Hundreds of area visitors will be arriving from all over the continent this weekend with plans to spend Saturday evening at the Mount Angel Festhalle.
These visitors will come from all walks of life, but they all have one thing in common: Gervais High School.
GHS will be holding an unprecedented 100-year class reunion on July 20; anybody and everybody affiliated with the Cougar contingent are welcome, and at last count that tallies up over 600 folks. The school’s first graduating class was 1922, and initial plans for this massive gathering were eyed for 2022, but the pandemic altered those.
Now, in large thanks to a handful of willing planners and an intensive effort to contact everyone, the social is slated, and visitors are en route.
Planners said the response has been so receptive that Festhalle caretakers will have to erect a tent to accommodate the mixed mingling and dinner plans scheduled to unfold between 4 and 9:30 p.m.
The base feed enabling this event is a continually updated, ongoing list of Gervais alumni kept by longtime educator Jeannine James. With the help of others, like Karen Staab and Beverly Just, the organizational effort included painstaking updates and reworking of the base list, then reaching out through all means possible, from electronic messages to snail mail.
“I have been keeping a list of everybody who has graduated from Gervais High School since the 80s,” said James, who spent decades at the school serving in capacities ranging from educator to basketball scorekeeper. “The district trusts me enough every year, to give me a list of the senior classes…Starting in 2011 I started gathering cell phones and email addresses put into a list — Everywhere I go I ask ‘what is your email address?’”
Even with that starting base, copious updates were necessary, and James credits Staab, Just and a few others for their tireless work in helping with that task.
“We have over six hundred people…from all over: the farthest is from Lewiston, Maine, something like 3,200 miles. We have someone coming from St. Petersburg, Fla. Third farthest is from Jacksonville, NC.,” Staab said. “I’ve been doing numbers and names and towns for so long, it’s getting confusing.”
Staab said the oldest visitors anticipated are from the class of 1947; two sisters (maiden names Hampton) who are 95 years old and going on 98 respectively are coming. The oldest male visitor is from the class of 1951.
“It’s fun to see how these kids turn out,” James related. “We have a man who teaches at the University of Georgia. I never would I have expected that is how he would have turned out.”
Registered RSVPs have come from 25 states and Ontario Canada. Included are exchange students from Holland and Kenya. The Kenyan student lives in Ontario, and Staab said it is not clear where the student from Holland currently resides.
“I’m the data keeper, and I’ve been working on this since March of 2023…getting addresses and emails,” Staab said. “It’s nice to get an up-to-date database, but I will be glad when this is all over.”
James noted that nearly the entire organizational process was realized by “five or six women who graduated in the 60s and 70s.”
The reunion committee chair is Just (Class of ’65), who can attest to the work involved.
“Yeah, that was a lot of work --it’s a big list. It took a lot of time for those girls to go find them (all GHS alumni),” Just said. “They sent out emails, and they sent out snail mails…it was quite an undertaking.
“I’m actually kind of looking forward to the Sunday afterward,” Just admitted. “People are coming from all over. It’s really heartwarming to see that little community come together like this.”
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