Imperial Beach, CA Reunion 2001

Dottie Hull Sandoval asked me (Lynn Price Wallen, TMW class of '63) to write up my impressions of the TMW reunion held in Imperial Beach, California, June 22-24 2001, so here goes. In summary, it was one of the most intensely emotional experiences of my life! Many years ago, I can't remember how many, I began feeling sorry for myself that I would never be able to attend a high school reunion like "normal" people can. I guess we reach an age or stage in life when we begin thinking back, trying to recapture the feelings and experiences of youth, remembering the events and people and places that helped make us who we have become. For me that nostalgia centered largely on my high school years spent in Morocco. For my sophomore, junior, and senior years (1960-63), life centered on friends and teachers at Thomas Mack Wilhoite High School. What had become of them all?

I felt very lucky that I had reconnected with a best friend from senior year, Lynn Kraighman Kramer, who had somehow found me through the Internet in 1997, but everyone else was lost to me forever. Or so I believed.

Last year Lynn attened a flower show at Epcot Center in Orlando and got to talking to a vendor who turned out to be a former faculty member of the Kenitra American High School (as TMW apparently had been renamed -- shame on whoever made that decision!). He told her about the TMW reunion taking place IN MOROCCO in two weeks, too soon for either of us to be part of it. That was the beginning of a yearlong journey of discovery of the TMW network. For all my whining about the evils (read difficulties) of modern technology, I must now admit that the Internet has made it possible for me to recapture my past. Each week, it seems, we find another TMW alumna/alumnus added to Sandy Bartell's fabulous TMW webpage or Dennis Fatheree's magnificent email list.

Since I missed the Morocco reunion, I was thrilled when Dottie, Kitty and Jessie invied TMWs to Imperial Beach for another reunion. After 38 years, I would see classmates again. I had been corresponding by email with several of them over the past year, and our anticipation sharpened as June approached. I was probably even more excited than the others because I would get to see the tall, dark, handsome Midshipman who was my boyfriend (mostly by mail) for my last two years of high school and first two years of college.

The first event of the reunion was Friday, June 22, when everyone who had arrived gathered at Dottie's house before heading for a guided shopping trip (courtesy of Kitty Hull Daugherty) to Tijuana. I did not know some people because they were at TMW during earlier or later eras than I. But the ones I knew, I really knew! I mean, they still looked like themselves. You know what I mean. I don't know what I expected, but everyone was the same! Such fun! That meeting belongs to one of the five fingers on which I count the happiest occasions of my life. And things just got better as the weekend progressed.

Friday night everyone met at the San Diego dock to board the vessel HORNBLOWER for a dinner cruise around San Diego Bay. We took up 3 tables of 12 places each and enjoyed a good dinner and a beautiful sunset. Linda McCrerey (class of '66) and I sat together, and she was a blast -- was a freshman class officer with my little brother the year I was a senior. We spent a lot of the evening talking to Amine Hajji (class of '69) who was a Moroccan student in elementary school (I later found his photos in the '61, '62, & '63 SULTANs). He has a fascinating family history, is an engineer and is living in the U.S. now. Then the dancing began. The hit of the evening was definitely Dottie's husband, Roger, who was such a great dancer that lots of women wanted to dance with him (Linda and I were both brazen enough to ask him, so we were the lucky ones. Mostly he danced with his wife while the rest of us watched enviously). And I danced with my TMW beau for old times' sake, a sweet and poignant experience as the band played the last dance before docking.

Saturday was the really big day, emotionally. Dottie, Roger and Kitty hosted a fiesta in the Sandoval's backyard, and we all feasted on great Mexican food. Then each class in turn, beginning with Pat LaFleur Jones ('56) and Suzanne Greksouk Kerry ('57), climbed the stairs to Dottie and Roger's upstairs deck, looked down at the assembled TMWs, and shared their memories of life in Morocco. Some of us were amazed to learn that the class of '56 had only 3 graduates, and their courses were by correspondence. But as each group spoke, we discovered that whether we were there in the 50s, 60s or 70s, our experiences were amazingly similar. Informal talks over the course of the weekend revealed similarities in some of our home lives that surprised us because we did not share them with each other when we were young (see the movie "The Great Santini" for some of these). I also heard some folks talking about the book "Military Brats" which explains why we did not talk about it at the time. For those of you who have seen photos but weren't there, the group photos of all of us in blue reunion t-shirts and caps were taken Saturday afternoon. My favorite photo was of me with my fellow classmates of '63, Dottie and Shirley Fatheree Faxon, both of whom are gorgeous and full of fun! Go class of '63 -- the BEST!!!!!

Saturday evening's event was the one I thought would be the coolest when I read the schedule before leaving home: a walk to the end of the Imperial Beach pier to watch the sunset and eat ice cream. So high schoolish! Such a throwback to the innocent fun our generation had as youth. An inspired idea for wholesome entertainment! I was looking forward to that pier walk most of all. But then Linda found a Tango club in San Diego and invited me to go with her, so I ducked out of the reunion and went dancing till midnight. If you've read my bio (which, in the tradition of a military upbringing, I dutifully wrote and submitted when Dottie told me to), you would not be surprised I chose to tango.

Sunday's farewell brunch was at Jessie Smith Allen's house (KAHS Class of 1972), and we all enjoyed another wonderful meal and the chance to hear more of Van Atkins' wit (he kept us laughing throughout the weekend). There was so much we didn't have time for -- didn't have time to talk to everyone as much as we wanted to, didn't have time to sing (Barry Barnett, please bring your guitar next time!), didn't have time to say proper goodbyes to all. The only way many of us were able to tear ourselves away to catch our planes was to extract promises to see each other at the next reunion (time and place undetermined). We are all painfully aware of the loss of two classmates, Marvin Hamlin and John Nibley (both class of '63) and of our popular history teacher, Mr. Maroney -- who were honored on a Memorial Board at Dottie's on Saturday -- and realize that the chance to reconnect with each other at a high school reunion is a special gift, made even more precious because we spent so many years thinking it would never happen to us.