Reunion stats

I wanted to echo the sentiments that Jay and Michael have posted here on the blog about the reunion. It was a great reunion, and special thanks to Michael for stepping up to chair it. Also, I want to thank the committee members who worked so hard to pull the reunion together. And last but not least, I'd like to thank those of you who were able to attend and make it into the success it turned out to be.

Terri and I had a wonderful time and it was great to see everyone there, including some of you who I hadn't seen in over 30 years. It's amazing how a reunion atmosphere can bridge that time gap and, in just a few seconds, it's like we've always been best friends forever. I think that some people may feel that they've completely lost touch with their high school friends and yet all it really takes to reconnect is a few hours at a reunion to reestablish these friendships. To me, that certainly seems like time well spent.

I was playing around with the spreadsheet I use to keep track of everyone and found that we had a higher attendance at this reunion than at the last one. We also had the greatest number of people returning from far away places. It seemed as if the number of spouses/guests declined a little with about 25% of us opting to bring along a guest this time. Perhaps it's an indication of how busy you know that you'll be talking with other classmates.

Here are some statistical observations about our graduating class, which had 176 members:

104 have made it to at least one reunion

And of those 104:

61 have made it to one reunion
24 have made it to two reunions
19 have made it to all three reunions

Number of Classmates attending reunions:

66 in 1988
49 in 2002
51 in 2007

It's not unusual for reunion attendance to drop off with time, so this increase in the attendance is something to celebrate. I'm not implying that attendance numbers are the only indicator of a reunion's success. I've just noticed that it's easy to talk oneself out of attending or procrastinate until it's too late. It usually only takes a little encouragement to move someone off the fence who's having mixed feelings about attending. Whenever I've done this, the person ended up thanking me afterwards.

I have the reunion pictures posted here. It requires the username/password which I generally send out in our emails. If you don't have it, please email me for it. In looking through them I realized that, although not everyone was there in person, many were there in spirit because we had the senior pictures cycling on a projector in the background so even if you were not there, you may still see yourself in a photo or two so please check them out.

If anyone who has any digital photos that they did not give to Bruce Cottle to copy at the reunion, please send them to me and I'll post more photos as I get them. Also, for those of you who are in the area, you can pick up a CD with these reunion photos at Mark Hession's White House Diner.