What happened to your high school friends?

My 20-year reunion is next weekend, but I have tickets for White Sox-Nats.

 

best friest from third grade through college remains my best friend today. we're 53 (today's my birthday, fyi). another buddy from h.s. is also still an important part of my life. the rest have pretty much bitten the dust, save for an occasional email out of the blue to catch up.

 

Gee, man, you got to go to 20. Missing it for a baseball game? Ah, different strokes, I guess.

My class valedictorian didn't make it into the Air Force Academy because he had weather problems driving to some test and was late and stressed and didn't do well on it. His response was to go to the highest building on the University of Wisconsin campus, put a coat and briefcase over his head and run through a window, a trip that ended 20 stories later.

The most famous person in my high school class was Bob Whitsitt, one-time sports front office whiz kid whose rep was damaged considerably by the Jail Blazers and then what he did with the Seahawks when he was running both teams.

The biggest nerd in our class, the one way all made fun of? Making zillions of dollars, presumably, as a big-time asset management guy for a big-time company.

Of course, at this point, I've also simply got members of my class starting to die.

But I've caught up with quite a few people on Facebook, and I'm loving that.

 

Well, I'm living 1,200 miles away, I start a new job in a few days and I'm in the process of buying a new house. So, even without the game, I wouldn't be making the trip. Oddly enough, I was in a similar position 10 years ago and missed that reunion.

 

Indeed.

 

Yeah, Letter Guy, you left out a few of the other complications beyond the baseball tickets.

 

Most have had average, ordinary lives, like mine. One member of my class was a POW in the Gulf War, wrote a book about her experiences, is still in the military and is now a hot shot at the Pentagon or someplace out in DC.

I'm in touch with a few, via e-mails of Facebook. Most I haven't seen since our 25-year reunion in 1997. But I don't live anywhere near most of them, because they stayed on the East Coast. A surprising number still live in or near my little WNY hometown.

And as SF said, regretably some are dying as they reach their mid-50s.

 

I chat with people I went to high school with when I bump into them on my infrequent trips home, but I don't stay in touch with any of them.

No real reason for it — my high school years were quite enjoyable — other than my closest friends during high school (and throughout my childhood) went to a different school. I stay in touch with a few of them, but even those relationships are dwindling more each year. They're married with kids, I'm a single sportswriter who lives much as he did 15 years ago.

 

Best friend is a construction cost accountant and married a veterinarian. The third guy in our trio is an architect. We had a couple of doctors, one high school principal and a bunch of teachers in my graduating class. All of which is great. I don't talk to any of them, and I have no intention of going back there any time soon.

 

Went to a brainiac high school (city's major employer was Union Carbide/Martin Marietta), so most of the kids in school were sons of people who worked for uranium enrichment facilities and national laboratories -- X-10, Y-12, K-25.

Success rate from this school is staggering. But even I was taken aback when I found out that a kid I sat next to in U.S. History class is the founding president of Google China.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai-Fu_Lee

 

Most of my class has had ordinary lives. Salutatorian is now a nuclear scientist. Class president is a successful big-city plastic surgeon. I think the valedictorian is a doctor of some sort.

I rarely saw any members of my class after graduation (wasn't very popular). Most of them knew I loved sports and weren't shocked when I told them I was a sportswriter.