The journey towards our 40th high school reunion started last November on Facebook.

There were three of us who connected, Bob and Don and I and over a month or so, as I remember it, we thought it might be fun to plan one. None of us were class officers or had, to my knowledge done anything like this before. So first of all Bob set up a group on Facebook. Well, within the first week, 23 people had joined it. Then we asked the group when to have it and there were all different answers. Christmas was already approaching and there were several ideas for types of parties, some more elaborate than others. Over Christmas I met some of my high school girlfriends at our annual get-together and one of them suggested a picnic. It would be low cost and everybody could bring their own food.

I looked around for a picnic site, on a snowy day, with my brother and sister-in-law. I was just visiting the midwest for the Christmas holiday. Kathy knew of a park. When I went back to California, I called them. We had initially thought of having the reunion in June. But planning for a reunion in June when it is already January, turned out to be not so good. The first date we could get was August 21. So I put it out there on Facebook and there was some positive response and I paid the money. I asked for and promptly received reimbursement through our Facebook community and I was grateful for that.

After that, Bob and Don's lives got too busy with other commitments, but then Ardyth and Laurie came and joined in. Ardyth posted the event on classmates.com as a picnic. Promptly about 20 people RSVPd that they would come. Laurie had the idea of having this at a restaurant instead, a place where no one had to bring anything and we could just go and enjoy ourselves.  Laurie and I looked around, both of us being out of state, we were happy to have the internet as our most useful tool. Laurie found a great restaurant right near our old high school, with Italian food, what's not to like here?

So she booked that place and I sent her the money I had received from the park reservation, which I canceled. OK, then three more people joined our committee, Lynn, Candy and Paul. To our great fortune, Paul is a graphic artist. He created a logo for the event which we immediately put out on Facebook.By this time, we had gotten hold of an old list from 20 years ago and were trying to update addresses of our classmates. It was slow going. Our class had 437 people. We found whitepages.com to be very useful. I was glad for the others joining so that we could split up the lists. 

We plodded along having committee meetings every now and then and eventually, long around March/April, Bill joined us. He had the idea of having two events, one on Friday and one on Saturday. Since he lives in Milwaukee, he also wanted to take charge of going to these places and also opening a bank account.

Deciding on the menus took several meetings and things got underway. Paul designed a save-the-date postcard that went out at the end of June and from that we could see how good or bad our current list was. We did get some back in the mail and that helped us to clean up the list for our invitation mailing that went out just before the July 4 weekend.

Overall, we managed to find over 200 people and of those over 80 came to the reunion parties on August 20 and 21. I posted pictures right away the next day on Facebook and it was fun to see everyone having such a good time.

We used my website, and created a story collection. Twenty-three people posted stories telling what they have been up to over the last 40 years. The stories were wonderful to read and Paul and I made a book out of them that we passed out during the events. They were well-received.

Overall it was a great success and a wonderful experience. Our little committee agreed that one of the best parts was working with eachother. It was never difficult or onerous and we had fun as we were creating something. We never knew how many people would come, but we thought, well we would come anyway and have a good time. The Thursday before the Friday night reunion event, we had our own committee dinner and we hadn't seen eachother in 40 years. We didn't even hang out together in high school. It was fun to meet eachother and talk about what we had done. Imagine that, it all turned out!

The parties were fun and many people said they wanted to do it again in 5 years, so we will. All of us on the committee are willing to work on it again. And it'll be easier this time because so many people have ideas about updating our lists so that we find even more people. We may even get some new volunteers for our committee, you never know.