Planning A Class Reunion - 40 Years Anyone?

A high school reunion is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter what level of success you’ve achieved in your life. The prospect of a high school reunion brings out the teenager in all of us. For some that may elicit fond memories of friends, early romantic interests and simpler times before the responsibility of being a grown up kicked in. For others that endured tormenting or bully behavior, your view of a reunion may be tied closely to how you managed to navigate those tough times.

In its most basic form the planning for a class reunion is like planning any other function - select a date, a venue(s), possibly some activities, establish prices, market and promote the event, and keep your fingers crossed that people want to attend. But, it's really so much more.

Is it possible we've known each other for 50 years?

There is something just a little different when you're involved in planning an event and trying to gather people together - some who you've known for just about 50 years. The sentimental notion is that you can gather all of your classmates together every five or ten years, but the reality is (and always was) that once that diploma was handed out and everyone was turned loose into the world we would never all gather together again.

By the time we got to Woodstock

I grew up in rural upstate NY in Ulster County near the town of Woodstock (not the concert site, but the town). It was a great place to grow up, and the school district was one of the largest, geographically speaking (or so I remember – or misremember) in the state. In the heart of IBM country in the 70's there were a number of kids that were here one year and gone the next, but it wasn’t uncommon for you to go to school with some kids for the entire twelve years (hence the 50 years of knowing each other). Contrast that with where I live today (Monmouth County, NJ) where our regional school district has something like 11,000 kids that, by the time they get to high school, have five (or more) schools to choose from (depending on what they may want to specialize in). With social media they can keep track of each other no matter where they go to school. But, I digress.

There were about 212 in our graduating class, and as classes go I think we’ve done a pretty good job of putting reunions together. I personally got involved later on (about 15 years in), and have had a hand in organizing just about every event we’ve had since then.

Enthusiasm

This runs the gamut. I have some people that are very interested in getting together and others that wouldn’t attend if we rolled up a limo to their door and picked them up. Some of the popular kids in school don’t have any interest in coming back, and the kids that you barely knew back then are some of the more engaged ones. I've had people reach out that went to elementary school with some classmates and want to reconnect.

Tools of the trade & our formula

The popular choice is to do everything on Facebook, but I utilize Class Creator (www.classcreator.com). I've maintained a website for our class for just about 10 years, and I find the interface easy-to-use. We generally offer a free event on the first night (typically Friday) and a sit-down dinner for Saturday night. If we can work in an activity on Saturday morning we'll try and squeeze that in too. Since we don't have any money to work with to start things up we'll offer sponsorship positions as a means of helping to defray some costs. We try and price the event at a reasonable level to make it accessible to everyone.

“And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around”

One of the big concerns is what everyone's motivation is for attending a reunion. We’re at the stage in our lives where some of us have been fortunate enough to retire, for others our careers are on the back nine, others may never have achieved the level of success they envisioned. The interesting thing about career discussions at reunions is that I don't hear a whole lot of them. Most conversation is always related to family and children, where we live (and how we got there). These days though I'm guessing that some amount of time will be dedicated to discussing health issues.

Drift back in time and find your feet down on Main Street

This is the one time when parents (and some who are now grandparents) can transport themselves back in time to when they were 18 (or younger) - forgetting their responsibilities and concerns for a day or two and enjoy seeing some folks that they may have known for 40 or 50 years. Now as one of the reunion organizers I just need to make sure that we don't screw up the planning, promotion and execution.

Have a great week!

Dave

4/9/19

Next week: 3 day commuter into NYC on NJ Transit