DALLAS TWP. — From the parking lot at Newberry Estate Appletree Terrace, the event sounded like any other Saturday night cocktail party.
And it looked like just another weekend in the venue with men in dress casual togs and women in dresses and high-heeled sandals. Wait staff passed through the crowd with trays of hors d’oeuvres and bartenders filled drink orders.
On closer look, though, those men and women were wearing name tags. And what seemed to be cocktail-party chatter was, instead, lots of catching up on old times.
That’s when it became obvious these were former classmates enjoying time together after roughly 35 years since they’d picked up their diplomas from Dallas High School. The term “roughly” applies because some in the crowd actually did graduate in 1980, but graduates from 1979 and 1981 came together, as well.
“It’s just that the class officers from those other classes never managed to put reunions together,” said 1980 class president Mike Getz. “And, frankly, lots of us have spouses from those other classes; we were all close. So, it made sense to combine the groups for a big reunion.”
Getz, who now lives in Muncy and is chief operating officer of an equipment leasing company, did his part with local alumni, including Sue Petty Van Horn, Suzanne Williams Gallagher, Karen Brace Hodle and Bob Besecker, to pull the party together as they have every five years since commencement ceremonies three decades ago.
In all, the planners got just under 150 Dallas alumni together for the evening.
And Getz wasn’t the only one who traveled a few miles for the occasion.
“I always come back. I haven’t missed one of these,” said Andrea Fiorini, a member of the Class of 1980. She now lives in North Carolina and brought her daughter, Allyson Frazier, to the party. Frazier is one of Fiorini’s five children and eight grandchildren whose photos might have become part of the evening’s conversations.
Fiorini, though, was more interested in finding her own photo in the display of Shavertown Elementary School class pictures from kindergarten through fifth grade on the sign-in table. They sat along with photos from the previous reunion held during the Christmas season five years ago.
Other conversations filled the terrace overlooking the swimming pool and inside near the dining room where friends could also grab fun pictures of themselves in the photo booth near the table of appetizers.
“We dated – sort of – in high school,” said Margie Luke Banks, as she and her husband, Chris, chatted with friends. The Dallas couple is now retired, she after working with the Children’s Service Center in Wilkes-Barre, and he in construction. After they married in 1983, they raised five youngsters and now have five grandchildren with another coming in November.
They shared fun stories with Terry Eckert, who graduated from Lake-Lehman High School in 1980 and who dated her now-husband, Lee, a 1980 Dallas High School graduate.
“I might as well have been a Dallas kid,” Terry said. “I was always over there and I really know just about everybody here anyway.”
She has been a realtor for 31 years and doesn’t plan to retire because she enjoys her job too much.
The years added a few pounds to some, gave others a few gray hairs — and in some cases, less hair. Those years also helped the insecure, shy and awkward high schoolers to find themselves and come back together with old friends and a new perspective on the world.
“I was a really shy kid in high school,” said Bill Smith, of Dallas, now sporting a gray goatee and tattoos from his 12-year career in the U.S. Navy where he served as an electronics technician on a submarine. “When I graduated, I never thought I’d spend even one day in the military, but it turned into 12 years. You just never know when you’re a kid where you’ll go.”
Smith and classmate Craig Duffield swapped stories about favorite teachers and adventures in math class. They noted they were amazed that the trigonometry that had baffled them in high school became part of their lives years after. Duffield, now living in Sunbury and sporting blue dye on his own goatee, also works in electronics.
Smith said his wife, Donna, also a 1979 graduate, urged him to go to the reunion. She got into conversations about their lives since they married shortly after graduation. Donna said the “Navy years” were tough at times, especially when she was alone with two children in Groton, Connecticut, while Bill served at the U.S. Submarine Base in Holy Loch near Dunoon, Argyll in Scotland.
“We’ve all changed since those years,” he said. “Now we don’t have to be concerned about what the others think. We know who we are; we all know what we’ve accomplished and what we can do. Now we’re here just to enjoy ourselves and catch up with old friends.”
After the grand dinner, the photos and what Getz referred to as the “festivities,” the party ended with everyone taking home a scroll, bound in a ribbon of Dallas High School blue with contact information from all the attendees. They’ll have the chance to keep in touch. And, in five more years, when there are a few more gray hairs, perhaps a few more grandchildren and a few more retirements, they plan to get together again.
