Fifty years later: Remembering high school days

This coming Victoria Day weekend, I’ll be attending the 50th anniversary of my high school graduating class.

I was a student at Outremont High School in Montreal from 1958 to 1962, a school that in those days was almost entirely Jewish in its student body. It had opened its doors in 1956, and, so to speak, had replaced Baron Byng High, located in the old Jewish neighbourhood made famous by Mordecai Richler, as Montreal’s premier “Jewish” high school.

It would in turn be replaced by Wagar High School in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Côte Saint-luc as Montreal Jews continued to move westward over the decades.

After the 1970s many kept moving much further west, all the way to places like Toronto, and today Outremont High — which by the 1980s had few Jewish students anyhow — no longer exists. The building now houses a French-language Centre d’éducation des adultes.

Of course, none of these three schools was officially Jewish — they were all operated by the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal. There were separate Protestant and Catholic school boards in Quebec until 1998, when they were replaced with linguistically based secular school systems. So Jews who did not attend Jewish day schools went to Protestant schools (as did all other non-catholics).

The very first Outremont High graduating class of 1957 placed 11 students among the province’s top 25 in the provincial high school leaving exams. For many years afterward, Outremont grads would usually get the top marks in the matriculation exams, known colloquially as the “matrics.” The year 1962 was no exception — an Outremont High student came “first in the province.”

In those days, students in Quebec went straight on to university after eleven grades, without an intermediate CEGEP ( junior college) stage, so when we entered university we were all a year younger than freshman students in the rest of North America — and of course most of us did go on, mainly to Mcgill University.

Many people, it seems, are nostalgic about their high school days. I’m not one of them. I didn’t particularly enjoy high school, and I blossomed as a student later, in university and graduate school. The few high school friends I retained were those who went on to university with me, so I have not seen the majority of the people coming to the reunion for half a century and will not recognize most of them without their name tags.

My parents were immigrants (and Holocaust survivors) and so my mother often packed a school lunch for me that back then would have been considered “uncool.” The 1962 Outlook, the school annual, had a number of comments regarding the sardine sandwiches I ate in the cafeteria! Of course today we know that sardines are healthier than the hot dogs and salami sandwiches others were eating. How the world changes in half a century.

I must say that over the decades I’ve given Outremont High very little thought. So why will I travel to Montreal to attend the reunion? I guess it’s a combination of curiosity and nostalgia — not for the school itself, but for the Montreal Jewish community of the 1960s, a community now much diminished.

I want to see what my fellow graduates, now all 66 or 67 years old, have done in life, and where they now live. (Many no longer live in Montreal, or even Canada. Two of us are on P.E.I.) It is the closest I can come to turning back the clock 50 years. Who would want to miss a chance like that?