever spoke in high school, even though we attended Boys' State together. This is the reason your preachers tell you that it is blessed to forgive—not for what it does for the guy you forgive, but for what it does for you. Having gone our separate ways in high school and afterwards, I was surprised to meet and immediately like Bucky when I finally went to one of our reunions—the 45th reunion held in 2001. My low regard for Bucky was challenged right away when I learned that he was a faithful attendee of our reunions, although he lives over a thousand miles away. I learned that he faithfully cared for his parents and now his mother with frequent long range visits and management of their/her affairs. I learned that he had worked his way up through the ranks to become a high level manager of research and development in a major computer company before his retirement. I learned in our conversations that he, too, had a high regard for our high school teachers, and he had taken this caring feeling for teachers in general
|
to the point of being moved to honor them (past,
present and future teachers) by some sort of fund or project that would
enhance academic excellence at SHS. This
altruism impressed me the most, and I entered into discussions with him on
this topic with great wonderment—how could this be the guy that I didn't
like? His positive optimism
about the righteousness of our cause and its eventual success got me to
thinking that my former feelings about him were wrong.
With a bit of a feeling of shame, I finally confessed to him my
long-festering former dislike for him, and he, the paragon of a true
gentleman, actually apologized to me rather than the other way around as
it should have been. We count
ourselves the best of friends, now, and we are determined together to grow
the SHS Class of 1956 Fund of the Sheffield Education Foundation into a
major philanthropy that will help eliminate at-risk factors in students at
SHS, and, thereby, improve the academic excellence of our Alma Mater.
Farley Vaughn and I, along with Sam Malone, Andy Burch and others,
were friends from grade school. He's
in most of my grade school class pictures.
I remember playing war games on the cliff over the Tennessee River
with our B-B guns. We wore
thick outerwear and nobody lost an eye.
We were always over at each other's house, playing and having fun
together. We were in band together in high school, and still ran around
together a bit, but he increasingly had other interests such as
photography, and our friendship, though always there, was not on the front
burner all the time. After
high school, I don't think we communicated again until we both attended
the informal event at our 45th reunion—the barbeque at Sandra Foreman
Morris' home. This was at the end of Farley's career, and he was stretched
thin for time due to his popularity in Huntsville as a family portrait and
wedding photographer. But,
then, he learned that he had a serious illness, and complications of his
treatment had made his activities somewhat limited.
That's when we got together. He
responded to my queries of him for photographs I knew he would have
because he was our class photographer.
When he downsized his home so he and his wife wouldn't have to
climb stairs, he came across a box of old SHS photos and offered them to
me for use on the website. Most
of the prints were wonderfully sharp and clear, professionally
well-lighted exposures. Despite his claims that he couldn't make his hands work
right, I pressed him to work his professional photographer's magic on some
of the big pictures on the website and some of the badly preserved
pictures in his collection. The
first one he worked on (The Snow Fight, in "Girl Things" on the
website) came out wonderfully restored.
I continue to use this talent to improve the website.
Recently, he told me that he looks forward to getting up in the
mornings to go to work on these photos and thanked me for including him in
this project. That brought
tears to my eyes—I had actually done something that meant a lot to a
friend. We now have large
telephone bills due to our long conversations in which we are catching up
on things.
These are just three examples of how working on one phase of the
reunion planning has led to renewed or new friendships with class members. There are others, too. Some
are just simple renewals of friendships. Others involve surprising "acceptance" as one of
the "fellas," for
example, Jim and the Bulldog Breakfast crowd or the reunion planners
letting me budge my way into their planning process.
Yet other new friends are so new and the relationships are so
fragile that I cannot nor would not speak of them publicly.
I can truthfully say that I have been blessed many times over by
this activity. I have the distinct feeling that time has made all of us
equal, and we have found a use for what our parents called
"etiquette"—politeness, respect for others, and an attraction
toward peace and harmony rather than controversy and discord.
That's what I found at the 45th reunion.
In a previous article in this column, I told of how this feeling
led me to want 100% of our living classmates to experience the same
thing at our 50th reunion that is coming up soon, June 2-3.
Fifty-sixers, we'll see you there! Maybe we should change Ron's ditty to: Fun to be with, a bond that clicks; Sheffield
High School, Fifty-six! Note: For more information on the Golden Reunion Activities of The Class of 1956, visit their website, www.shsclassof1956.org.
|
|