Former HHS students celebrate at 60-year reunion

On Sunday, July 24, several dozen former HHS students got together to remember their high school days from 60 years ago. The class of 1956, and a few from 1955, met up at Grandview’s Mark O’Meara Clubhouse at the impetus of classmates Mary Ray Ward and Marg Wood to share stories old and new.

Their principal back then was Harry Thornton and they were the first grade nine class to use the new high school. Many of the memories that stick out in their minds were of mischief and high jinx both during their school years and after, some that can’t be printed here.

Hal Cairns, who is in the process of moving from Salt Spring Island to Sydney, BC, laughed as he said they spent all their time having fun and doing as little work as possible. He remembers setting the highest differential in marks for final exams with a 99 per cent in physics and a nine per cent in French. Earlier in his high school career, in grade nine, he and friend Mike Robbins set out to skip class by covering themselves with cardboard boxes and scooting across the valley that used to be behind the school and up the hill on the other side. “When we got to the bush on the other side and took the boxes off, the whole school was watching. We spent quite a bit of time after school for that one. It really didn’t pay off that well.”

There was also the story of the piano that ended up at the bottom of Oxtongue Lake during a summer party, and more than one story of things that happened up at Lion’s Lookout.

Andrea Lough Alexander, whose father is Don Lough, remembers well the move to the new high school when the grade nine class moved half-way through the school year. “It was quite dramatic – to have the shop, the big home ec room, the cafeteria. The old school was just classrooms. That old red brick building is gone now.”

Mike Robbins, who lives in Rossland BC, remembers dressing up, along with Cairns, as a telephone repairman and stealing the pay phone at the Blue Bell restaurant. They took it out to Algonquin Park and put it on a portage. “We did it in broad daylight with nice green coveralls. To this day, no one knew who did it.”

Robbins also remembers being in his grade nine class with Jack Bionda before moving to the new school. “He was six-foot six and in grade nine and he’d sit in these tiny desks and he’d start shaking his leg and the whole row would vibrate. You couldn’t control him. His mind was out on the lacrosse field somewhere.”

Huntsville’s two arenas are named for Bionda and Don Lough. “It’s those two sides,” said Alexander. “The great performer athlete and the people who built the town, all those people in the Sports Hall of Fame who were the builders.”

The ski team was a new thing in those days, said Alexander, and many students were active in Girl Guides or Scouts. There was also an excellent girls’ choir that travelled to many competitions. Bruce Werry, a music and math teacher and the school’s choir director, was at the reunion as well.

Many notebooks could have been filled with their stories that afternoon. But as old friends do, they talked and they laughed and they lamented those that are no longer with them. And somewhere, we hope, their stories will live on.

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