50 Year Class Reunion - WHAT????

 It just can't be that I've been out of school for 50 years!!!!  Where has the time gone?  I have always thought in the past when I saw pictures of people celebrating this that they looked SO OLD!!  Can it really be that I'M in that group now?  WOW - JUST WOW!

Our date for the reunion was set for Sept. 25th - I had asked if they would have it in the late spring when I KNEW that we were having our sisters get together but that didn't happen - sigh.....  So I found myself flying to Iowa by myself as Glenn and I had already been back TWICE to Iowa this year!

I flew into Omaha on Friday early evening.  Headed to Denver early afternoon and was shocked when I drove to our usual parking area and saw a sign that it was FULL except for online reservations!!!!!  Luckily I had made a reservation online, only because it's 1/2 price to do it but I had NEVER made a reservation there before!!  Sure glad I did!!  Patty picked me up (with yummy Mexican food in the car for me to eat) and we headed to Soldier, watching intently for the deer!  And yes, we saw 3 deer along the way right by the highway and hit a racoon outside of Pisgah!

Saturday we enjoyed coffee together - Jim and Brenda came in and we walked up to their new house that is being built and got the grand tour - sure is going to be nice!  It was a beautiful day in Soldier and we enjoyed our time together!

My friend Sandy (from down the street) picked me up close to 5:00 and a bunch of us met at our old high school in Moorhead - a couple has bought it and are actually living in part of it!  We enjoyed meeting in the gym and listening to the gal tell us their plans for the school!

The grade above us, Class of 1970, had their reunion with us - theirs was cancelled the previous year due to COVID so the committee decided to have the 2 class reunions together - when you have graduating classes of 36 (class of 1970) and 40 (our class of 1971), of course you know everybody!

Our name tags were our senior class pictures which made it easy to recognize people!  The lighting in the gym was not great as you can see!

And when you hand your phone to someone to take pics, I've found you have to accept what you get - so a lot of mine were quite blurry!

We then went back to Soldier and met at the Community Building for social hour and dinner which was catered by AJ's in Ute.  I was SO disappointed that we had such a poor turnout - a lot of the locals within 50 miles did NOT come and that always makes me sad because there are some people I have not seen since we graduated!

One of the BEST things my senior year was the music!!  We had a fantastic music teacher (who drove us crazy of course but she was an awesome instructor) and since we had so many good singers in our class, we formed a group called Establishment 71 - the girls bought matching outfits in green and brown and we sang popular music!  We described ourselves as a "swing choir" and our audiences just loved the songs we sang and played - great times together that I will NEVER forget!!

Since we were only missing 2 people (and one was our foreign exchange student) we decided to recreate the picture from our 1971 annual!

Do you think we have changed?

Here's the class of 1970.

And here's our class of 1971!

It was a fun time to be together -we've lost 5 out of our class and I'm sure by the time we meet again, we will lose more.....

Sunday morning was coffee on Patty's porch before we headed back to Omaha for my flight home!  It's a short flight so that makes it really nice!  I enjoyed stopping at Jessi's to visit for an hour before I headed home, which took an hour longer due to an accident!  But at least I made it back home before dark!