Burlington High School Class of 1953 Holds 'Final' Reunion 

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• Daria Bishop
• The Burlington High School class of 1953's 70th reunion

The Burlington High School class of 1953 met at Vermont National Country Club earlier this month for its 70th — and final, organizers said — class reunion.

Working on the reunion committee has been a joy, Diana Carlisle told 17 classmates and their guests after the luncheon plates had been cleared, the cookies passed and the coffee poured. The events have been fun, she continued. "But the time has come where ... our treasury is depleted, and so are we."

The committee members, like their classmates, are in their late eighties. It's time to retire, resign, call it what you will, Carlisle said. "We're not going to do any more organized reunions. But..."

And therein lies the spirit of the class of '53. But, Carlisle continued, some classes manage to get together every year or so informally; they announce a date and a place, and anyone who is interested shows up.

Staying connected seems dictated by the laws of gravity for these classmates. They've been meeting regularly since 230 of them — 224 seniors and six postgraduates — filed into Memorial Auditorium on a Tuesday in June to receive their diplomas 70 years ago. Reunions, which used to come at five- and 10-year intervals, have been annual for the past three years. "Because when we had our 60th, we said, 'We'd better not take a chance,'" Carlisle said.

They have met at the Windjammer in South Burlington and the Hampton Inn, McGillicuddy's on the Green and the Marina at Marble Island, all in Colchester. They have cruised Lake Champlain; toured their old school building, which now houses Edmunds Middle School; and met in Stowe for a two-day reunion many remember fondly.

"My husband used to enjoy our class reunions more than his own," Barb Lavallee Ryan said. "He was from Barre."

For their 25th, in 1978, John Adams brought straw hats that said "BHS Class of '53" on the bands. He and his wife flew in from Boston that year, and when he got to the airport with a box full of hats, an airline employee told him he'd have to pay freight. Adams couldn't afford freight — "I had just started a new business," he said. He and his wife couldn't even afford to spend the night in Burlington; they were going to fly home the same day.

So he distributed the hats to fellow passengers to wear. When the plane landed in Burlington, off filed a whole lot of people saluting the BHS class of '53. Adams reassembled the box, collected the hats and took them to the reunion.

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• Daria Bishop
• Diana Carlisle with a Burlington High School class of 1953 photo at the 70th reunion

For their 50th, 104 class members came from nearly 20 states. They raised about $2,000 by auctioning items they had made to each other. They used the proceeds to send $100 checks annually to the Edmunds Middle School library and to buy the school a podium equipped with a microphone and a light.

This month, for their 70th, most of the attendees were locals, but Mary Louise Kolk Blanchard drove from Maine and Susan Wakefield Cochran traveled from Maryland. Adams, 89, whom classmates call "the glue," was all set to come from Massachusetts to emcee when he had two heart attacks three weeks before the reunion. "I'm better now," he said the day before, though, he added, he wasn't up for the trip.

Burlington School District personnel don't play any role in reunions, so there's no way to compare the frequency with which different classes hold them. It seems fair to say, however, that this class has remained unusually close. Adams keeps a database with contact information for everyone he can find. He has a list of classmates who have died — 112 as of this month — and he acknowledges that there are still others whom the class lost track of years ago.

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• Courtesy

In the 144-page spiral-bound book that Rhoda Rosenberg Beningson compiled for the 50th reunion, she included two pages titled "Our Missing Classmates." They are pictured there as they appeared in their senior yearbook, pure potential wrapped in smooth skin. Only their names are listed, but the unwritten message is clear: We haven't forgotten you.

Membership in the BHS class of '53 has been a through line in many lives. Most of the class came together in seventh grade, but three attendees at the 70th reunion started kindergarten together. Beningson has a photo of them from that year: Lorna Dean Brown, David Jenkins and herself, sitting in a row on a step, wearing snowsuits.

Born during the Great Depression and young children during World War II, the classmates remember blackouts during the war. Beningson's dad was an air raid warden whose job it was to ensure that people pulled their shades and turned off their lights. Carlisle's dad was a pilot, and Sylvia Wright Corbin's mother was a plane spotter. Corbin remembers going along to the tower in Ethan Allen Park when her mother was on duty.

At the end of their ninth-grade year, the United States entered the Korean War. Richard Lavallee, a member of the class, volunteered for service and got a letter telling him where to report for training the day he graduated. The war ended six weeks later, but Lavallee spent 15 months in Korea as part of the Korea Military Advisory Group.

Despite those sobering aspects of the era, "I've always said we grew up in the best of times," Ryan said.

The class of '53 was aware of current events: Miss Akins' history students interviewed people in town about what the United Nations should do regarding Korea. But members still made time for "silly high school things," Carlisle said. Put Carlisle, Beningson and Joan Bugbee Boardman around a dining room table scattered with old photos, scrapbooks and a yearbook — which was where they gathered the week before their 70th reunion — and the stories flow.

