I went to an odd year reunion that turned out to be our 32nd. I missed the 45th, but am planning to attend another odd year reunion next year, the 48th. Facebook put me back in touch with people I had no contact with for many years.
I went to my 5th and won’t go to more. I went to a small public school with around 35 in my graduating class. We moved there when I was starting 10th grade and moved again right after I graduated. I now live over 2,000 miles away. I will go to that town to visit my sister, who still lives there, but not for a reunion. They all live in a different reality than I do.
No. I only spent 3 years with them (grades 10-12) and have no desire to go to one now, 40 years on. I’m FB friends with a couple, but that’s as far as it goes.
@VaBluebird, your fears are exactly what happened to me at my 50th. Lots of people remembered me, I remembered very few people. The food was truly awful! I left early.
I wasn’t interested in my high school class 50 years ago and I’m not interested now. I don’t even know if they have reunions.
Regarding people seeming much nicer 50 years later:
At my reunion, the girl who had been most popular (not in a mean way; she was extraordinarily nice) told me that during HS her parents were getting divorced and her mother announced she wanted custody of all of this girl’s six siblings but not this girl herself. She was going through a terrible time at home, and we had no idea. Even her HS BF, who was also at the reunion, was stunned.
I think that now that we are older, we know what’s important, we can let our guard down, and we can be more honest with each other. So we wind up getting to know people in a way we never could have in HS, and to me it’s genuinely refreshing.
My public high school had a graduating class of 550, with 95% of us going on to the state flagship. Since reunion planning was traditionally the responsibility of class officers, if you ran for office you understood you were going to be planning the reunions for the rest of your days. Our class president and secretary were high school sweet hearts and married immediately after college graduation. As expected, they organized a committee that planned an extravagant, multiple day party of a 10 year reunion. I hated to miss it but was living overseas.
Later I heard varying accounts from multiple sources including those directly involved. Lots of wild behavior at that reunion. But the most important story for this thread is that the male class president and one of the female committee members began an affair during the reunion planning year and two marriages blew up at the reunion, with two divorces in the months afterwards. And then there were shared custody arrangements of blended families that sounded totally overwhelming when they talked about their calendars in the following years.
There has not been another reunion. I’m wondering if anyone will try to plan a 50th. I’d like to see my old boyfriends. My best girlfriends also ended up being sorority sisters, so I’ve seen them more or less regularly over the years.
I went to the tenth and twentieth and there haven’t been others. We had a spontaneous reunion a few years ago when a well liked girl died of cancer, but I missed it since I live far away.
My experience was also good. We were a class of close to 400, very diverse, and I found that the old barriers and cliques were gone when I went back. I remember at our tenth someone came and talked to me and said he had been intimidated by me when we were growing up. I laughed and said I was surprised because I did not see myself as scary at all, that I was a nerdy girl who had been intimidated by the cool kids.
I keep up on Facebook. I enjoy seeing where people have ended up, especially the surprises, like those who renounced their big jobs to live on the land or finally came out as gay. We have had more than our share of deaths from disease or accidents, which isn’t nice.
I did not enjoy my time in high school and was happy to move on. When the 50th rolled around, I did RSVP in the negative and spoke on the phone with the organizer, thanking him for all his efforts. I later learned I was one of the few that even acknowledged the receiving the invitation. The follow-up report on the event indicated only about 10 percent of the class attended. I found that kind of a sad commentary on how many of us seemed to remember high school days.
I went to my 10th. I think that’s the only one there’s been - we just passed 30.
I went to a small public, not in NJ, with about 60 in the graduating class. Only 1 person I was truly friends with in HS showed up, I think because most of my friends went to college and moved away. Basically the reunion was a rented hall at a summer resort. Someone put a boom box on the counter and a keg in the middle of floor! My friend’s wife and I were in nice but not fancy dresses; my friend and my husband wore suits. Most everyone else were in jeans and Harley t-shirts or the like. The 4 of us kind of sat off by ourselves and chatted.
Nowadays there is a Facebook group, and I’m friends with the ones I want to be friends with. I doubt there will be any more reunions.
