High School Reunions: Finding Former Classmates in the Digital Age

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Mark Thompson, GoLocalProv Contributor

Dan's mother died recently. It was a sad day for him and his family, but a good day for the committee trying to put together East Greenwich High School's Class of 1971's 40th reunion this summer. That's because the obituary I read told me where Dan was now living, and I was able to mention the upcoming reunion to him in the condolence card I sent him via snail mail.

Reunions are a strange business. First of all, most folks are ambivalent about attending them. I get the sense the early ones are easy to attend, as are the later ones. It's those in the middle that tend to weigh heaviest on the mind. EGHS '71 made it easy: there was a 5th (at the local East Greenwich Veterans Firemen's Hall), a 10th (at the not-so-local Quonset `O' Club in North Kingstown), and a 20th (at the faraway Dutch Inn, in Galilee) – but nothing since.

The yearning to reconnect

The blush of youth is still upon you for those early ones. Mistakes tend to be minor, as are the pounds added on or the hair lost. But such issues can grow in mid-life, which probably deters some folks from attending – or for even holding them, for that matter. But now that our class is approaching the 40th anniversary of graduating (in the high-school faculty parking lot, of all places), there seems to be a yearning to reconnect, if only to remind ourselves of how young we once were.

By my count, 13 of our 171 classmates are no longer among us. So we need to come together to acknowledge them, and our own journey through life. Technology has certainly made that easier. We've set up a Facebook page, been ricocheting emails across the Internet, and sending out press releases to various outlets at the speed of light – for free!

The Internet's role in reuniting

There are all sorts of digital tools to help high-school reunion planners: there's greatreunions.com ("Over 6,000 high school reunions since 1983"), reunionsonline.net ("With more and more people going online everyday, let the power of the Internet work for you and get your reunion online today!") and even reunions.com ("The official association of professional reunion planners").

Then there's the ancient classmates.com ("Keep Old Friendships Alive Online'). You can't go anywhere inside its site without registering, and you wonder why you need classmates.com (apparently recently acquired by "Memory Lane – Step Back in Time" – an entity that has the gall to trademark "Memory Lane"…).

Once Facebook came onto the scene, you kind of felt sorry for classmates.com. (From the Onion a couple of years ago: "Employees at Classmates.com—an online service that enables users to find and communicate with people from their past for a monthly fee—have done everything in their power to keep the company's CEO from finding out about the wildly popular social networking site Facebook.")

Paying to connect? In the digital age?

Then there was that nasty lawsuit that alleged that despite online pitches from classmates.com that your former classmates were trying to contact you – forcing you to pay that monthly fee to find out just who they were – was a sham. "Plaintiff discovered that in fact, no former classmate of his had tried to contact him or view his profile," one legal complaint said. "Of those http://www.classmates.com users who were characterized…as members who viewed Plaintiff's profile, none were former classmates of Plaintiff or persons familiar with or known to Plaintiff for that matter."

So the class of 1971 has elected to strike out on our own. We're indeed reuniting on our 40th, and it's set for the Dunes Club in Narragansett (okay – it's not local, but a classmate is a member and got us a good deal) on Saturday night, August 27.

And yes, we've set up a Facebook page and emailed press releases around the state seeking former classmates (not-dot-com). We're hoping for the best. And primping already.

If you're a member of the East Greenwich High School class of 1971 – or know someone who is – kindly ask them to shoot us an email at 1971Avengers40th@groups.facebook.com. Better yet, simply print out this story on paper and mail it to them via the U.S. Postal Service. Let them know the deadline for reservations is August 1.