1st-graders together 64 years ago, septuagenarian Sacreds party on
20 alumni from ’52 to meet for reunion
Well, they’re certainly not going to party like it’s 1999 — or 1989 or 1979 or 1969 — but a group of Sacred Heart Elementary School alumni today will heartily celebrate the friendships and memories that have endured since first grade, over more than six decades.
The group of about 20 alumni of the 144-year-old Shadyside school, who laughingly refer to themselves as “The Sacreds,” have planned a day of activities that will last as long as they do.
“We’re all 70 years old. When we all fall asleep, then the party’s over,” one of the organizers, Barbara Maher, joked (or maybe not).
Either way, Ms. Maher, of Redwood City, Calif., will be joined by her former classmates who entered the first grade in the parochial school in 1952. That was the year Queen Elizabeth assumed the throne, 56 million people watched Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, a first-class stamp cost 3 cents and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” was published.
They will return to where it all began from their current homes in Massachusetts, Florida, New York, North Carolina, Arizona, California and Pennsylvania.
The day will start with a Mass at Sacred Heart Church, a tour of the school, a brunch at the Fox Chapel home of classmate Ann McKenna Fromm and the “big party”— a picnic at the Oakmont home of classmate Paul J. Friday.
They have worked as teachers, psychologists, attorneys, in business, in military service, as a librarian and as a publisher. There have been marriages, divorces, children, grandchildren, retirements and death.
“One of the things that’s really
nice is to talk to people who know all about you, know your parents and siblings and where you lived and what your house looked like,” Ms. Maher said.
“Laughter has been the primary part of it and really that’s our nature — if you can’t laugh about it, you’re taking life too seriously.”
Judy Doyle Ondako of Lower Burrell, who like Ms. Maher is a retired teacher, said the reunion is built on a simple but important premise.
“It’s lovely to be with people who grew up with you, who remember you when your teeth weren’t straight and your hair was curly and love you anyway. Growing old together is very special.”
Today’s gathering, to mark everyone turning 70, will be the sixth time The Sacreds have gotten together.
The tradition began 20 years ago when Ms. Maher was in town in 1996 and ran into a classmate. “I said to him, “We’re all turning 50, we should get together for a party.”
Sister Lynn Rettinger, the current Sacred Heart principal, marvels that in 1952 there were two first-grade classrooms, each with nearly 60 students. Today, there are still two classes of first graders but with 25 in each.
“How did they fit?” she said. “It’s hard to imagine. I’m sure they didn’t do much walking around.”
She said she finds the reunion and the group’s longstanding connection to Sacred Heart “amazing, wonderful. It’s cute to see when they come back into the school.”
Today’s picnic host, Mr. Friday, chief of clinical psychology for UPMC Shadyside, seemed to be in denial.
“We are not 70 years old,” he asserted with a chuckle. “We feel 10. We are alive and well. We’re having more humor, more brain stimulation, it’s like we’re young.”
Speaking as a psychologist, he said such gatherings of longtime friends are comforting because of the role played by the brain’s amygdala, the center of the fightor-flight response.
Being together, he said, makes the classmates feel “we’re safe, we got through it, we’re here. When you recollect past events there are far more positive things. The bad stuff you filter out,” he said.
The group started first grade when polio was still a scourge — the Salk vaccine wouldn’t be available for three years — and the Cold War was on everyone’s mind, even kids.
“It was tough but we can come together and look forward with joy and hope and it’s a wondrous thing.”
And, he added with a nonclinical term, “It’s a hoot!”