
DATE: Friday, October 24, 1997              TAG: 9710230286

SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS     PAGE: 06   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: COVER STORY 

SOURCE: BY MELANIE L. STOKES, CORRESPONDENT 

                                            LENGTH:  160 lines

TOGETHER AGAIN REUNION FANS MEMORY OF FIRE AND 50-YEAR-OLD FRIENDSHIPS

He was the craziest boy in the Woodrow Wilson High School class of 1947. At least that's what his Portsmouth classmates voted him fifty years ago.

Today, Father Forrest John Bergeron says that nothing's changed. Nothing except that back then he was a wise-cracking high school kid, and now he's a retired Episcopal minister. But when the craziest girl from Wilson's 1947 class learned that her old friend became a minister, Sally Jernigan Watson said, ``I dropped my teeth.''

Watson and Bergeron are just two of Wilson High School graduates from the classes of 19461/2 and 1947 who reunited last weekend, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of their high school graduation.

The former students believe they have a unique bond. The bond, they say, is evident by the large number of class members attending the reunion a half-century after they parted ways.

One-hundred-eighty classmates, family members and friends reunited and celebrated their proven stick-together spirit. Indeed they are a unique class.

They don't share many memories of walking Wilson's halls. No mention is made of graduation day in Wilson's auditorium. Instead, many recall sitting on long mess hall benches, and dashing between barracks for classes. Some share memories of long bus-rides to the Naval Shipyard and remember Naval Chiefs as readily as school principals. And everyone remembers the moment, during the spring of their junior year, when they heard the news that their high school was burning.

In the earliest hours of May 6, 1946, flames swallowed most of Wilson High School. The blaze lasted more than 10 hours, witnessed by hundreds of students who arrived for classes that Monday morning.

``I remember when my father walked me down to High Street, and we watched the school burn,'' Bergeron said. ``It was so, so sad.''

Along with the blaze, students' emotions raged from excitement to fear, confusion to concern. With an article in that day's edition of the Portsmouth Star, writer Bill Brown captured student reaction, ``Some giggled with joy, others cried, and one lassie wanted to know if the Star could tell whether her locker had been destroyed.''

The fire began in a chemistry lab and destroyed many classrooms, the school cafeteria, and the auditorium. It did not, however, destroy the spirits of the rising seniors. For nearly a year following the fire, Wilson students attended class in the Naval Shipyard Barracks A which comprised six buildings. The seniors were determined to enjoy all the benefits of their final high school year. They brought packed lunches from home and school spirit to the shipyard everyday.

They had just survived World War Two; they certainly would not be defeated by a unfortunate relocation.

They made the barracks their Wilson High School from May of 46 until February of 47. They returned to their renovated home in February, but the auditorium was not complete for their graduation in June. They received their diplomas during commencement in the Naval Hospital.

Many class members had returned to Wilson, veterans of the war, to finish high school with the classes of 46 and 47. Earmuffs were the fashion rage of the day, and ``Choo-Choo-Ch-Boogie'' was everyone's favorite song. The students enjoyed football games and dances, school plays and radio-broadcasted debates. Some say they even enjoyed life in the barracks.

``The truth is we thoroughly enjoyed the excitement,'' Robert James said. James travelled from his present home in Louisiana, where he owns an interior design firm, to attend the reunion.

``We adjusted because we made it a game. We pretended we were in college, going from building to building for classes,'' James said. He recalls that game with a wide smile and roars of laughter like those around him at the celebration.

The classmates all return to the city on the Elizabeth River with smiles and memories. They recognize each other if not by face, then by the sound of laughter.

``I may not recognize everyone's face right away,'' James said, ``but I soon recognize their expressions and the sounds of their voices.''

The old photograph each class member wears on his or her name-tag also helps with recognition.

``This is before,'' Betty Lee James Harrison says, pointing to the high school photograph on her chest, ``and this is after,'' she says pointing to her own smiling face. Harrison served as the chairman of the reunion committee. She and more than twenty others began organizing the event last February.

``We.ve had so much fun,'' she said. ``Despite all of our laughing, playing, and joking, we've even managed to get some things done.''

