By: ANDREW MOLLENAUER
In June, several Laurel High School class of 1965 alumni and their spouses gathered to reminisce and catch up during a three-day reunion.
Traveling to Laurel from as far away as Wyoming, Tennessee and North Carolina, the former classmates shared catered meals and posed for group pictures to document a long-overdue get-together. The group normally meets every five years but missed its 55th reunion due to the pandemic.
Laurel resident Jim Cross said that seeing one another after an uncharacteristically long hiatus was special.
“I mean, we grew up together, we were friends, we dated — we did all that stuff,” Cross, who played trumpet in the band and quarterback for the football team, said. He recalled with a chuckle class clowns whose antics made for memories he still enjoys decades later.
“It’s just been so good to see our friends,” Cross said. “We just need to get together more.”
Cross said that about 25 of his former classmates died between graduation and now — and others weren’t interested in participating. There were more than 150 students in the graduating class.
“But a lot of us are really like, ‘so good to see you,’ especially people coming from other states,” Cross said. “It’s just great.”
Betsy Welsh, who hosted a gathering at her house for the group, said name tags were helpful, as some in the group were hard to recognize after a decade.
“We renewed friendships,” Welsh said. “We had an opportunity to kind of see where people had been this last decade and before, and we talked about memories.”
Welsh said her high school math class inspired her to teach the subject for 40 years, mostly in Prince George’s County.
“I wasn’t thinking I was going to be a math teacher, so it was learning how to be very organized and how to move forward,” she said. “And there were so many things from that.”
Welsh looked back on her experience as a student during that time in American history. She started elementary school amid segregation, to which Laurel wasn’t immune.
“The kids who lived right down this street … were bused to Upper Marlboro,” she said. “My kids don’t believe it. It’s staggering. Our children can’t imagine how our lives have changed.”
Welsh also recalled the announcement of President Kennedy’s assassination over the school’s PA system as the dismissal bell rang.
“I remember it exactly,” Welsh said. “We were juniors in high school. It was surreal.”
Welsh said it’s been interesting hearing her former peers’ thoughts about current events during the reunion.
“To stand back and see [everyone] in one big circle, sharing … doesn’t happen if you don’t give an opportunity,” she said. “You find that people have different ideas, and certainly we’ve got the whole political spectrum, but we all look for things we had in common.”
The former classmates also had the opportunity to visit their old school building, now home to The Laurel Boys and Girls Club. Opened in 1899, the building was the first high school in Prince George’s County. The class of 1965 was the last to graduate from the old building.
“We’re the last and best class to graduate [from] the old Laurel High School,” Ken Boyer said. “And it was great fun. Some of these people I’ve known since elementary school; we’re still friends. We’d raise the roof on the place during wrestling matches.”
Boyer, a U.S. Navy veteran, takes pride in being an “almost native,” he said; his family moved to Laurel from Iowa when he was an infant. His father, who served in the Army, was stationed at Fort Meade, thus beginning the younger Boyer’s 20-year chapter in Laurel.
“It’s where I grew up,” he said. “My earliest memories are here. It’s home.”
Like Welsh, Boyer noted changes to the area since graduation. He was struck by how large the city is now.
“We all pretty much remember Laurel when it was a small town,” he said. “You could go south on Route 1 and you get out to just a little bit past Cherry Lane, and you were out of town; there was nothing until you got down to Beltsville. Laurel was Laurel. We didn’t have West Laurel or East Laurel. It was truly a small town — small-town America.”
But small-town is a reflection of more than a location, Boyer said. It’s a way of life.
“Everybody knew everybody, so [if] you do something wrong, the neighbor lady would whack you on the butt and send you home,” he joked.
For Cross, the reunion more than half a century after graduation was a sobering reminder of a cliche as old as time: Life is short. Now approaching his 80s, he is especially grateful to reconnect with old friends.
“You get to 77, and a lot of people are getting issues with their health, and you just can’t get up and go do stuff like you want to, so that’s part of it,” he said. “It’s kind of nice to at least get [some] out.”
Boyer, who lives in nearby Pasadena, appreciated reconnecting and reflected on what his classmates meant — and still mean — to him.
“It’s neat to have that kind of a base,” he said of the reunion. “We had everything. It was a fun place. It’s a lot of memories of Laurel. We rode our bikes everywhere when we were kids. It was just a great small town to grow up in.”