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The end of summer usually signals the conclusion of high school class reunions. Altoona and Hollidaysburg High School classes of the 1950s and Morrison Cove High School Class of 1960 (its last before jointure into Central High) had prominent reunion announcements in a recent Mirror's weekend Community News roundup.
While school days might be long past, those times were an integral and sometimes dominant part of many lives.
Reunions have a special meaning for some people, especially older folk who look forward to socializing and renewing old acquaintances.
Many sociologists believe that reunions are good for the retirees, because the events contribute to a sense of well-being and continuity, and they fulfill a need for personal relationships. The reunions also can add meaning and purpose to people's lives.
The mood at most gatherings is much the same. The evident pleasure of old friends greeting each other, the strong sense of comradeship, the what-have-you-been-doing-lately questions and the anecdotes and jokes about events long ago.
Talk about the grades they got in school was the subject of a university study on how well people remember tales of their lives.
Researchers at Ohio Wesleyan University measured how well 99 people remembered the grades they received in high school math, science, history and foreign language courses. (If they could not recall they were asked to simply mark an X instead of a grade.) The supervisors then went back to each student's high school transcript and checked how accurately the student had recalled their grade in a total of 3,220 classes.
Overall, the students correctly remembered 71% of their grades. But the 29% who were off remembered Ds as Cs and Cs as Bs.
Not all of the memory lapses produced grade inflation.
About one in four A grades were remembered as something else, including one former scholar remembered getting a D in a class he actually aced.
There were four Fs in the study and just one student confessed to flunking the course. The other three reported getting Ds.
There were two other facets of high school reunions that have attracted the attention of college researchers: long-ago sweethearts and classroom rivals.
A psychology professor at Catholic University in Washington says reunions "bring to the surface old romances, forgotten friends and longtime academic and athletic rivalries."
I experienced a romantic rebuff at my Morrison Cove High School Class of 1952 40th reunion in 1992.
I was involved in a rather serious romantic undertaking with a classmate during our 1952 senior year.
We talked marriage, but drifted apart after I left for college.
For the next 40 years, there was a class reunion every five years, during which time, I was always out-of-state or overseas.
When I was finally able to attend the 1992 reunion, the first sight of my long lost love was her, walking alone, down a restaurant passageway.
I caught up with her and fell in-step. She looked over, uttered a mild shriek, shook her head and peeled off.
We never saw each other again.
Fortunately, she happily married a guy with whom she was much more compatible than me.