When are your reunions held?
My class reunions are Thanksgiving weekend. I live across the country from where I went to high school and haven’t travelled over the holiday although I was tempted last year.
I need to say…the 10th HS reunion was like going to the senior prom. Really…not much had changed.
By the 20th, folks were more settled and established, and some of the old crap no longer was evident…but some was.
By the 30th, we were all talking about our own futures, and having some good times remembering different POV from HS, and even Jr HS.
By the 40th, we were all friends…and equals. I was not in the particularly “popular” crowd in HS, by by the 40th reunion, classmates who truly were not in my HS circle of friends had great chats with me…and I was surprised what they did remember about me…and they were surprised about what I remembered about them.
Our 40th was so much fun, we had a 45th…and it was equally great.
Our 50th is next summer, and I’m very much looking forward to it. It’s in the town where I grew up anyway, so I will just coordinate my visit there with the reunion, and see my family there as well.
This time, I actually really know the folks planning the event. So far, their plans sound great. They will have a tour of our HS which just reopened after a multi-year renovation (I saw it this summer when I went to that reunion). They are having a trolley tour of the city as well…a lot has changed and that’s fun for those who haven’t been there in a while. There is a less casual mixer on Friday, and a still casual but bigger event on Saturday.
For the 40th, I organized a breakfast on Friday mid morning for those in town who wanted to attend. I’ll do the same again.
Someone else is organizing some other get together events…mostly for the four junior high school classmates. I went to one of those last time…and it was fun too.
I also went to my 10th and none since. But I still see my closest friends from HS – five of us go away for a “girls weekend” annually and some of us who live closer meet a couple of other times each year – that is enough for me.
Timely question … my 40th reunion was this past weekend. I didn’t go. I could have if I’d really wanted to, but some of the main “organizers” were discussing political things over the past couple of weeks and I decided 'you know what? I really don’t care to go make nice with them." There are several friends that I keep up with on Facebook, so that’s good enough for me.
Never have and never will. It’s interesting to me that my kids’ high school classes don’t plan reunions. Social media might have made them unnecessary?
My stepdad’s high school class has just announced its last reunion (the 65th). It was a very small school - only 7 grads his year. Everyone has had a turn as organizer, and they’ll just keep in touch online from now on. Here’s something odd: 3 of the grads are STEM PhDs and university profs. Nice legacy for their science/math teachers!
Also @MaineLonghorn I’ve lived in Austin now for quite awhile and I can pretty much figure out who the quarterback/baseball player is that you’re talking about. 
Never have gone. I noticed that the last ones are a reunion of the Decade - graduates from an entire decade. Well I was in the first of the decde’s years and my friends were not younger than me. My brothers were. No interests in attending.
Big public high school, 650 graduates in my class. I went to the 10th, 20th, and 30th. I would not have gone to any of them if I didn’t have my twin sister to sit with (we didn’t bring our spouses). She was more well-known/one of the top honor students in the class, and I was known for being her twin. By chance we met up with/sat with middle school friends. We enjoyed the reunions, though there were a few awkward moments. We’ll probably go to our 40th, which is coming up in a couple years.
The girls were still easy to recognize after 20 or 30 years. The guys? Not so much.
We had so many surprises.
The guy who had been voted “Most Forgetful” and who had a total vague brain became a PhD clinical psychologist and has a thriving practice.
A girl who had been smart but very party-oriented attended University of Vermont for two semesters and skiied three days a week but finally decided to get serious. She wound up at CalTech and now has a PhD in some sort of biology. She researches the immune response in cancer treatment.
I loved hearing what people became in their adult lives.
This might not sound nice but while I don’t have any interest in going to a class reunion - and truly have not kept up with more than a couple of friends from then - and only on Facebook - I would take a glance at some format/document where people would submit a pic of them then and a pic of themselves now and then a short paragraph at where live has taken them. This would appeal to me much more than an in person event. Told you I was an introvert. 
One thing I don’t like about our class FB page is that people only seem to post bad news there - illnesses and death. 
I find that really depressing.