Happy Days Here Again?

Some rites of passage are such an ordeal that the majority of people who are eligible to observe them are absent without leave. This may surprise you, but high school reunions fall into this category. Such reunions are apparently so terrifying that less than half of the alumni bother to show up. Is it any wonder when one considers the shockingly large number of popular films and books that depict reunions as places of malice, mayhem, and even murder? From such movies as National Lampoon's Class Reunion, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, and Since You’ve Been Gone, as well as such books as Class Reunions Are Murder and Most Likely to Die, one could conclude that high school reunions are gatherings of the disillusioned, the pretenders, and a few homicidal maniacs.

The Madison, Wisconsin, Central High School class of 1960 held its fiftieth reunion this summer, and I, too, thought about joining the no-showers, as I have done for all but one of our other reunions. I was not particularly worried about some catastrophe occurring, but I did have same nagging worries: What if classmates I really wanted to see didn’t show up? In particular, what if my best friend Peter wasn’t there? What if I couldn’t recognize most of my old classmates? What if they didn’t recognize me or, worse, ribbed me about how I look? What if the group wanted to reminisce about pranks and stuff that didn’t interest me in the first place? What if the whole experience caused such a time warp that I was literally transported back to the 50’s where the Fonz, another Wisconsin native, was first class in our minds?

Nonetheless, I went to my reunion; and I even brought my wife along although this violated sacred L.O.R.E. The “Laws of Reunion Etiquette” state unequivocally, “Leave your spouse at home. He or she might feel awkward and bored, and it's more fun to be with your friends when things are as they were in high school.” But we took off from LaGuardia Airport on an escapade that turned out to be one of the most significant experiences of my life – even though everything I was worried about materialized!

This irony of ironies began as soon as we boarded the Delta flight heading to the Midwest. We were sitting in the cabin, and we had to walk through the first class section to get to our seats. As we did, I looked to my right and there was none other than Henry Winkler himself! He was seated on the aisle beside a fellow actor Liev Schreiber. Winkler looked up towards me, and I mumbled, “Nice to see you” as I passed beside him. I recall a slight urge to stop my movement, to say something more profound to this celebrity, even to ask for his autograph -but on what? My boarding pass? But I kept moving forward until I joined my wife, who hadn’t been focused on anything except where we were sitting. When I told her whom I had just seen, we both craned forward, but we caught no further glimpse of the Fonz.

For the rest of the uneventful flight, my mind craned to imagine whether this was a mere coincidence or a harbinger of things to come. What was I getting into?

Once in Madison, we settled into a comfortable inn on the Campus of the University of Wisconsin. Madison is primarily known as the capital of the state of Wisconsin with one of the more picturesque state capitals. It is also the home of one of the top schools in the country, a sprawling campus with around 50,000 students. The old Central High School would've been the natural default place for our reunion if it still existed; but the building, located a block from the state capital, had been torn down. So the reunion committee had arranged a cocktail party one night in a hotel on fraternity row and a sit-down dinner another night in a conference center near the student union. Both events were mere blocks from our inn, and both overlooked one of Madison’s scenic lakes, reminding us that we grew up in a city that has been identified by Money Magazine as the best place to live in the United States and by Men’s Journal as the healthiest city in America.

The reunion began with another seemingly propitious omen. As we entered the reception area, there was a table where we found name tags with our 1960 Yearbook photos on them. Seated at this table was a man not from our class but rather from the State Historical Society. This representative of the Historical Society, with venerable headquarters on the University campus, had apparently taken the trouble to find the addresses where each and every one of us had lived while attending Central. When I gave him my name, he located a file with photographs of 120 Murray Street and 624 Wingra Street. The house on Murray Street, in what was then the “Greenbelt” section of Madison, was actually the home of my paternal grandparents. It was a two family modest structure with faux brick siding, and my family lived on the top floor for several years while my father saved enough money to buy our own house. Finally, when I was in my early years at Central, we moved to the house on Wingra Street close to parks, a lake and even the local zoo. That house still stands, spiffier than ever due to remodeling efforts of subsequent tenants. But the Murray Street address is long gone, along with that entire neighborhood, a casualty of urban renewal. Yet here I was, staring at the building that was home to me and home to my father’s family for several generations.

