HOW TO ORGANIZE A CLASS REUNION---CLASS OF 1961 UNION HIGH SCHOOL

Our Class of 1961 organizer, Sue.  Photos by Dave Hayes, our official photographer.

To organize and keep a Class connected you need someone like Sue, an organized, caring, lovely lady.  Last year Sue, with the help of good friends from the Class of 1961, organized a terrific 50 Year Class Reunion.  However what she did after the reunion is what I think is so great. 

With the help of social media, we may be 51 years from our high school graduations but we do keep up with technology to the best of our ability, Sue has organized the Union High Class of 1961 Breakfast Club.  Once a month we meet at the same restaurant at the same time to have lots of fun and reminisce.  She also posts obituaries from the Grand Rapids Press to keep us all current with losses to our Class.



Union High Class of 1961 Breakfast Club

I left Grand Rapids to go to college and life just never brought me back to the city to live.  I never went to a reunion until a friend insisted I go to my 50th.  My friend even went with me as I had lost Tom just months before the event and didn't feel comfortable in new situations.  I guess I didn't go to reunions because I thought no one would remember me or care that I was there.  When I did go, I reconnected with my friends and it was like we had never been apart.  We just picked up from where we had left off 50 years ago.  Thank you, Mary, for taking me to my reunion.

 

Our Class Breakfasts are a roaring success as far as I am concerned.  Every month there are more people who attend.  The great part of our Class Breakfasts is that we have a chance to meet and talk with classmates that we didn't know when we were in school.  Union High was a very large old school with classes from 7th to 12 grade.  Lots of people, lots of different interests, lots of classes, lots of hallways, and different floors to the building.  Now we meet in a small restaurants and our interests are all the same.  Do you remember this theater, that teacher, how did we get so old?  I must say I feel I have made really good new friends from those I reconnected with and those who I had no idea they were in at Union.  What fun.

This past Monday we learned there are other Class Breakfast Clubs.  There are those of us who find it difficult to leave the restaurant as we are having so much fun.  As we were talking, breakfast long done and dishes removed, a group of women filed up to the cash register.  The woman at the end of the line said to our group that they were a Class Breakfast Club too.  We asked what school?  Union.  So are we!!  What Class, we are 1961.  Class of 1943.  What a strange world we live in, the majority of the Class of 1961 was born in 1943.  We had poodle skirts and rock 'n roll, they had World War II, but we still shared a common joy----breakfast with classmates.