As the reunion weekend neared, Harrison said she was excited but very nervous. ``It's like planning a big wedding.'' The event began on Friday, Oct. 17, with a welcoming party at the Glene Shiela Women's Club. On Saturday night, the class enjoyed a dinner and dance at the Holiday Inn Waterfront in Portsmouth, and on Sunday, they concluded with a breakfast.

For committee member Kathleen Wiggins Culpepper, the months of preparation were as enjoyable as the reunion weekend. ``We learned to be pretty good detectives.'' Culpepper said she enjoyed tracking down old friends. However, she finds the event bittersweet when she thinks of her friend who isn't there. Betty Copeland Long began working on the reunion committee but did not live to attend the event.

``She was really looking forward to this, but she just didn't make it.'' Reunion attendants have not forgotten others who didn't make it. Among old photographs, sketches of the school, letterman sweaters, and memorabilia on display, a board bears 37 names and high school photographs. Above the names reads ``In Memoriam: Our Known Deceased.''

The class does not return to their school gymnasium for the celebration. Despite tradition, they do not attend a Wilson football game. They don't feel connected to the current Wilson High School. It isn't the school they attended on High Street.

Culpepper says, ``That's just not our school.'' It hasn't been since 1955 when the old Wilson High School closed. But, they have been without a school building before. This class learned fifty years ago how to make themselves at home elsewhere. So, they dance until midnight, and slip back to a carefree time.

In high school, Ollie Vee Walpole wrote for ``The Student'' Wilson's newspaper. For the reunion, Ollie Vee Walpole Lowe prepared a special article of memories. She recalls the last year at Wilson as a simpler time in life. ``One of our biggest decisions each day was whether to wear our bobby socks up or down,'' she wrote. During their reunion weekend, many enjoy returning to that youthful state of mind.

``I have no problems today,'' Sally Jernigan Watson says. Watson traveled from her home in Florida for the occasion. ``You could not have paid me to stay away. This returns me to a time of childhood, of no problems,'' Watson said. ``Everything I've lived through these years, all the hard times don't matter now, because I'm back where I started from, without a care in the world.''

Watson sits at the table in the hotel, beneath royal blue and orange balloons floating overhead. Around Watson's dinner table are friends Nel Jones Nelson and Edith Blacoger. The three women met as girls in the forth grade and progressed through school together.

Their lives' paths led them all to Florida, where they write or speak every Christmas, but have not seen one another in more than twenty-five years. The years of distance were erased as soon as they reunited, they say.

``It's just overwhelming,'' Jones said. ``I recognized them both as soon as I saw them.''

Though they fill their plates with the buffet food, the friends are swept-up by the activity around them, and the plates sit on confetti-laden tables, untouched. They giggle and chatter, pose for photographs and greet friends. They sign the old yearbooks they first autographed fifty years ago. In one book Watson finds her photograph. Next to her face, ``talking'' is listed as her hobby. She writes, ``10-18-97, one of the greatest days of my life.''

For one weekend, they became the teenagers in the name-tag photographs they wear on their chests. They remember bonding together during a disaster, and they come to share stories of lives trials since then.

Walpole Lowe uses these words, ``As we thumb through our yearbook and look at all those fresh, unlined faces so young and untouched by life, so full of anticipation and hope, we cannot help but reflect on how much we have lived through. . .

Still, there seems to remain in all of us here some innate need to return and visit old familiar places and see those with whom we shared those earliest hopes and dreams. It's lives touching again - it's a 50 year celebration of growth and survival.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo (top) by GARY C. KNAPP, File photo below.

David Varner, left standing, the husband of a Wilson graduate, meets

graduate C.E. Doll, center, and his wife Jacqueline at the Wilson

High School Class of '47 50th-year reunion. Students, below, were

forced to attend classes at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard during their

senior year after their school was heavily damaged in a fire in

1946. The class' graduation was held at the Portsmouth Naval

Hospital.

Connie Heynen Pomeroy, left, and Jessie Thomas Lokrantz catch up at

the Wilson Class of 1947 reunion.