After having feelings aroused intensely by the surprise photographs, I interacted with former classmates, only to find that many hopeful expectations were dashed. There had been 192 members in my senior class. Of these, only 37 men and 12 women showed up for the reunion (I suspect that this ratio may hold in other such gatherings: females may be more self conscious of the effects of aging and, being molded in the pre-liberated 50’s, may be more insecure about their accomplishments in life). At this juncture in life, most of the alums were retirees, most having had careers in business. As I feared, my closest friend Peter, a nationally recognized photographer, didn’t make it.

It also seems that the people who have longest to travel for a reunion tend to come in larger numbers than those who remained in the Madison area. That was certainly the case with my class. Peter and a lot of other Wisconsinites were not there, perhaps because they see high-school friends regularly, and the event doesn't seem like a big deal. But attendees came from the four corners of America, including Texas, Louisiana, New York, Florida, California, Wyoming, Oregon as well as other states.

It turned out that twenty-nine members of the class had passed away during the 50 year span, and another eleven could not be located. There was some brief gossip about others who were not in attendance, including the girl voted best looking: sadly, as she aged, she lapsed into a schizophrenic condition so severe that she is institutionalized. But this was not to be a morbid or solemn gathering. Nor were we there to compare kids, careers or customs. Younger people are concerned with impressing others; at our advanced age, such things matter less and less. This was to be a happy time, a time to renew old friendships. We all shared in the excitement of recognition after all the years as well as the astonishment at non-recognition or physical change. Thankfully, I guess, people seemed to have little trouble remembering me. We quickly reconnected, particularly with those with whom we had the most shared memories.

As I feared, there was some ribbing and teasing; but it was good-natured kidding mostly about hair color or hair volume with no vicious barbs or digs. We heard recordings and saw slides of the past, and we reminisced about some colorful teachers. I even listened half-heartedly as some classmates talked about where they hung out after school or when they cut class, the times they were sent to the office and other mischief that they weren't sorry they had done. All these shenanigans were foreign to a nerdy, over-protected, goody-two-shoes kid like myself.

When all was said and done, the reunion experience was a positive, if not entirely satisfying, experience. But I had come to Madison for other reasons, some presaged when we were still teenagers. You see, high school prepared us for life in ways we did not imagine or appreciate. Take English literature class, for example. We had to study such epics as The Odyssey, Pilgrim’s Progress, and The Canterbury Tales. To this day I still know how to recite the opening lines of Chaucer’s work in Middle English (“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote….”). What did not sink into my head at the time was what these tales represented, namely, journeys of deep purpose. They were meant to help us connect to humanity’s search for meaning and moral significance. People may travel to escape reality or to break a routine. But there are those trips that in the aggregate can take on a larger role.

I realize now that my reunion was just such a pilgrimage for me. Like Odysseus and the great heroes, I needed to return to what one scholar has termed “the center of your being,” the hometown that launched me to where I am today. The building that we came to know as Central High School was completed in 1909. That was the same year that my father Herman Karan was born in Lithuania. A few years later, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Madison where my grandfather, a blacksmith in Russia, found work in a local junkyard. Times were hard for my father’s family both before and during the Depression; so he had to drop out of school after third grade to help support his parents and three younger surviving siblings. My father would have attended Central High School if he had a chance to complete his education. Instead, he was a handyman par excellence who taught himself the skills of tool and die making with which he made a living. He met and married my mother, a native of Canada, and they settled in Dubuque, Iowa, where I spent the first seven years of my life. But as my grandfather became older and more infirm, it was my father alone who moved us back to Madison so he could be close to his parents. That was how we came to live on Murray Street. My father continued to work hard to support us up until the day that he died in 1962. He never got a chance to see the fruits of his labors, namely, his two sons growing up, becoming Ph.D.’s, and raising children and grandchildren. He never even lived to see my brother graduate Central High School. I realize now that when he sat with my mother in the auditorium of Central in June 1960 to see me receive my diploma and to watch me present one of the graduation speeches, it would be the last special occasion he would celebrate.

So I came to Madison, Wisconsin, this summer not merely to see old sights and old friends. Central High School has been razed, the house on Murray Street is long gone, and my father’s last business address has been torn down as well. Even Fonzie, Potsie, and the Cunninghams are relics of the past. Were the 50’s and 60’s continuously happy days? Certainly not. But for one glorious weekend this summer, the past and present melded for me in a sacred pilgrimage to the place I will always call home.