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• Courtesy Of Joan Bugbee Boardman
• Clockwise from top left: Rhoda Rosenberg, Martha Abell, Eleanor Feen, Diana Danforth, Judy Ramsden, Joan Bugbee and Joanne Aldrich

Every year, the class posed on the school steps for a photo. Lined up 35 to 40 students wide and seven or eight rows deep, they had to stand still as the camera moved from left to right to capture them. "Hold it, hold it, hold it," photographer L.L. McAllister would say. One year, Adams stood at the end of a row on the left-hand side, then ran behind the group and popped up on the right to appear in the photo twice.

Once students got their prints, they passed them around to collect signatures on the back. They used the word "swell" a lot. "Best of luck to a swell kid!" "To a swell neighbor for 13 years." "To a swell pal." "Will we ever forget M. Verbist's classes!!?" "Let's hope we both get through our geometry."

Beningson shuffled through snapshots. "This was the troublemakers," she said of one photo. Boardman leaned over for a look: "I'm in there, and so are you."

"We were the good girls, really," Beningson said. "The only time I got in trouble," she continued, was when the University of Vermont held one of its annual jazz concerts. "And there was a fabulous jazz band coming to Memorial Auditorium. And seven of us ... cut school, zoomed across the street to Memorial Auditorium and sat where no one would see us. And we're listening to the band, and all of a sudden — I don't know who it was — one of the kids [said,] 'Oh, there's Dutch.' That was our principal [Holland L. Smith]."

The others thought it was a joke.

"So we all go, 'Hey, Dutch!' It was Dutch," Beningson said. "He was writing down our names, and he called our parents."

It's not like they were out smoking.

"We probably did that, too," Boardman said.

"We smoked Pall Malls in my bathroom upstairs and blew the smoke out the window," Beningson said, though she protected the identity of her partner in the haze.

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• Courtesy Of Joan Bugbee Boardman
• From left: John Duff, Paul Scheer and John Adams mugging for the camera

A little square photo shows two boys pretending to mix cocktails at her father's living room bar while a third holds a bottle to his lips. "I had a lot of parties," Beningson said. But the boys in the photo really were pretending, she noted. "They weren't allowed to drink. There's no question about it; my father was listening."

Boys were allowed to come to Beningson's parties, she said, but if one showed up to take her on a date, her father would call him a hoodlum and send him away.

Carlisle's parents required her dates to come into the house to say hello to them, and then her parents would tell them to have a nice time. "My mother called every boy that came 'Larry' so she wouldn't goof up."

Edmunds High produced an outstanding band in the early 1950s. So many students played instruments that they had to audition to get in. On a band trip to Boston, the girls arrived wearing dresses, heels and hats. "I got pictures to prove it," Beningson said. "Here's me with a feather in my cap."

The football team went 6-1 their senior year, tying the team's two best records during coach Milton "Buck" Hard's 31 years at the school. Their senior year was his last before he retired. That winter, Hard led the basketball team to the state championship. Five starters played four tournament games without a sub and were dubbed the Iron Men.

Two of those Iron Men — Jenkins and Art Lambert — attended the 70th reunion.

The 50th reunion book — and the 60th edition that followed — include mini biographies submitted by classmates. Common themes include:

Family: "Our three children and their spouses have blessed us with 4 grandchildren who have further blessed us with 6 great grandchildren."

Travel: "Alaska and Hawaii and a ski trip to southern France..."

Joint replacement: "titanium"

General health: "Sally is slowly losing her eyesight ... Paul was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease ... I am still very healthy but I have lousy teeth."

Heartache: "My husband, Bob, died of Pancreatic Cancer in 2005"; "Sadly I lost my wonderful husband, Edwin, in 2010"; "Hal died suddenly seven years ago"; "our oldest son, James died of a stroke at 27 years of age."

They express gratitude and encouragement. The people who endured geometry together now face life's hardest tests. "I wouldn't call it therapeutic," Carlisle said of the reunions, but it helps to know that others are dealing with sorrows, too, "and [to] say, 'Well, if they can do it, I can do it. If I can do it, they can do it.'"

Carlisle's husband died six years ago. "Every one of us ... is going through losses and changes," she said. "And so maybe that's, in a way, a good reason why we get together."

The 70th reunion lasted three hours. Most people lingered until the end, by which time the group had selected the first Tuesday of August as the day to meet for lunch next year. Sue Gurney Day and Brown volunteered to be point persons.

"I think we appreciate each other as we age," Carlisle said. "We appreciate those times; we appreciate remembering them and sort of being in that moment for an hour or two."

Joan Bugbee Boardman's baton twirling days are over. She can't even remember a teacher named Verbist, much less recall those unforgettable classes. Members of the reunion committee have died, but the others have carried on. Boardman helped plan the 70th reunion, and she showed up there in white pants, polished toenails and flowered sandals.

"Don't give up Bug!" the late Marilyn Falby Stetson wrote on the back of Boardman's class picture all those years ago. "Never forget old BHS."