The Mount Airy High School Class of 1970 is planning a special gathering this year — but first there’s “The Case of the Missing Graduates” to solve.
It’s not every day that a group of people can mark the 50th anniversary of such a rite-of-passage milestone they shared in their lives, which will occur on Oct. 17 when the class holds a reunion in town.
But a planning committee for the event wants it to be all-encompassing, attended by as many graduates as possible — including some it is having trouble locating.
“I just hope everyone can participate,” Inglis (Holcomb) Rowe of the committee said Thursday, indicating that a special, fleeting moment in time will be involved with class members now in their late 60s.
“We need to get together.”
The MAHS Class of 1970 had about 200 students, fairly large compared to others at the school over the years.
They emerged at an interesting period in American history, amid a backdrop of the Vietnam War, protests on college campuses and other turmoil.
“It was definitely an uncertain time, and a time of huge change,” Rowe agreed.
“Especially being sheltered in Mount Airy against the real-life things that were going on,” she added.
Search underway
As do all other graduates, those in the Mount Airy High Class of 1970 went their separate ways after the last commencement speech was delivered and proceeded to scatter all over the country.
“We’ve got people in Colorado, Idaho, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina,” Rowe said in rattling off some of the various places they’ve landed, later adding Pennsylvania, California, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington, D.C., to the list.
Class members have met sporadically for reunions over the years. “We had a 10th and a 20th and we haven’t had another one since then,” Rowe said.
The lags in connectivity contributed to the whereabouts of some class members not being known at this time.
About half of the grads on the active-address list live in the Mount Airy-Surry County-Cana, Virginia, area. One notable alumnus is Dr. David Bruce, a Baptist minister who served as executive assistant to the late Rev. Billy Graham in the latter’s evangelical association.
About 25 of the graduates are thought to be deceased.
Then there are others, a group of 11, for whom no addresses are known, which has led to the reunion committee issuing a special appeal to the public to help locate them.
They include:
Elizabeth Ann Beasley, Anita Chandler (Puckett), Shirley Johnston/Sharon Jean Johnston, Judy McGee (Higbee), Debbie Nunn, Paula Lovill, Carroll Dean Shelar, Wanda Thomas, Benji Vogler, Raymond Wade Whitlock and Linda York (Smith).
Organizers hope that area residents will supply contact information for them, which can be done by notifying Inglis Holcomb Rowe at 336-789-4854 or inglisrowe@gmail.com
The reunion committee, with about 12 members, has mounted various efforts to find missing classmates, including just networking among themselves to track down ones other than those now in the ranks of the missing.
“We have tried — we have really worked hard,” Rowe said. Not knowing the married names of some of the female class members has complicated the task.
Rowe has undertaken numerous Google online searches as part of the quest for those who are “lost.”
“I am an Internet stalker now,” she joked.
“Several of them are on Facebook, but not everyone,” Rowe, the wife of Mount Airy Mayor David Rowe, said of a typical mechanism for reconnecting with folks — which is only as good as their regularity in monitoring the respective pages.
“Not everyone pays attention.”
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Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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