American Scene: Nostalgic Reunion in Salina, Kansas

Dwight Eisenhower, who grew up in nearby Abilene, was ending his presidency when the class of 1960 graduated from Salina High School. John Kennedy was two weeks away from the Democratic nomination. Recently, 195 members of Salina High’s class of 1960 gathered from all over the nation for a reunion at Salina’s Hilton Inn. They came partly out of nostalgia, but also out of curiosity—to see what the ’60s had done to their classmates and their home town of 43,000 people. TIME’S William Friedman joined them and sent this report:

SALINA is almost literally the middle of America, lying in the wheat-rich Kansas prairie equidistant from either coast. The streets are wide and shaded by magnificent Dutch elms. The air is a sweet melange of fresh-cut wheat, mown stubble and clay baking on the river bottoms. A hot, dry wind pours across the plains from the Rockies. Westinghouse tested air pollution in every part of the country before deciding to establish a fluorescent-tube plant in Salina. Instead of traffic reports, the radio offers the latest fishing conditions.

To call Salina Middle America, however, would not be entirely accurate. “We have some pockets of intolerance,” says Whitley Austin, editor of the Salina Journal, “but most of the people simply try to be fair.” Salina is an accumulation of American eras. Ladies wait for men to open doors for them. Says Marsha Johnson Stewart, class of ’60: “We’re happy out here just like a woman always was. No reason to change the past when it’s been good.” With a black population of only 1,900, the town has a black mayor, Robert Caldwell, an industrial-arts instructor at the high school. Salina boasts a handsome new city-county building and library, two colleges, an Elks Club with, according to one native, “the best collection of stag movies in all of Kansas,” and one hippie boutique run by a man who calls himself Brooklyn.

Salina had no such boutique when the class of 1960 graduated. The faces in the Salina High School yearbook have such a faraway, unformed look that some of them, only ten years later, may wonder if they were ever entirely that young. The homecoming queen that year was Rita Joyce Cook, who appears on a full page of the yearbook crowned with baby carnations, a heart-shaped diamond pendant around her neck. With two others, she was judged “Most Likely to Succeed.” Rita Joyce got married after graduation, had two children, got divorced, earned a teaching degree and moved to Shreveport, La., a city that she finds “much more conservative than Salina and very bigoted.” She is still “cute as a button,” as an old counselor at S.H.S. says. Rita Joyce has also grown startlingly outspoken in her opposition to the war in Viet Nam.

The townsfolk still recall the class of 1960 as something special. It set a regional record for Merit Scholarships (13), and its football team went undefeated in the Central Kansas League. Breon Mitchell went on to Kansas University and a Rhodes scholarship. “Folks here,” remembers Rita Joyce, “could never understand why Breon studied English and philosophy. They figured he should be using his brainpower for engineering or physics.” Breon, like much of the class of ’60, moved away from Salina and now teaches at the University of Indiana. Sandy Van Cleef studied ballet, married a mortician and settled in Magnolia, Ark. Keith Cushman became an assistant professor of English and humanities at the University of Chicago; he is planning a book about D.H. Lawrence.

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A year ago Mike Loop, a Union Pacific conductor-brakeman, and his wife Linda began organizing the reunion by rounding up addresses with Marsha Stewart’s help. Out of a class of 348 —one died, electrocuted in 1960 while surveying near Salina—195 appeared. They met and caroused fondly, with many shocks of recognition. Harold Snedker turned up, now an Air Force captain with two children, and an expert on missiles. “The Air Force is changing,” he remarked at one point. “Today the officers are not Southern cops. We need good young officers who aren’t afraid to think for themselves. It’s the only way to change the system.” Sandra Applebaugh was there but without her husband, Darryl Johnson, who is an Army major in Viet Nam. She recalled wistfully: “The most scandalous thing that ever happened to our class was when some guys got caught drinking beer backstage during a stage production.” Gene George, president of the class of 1960, is now a geologist with an oil company, a job that leaves him morally unsettled: “I am a conservationist who works for an oil company.”

The old graduates kept the local bowling alley open all night. Next evening they assembled for a ham and beef banquet, looking prosperous for their ages and, because of state liquor laws, influencing their Cokes from brown paper bags. On each table at the Hilton Inn was a construction-paper centerpiece noting the most important events of the past ten years. In 1963, John Kennedy’s assassination. In 1965, Debbie Bryant (a Kansan) named Miss America. In 1966, Kansan Jim Ryun runs the fastest mile. Not a word about Viet Nam.

Then after dinner Phil Currier, a former Peace Corpsman in Borneo, once president of the Salina High student council, took the speaker’s stand with an urgent yet soft-spoken speech about pollution, ecology, cities, racism and the war: “If you feel as I do, then sign a letter to President Nixon from the class of ’60” protesting the war. Some of his classmates applauded respectfully. More than a few muttered “That son of a bitch!” Before the evening was over, Jerry Brewster, a former Marine helicopter pilot in Viet Nam, was circulating a counter-petition headed: “Up yours, you s.o.b. You don’t have the answer either.” Currier got 35 signatures, Brewster 15. But Brewster and Currier wound up shaking hands.

The war, after all, still seemed rather far from Salina, the home town where Richard D. Nelson married Joan Velve and went to work as a traffic manager for local granaries. In his resume for the reunion, he wrote siniply: “I have raised a family and enjoyed life.”

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