9/27/24 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: Girls on the Run Begin Their Season

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,

Last Friday night I was at St. Charles for reunion weekend. It was my 50th since graduating from high school in June 1974.

There were 72 of us in our class when we began in the fall of 1970. We were the second class after St. Charles had re-opened after having been a seminary high school for five or six years. There were still boarding students my freshman year, holdovers the seminary.

Father Ralph Huntzinger, the school principal, was also my religion teacher. Father Thomas Bennett taught us Social Studies. Msgr. Thomas Gallen was algebra and choir. Father Bill Dunn was my Latin teacher and Father Roger Emmert instructed us in freshman English. I had Mr. Don Henne for both health and physical education and Mrs. Theresa McClain, the only woman on the faculty, taught freshman science.

I got decent grades but was one of the worst athletes in my class, trying out with no success for both basketball and baseball. When they started a track team in tenth grade with a promise of no cuts, I joined the team and became the slowest two-miler in the history of the school. I doubt there is a plaque for that hanging anywhere.

I got a big part in the fall drama my freshman year. It wasn’t until junior year that girls from other schools were allowed to be in our plays. In my first play, The Devil’s Disciple the women’s parts were adapted into men’s parts. So, the minister’s wife became the minister’s brother. I was an over actor with a loud voice so later parts included an abrasive colonel in No Time for Sargent’s and Lieutenant Brannigan, the ineffectual policeman in Guys and Dolls.

I started and ended my four years at St. Charles giving speeches. Father Huntzinger pegged me to give a speech at the first ever Open House for prospective students in November of 1970 after reading a religion essay I wrote. As president of my senior class I gave the valedictorian speech at my graduation in 1974.

By the time there were 48 of us left. We were a close, confident class and when we left, we weren’t sure how the school would survive without us. Fifty years later, St. Charles has obviously done just fine.

Of the 48, eight of us are dead. There were 15 or so at Friday’s reunion. Many are retired or semi-retired. Those of us who still have hair find it short and gray, as opposed to our long blonde and brown seventies swoosh hair. There were a few there that night that I hadn’t seen in 50 years. Others I keep up with from time to time. But there is a bond between us of shared memories and a 50-year perspective on life that we didn’t have when we left St. Charles at 18 years of age.

At our graduation, the only other speaker was a priest. Sadly, I can’t remember his name. He was not on the faculty of St. Charles. He quoted what was then a current Cat Stevens song in his advice to us:



Oh very young, what will you leave us this time

You're only dancin' on this earth for a short while

And though your dreams may toss and turn you now

They will vanish away…

And though you want them to last forever

You know they never will.

At the reunion the younger attendees, those who graduated five, ten, even twenty years ago, probably looked over at our two small tables and saw a bunch of old men. Aside from Chuck Gehring, who is President and CEO of LifeCare Alliance, one of the leaders of nonprofit services in our community, any of us who were movers and shakers are moving less these days and shaking only because various body parts don’t work as well.

But we old men were young once, and in these last fifty years we have done our best to dance and to dream. Like the first students of St. Charles from 101 years ago, one day we will only be a picture on a hallway wall at the school. But each of us individually has a story to tell. Each one of us has contributed to our faith, our families and our community. Each one of us has loved and has been loved. Each one of us is a child of God. And that makes all the difference.

Jim Silcott