Here’s to the 35th reunion of the class of 1969, St. Ansgar, Iowa. If you’re not from there don’t worry. You can exchange any of the numbers or the places or the names with those from your past and it all still applies. Reunions are the place we want to be when we can’t, and don’t want to be when we can. We’re all afraid of what we’ll see and feel when we walk in the reunion-gathering place for the first time. We want so desperately to know how our classmates turned out, even hoping to win their approval for the way we’ve negotiated our lives since then. Yup, that’s it in a nutshell: see and be seen!

At the end of high school I couldn’t get away from my hometown fast enough. The more I saw and the more freedom I had the less I wanted to return home. A town with a population of just over one-thousand, where the streets pretty well rolled up by 9:00, couldn’t compete with bigger cities like Ames, Iowa or Des Moines. College changed me dramatically. In high school, I was a combination of a class clown, struggling actor, and science geek, from a broken family that tried it’s best to be normal. In college, I was active in student government, got saved, went to graduate school, lost my glasses, shed my braces, and grew another 3 inches in height.

At my 5-year reunion I felt like an odd duck. Just back from spending a year as a missionary in East Africa, there was little I had in common with my fellow alumni who were still waiting for my one-liners or for me to do something stupid. Few of my close high school friends attended. Most of them were busy like me, going to grad school or the military or had moved out of the state. The class jokester in 1969, in 1974 I was a lot more serious and together, even had a girlfriend who is now my wife. I didn’t do much dating in high school because I had zero confidence and looked like the guy from “Revenge of the Nerds”. Honestly! I was 18 going on 14. Lots of us fit that bill. We didn’t have to grow up in small town America in high school, so we just didn’t. Wasn’t that a wonderful gift?

After that disaster, reunion notices kept getting lost as I moved from Ames, to Albany, New York; to Ft. Myers, Florida; St., Louis, Missouri; and finally Clearwater, Florida. Now, 35 years later, for some reason that little 3 by 5 reunion note card found its way into my mailbox. When I held it in my hand I suddenly became overwhelmed with emotion. For the first time, maybe the first time ever, I wanted to reconnect with my classmates, those people who knew me when we were all still trying to find our place in the world. I wanted to deliver some messages that I carried in my heart but couldn’t sort out or express until years later. Believe it or not I actually have some reoccurring dreams about being back in high school except this time I have all the skills and savvy of an adult.

Oddly enough, I’ve discovered we all have those same kind of high school flash backs or notes scratched in our hidden places. It’s time to clear them out. So feel free to retrieve your “secrets” and insert your own names in the places where my friends now appear.

To Bryan, my old acting buddy. I wish I could have shared more lines with you on stage but my parents wouldn’t let me. No joke. They thought acting might corrupt me. Acting is all I ever wanted to do, which may explain why I’ve been a TV news anchor for more than 30 years.

To Tom, my chemistry partner and otherwise unwitting protector. You were the Hulk and Einstein in one body. You taught me the meaning of fear going 120 miles an hour in your Camero on that dirt round between Stacyville and St. Ansgar. No wonder you’ve spent most of your life teaching rocket science in the military.

To Elaine and Valerie. You were both the stars and the moon in my secret life. Okay, at least they were serious crushes. Why on earth were you dating my friends? I wish I had the courage to ask you out back then. But, if you had said no… it would have been the end of the world for me. We silent hopeless romantics are so pitiful.

To the town of St. Ansgar. It’s only years later that I’ve come to appreciate the Ozzie and Harriet childhood I lived and the school district that delivered a first class education with top-notch teachers.

To Coach Kester. If you only knew how much I loved basketball and wanted to have just one chance, one chance to show you what I could do. I’ll bet you didn’t know that one-year out of high school I was invited to tryout for a major university team even though I never played more than 5 minutes a game in high school. Someone there believed in me. Self-confidence is often a gift coaches can deliver with just one ounce of encouragement or destroy with their silence.

To the Stacyville girls. Thank God for consolidation and a new pool of “babes.” You Catholic girls taught many of us ugly ducklings more about having fun and acceptance than any sermon. You were my favorite dancing partners.

To all those classmates I barely knew. I’m sorry I didn’t go out of my way to get to know you better back then. I could have been a lot more encouraging.

And to all of my classmates who chose to stay in St. Ansgar or maybe ended up there by mistake or by good fortune. Forgive me and others who don’t make it back to class reunions. In some ways we are jealous that you’ve been able to carry on from 1969 to 2004 without dropping a beat in the shadows of our memories. On the other hand, some of us have changed so much both physically and emotionally that we don’t resemble anything like the black and white images pressed between the covers of our red yearbook.

So I guess we’ll continue ignoring the yearly notices or lamenting that, “the date just doesn’t work into my schedule.” We’ll try to explain what it was like “back then” to our kids who are now having their own reunions. In the grand scheme of things four years in high school goes by now like a dash at the end of a sentence-. Yet, oh how much that dash meant when we were living it.

Please! Remember us poor reunion skippers tonight as you toast the Class of 1969. We are with you in spirit. We hold you in a place where you haven’t aged, or gained a pound, or lost a step, and that can’t be all bad.

PS. Please send me pictures of the reunion with names to identify the subjects. I’ll think about sending you mine after I’ve seen all of yours.

Al Ruechel, Copyright 2004, All Rights Reserved

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