Times were simpler, innocent for students at Vernon High School in 1959.
The school, home to Grades 10-12, and some Grade 13 classes, was located in Polson Park. The Class of 1959 would hang out in downtown Vernon at Nick's Kandy Kitchen, pulling 'Mainers' (driving up and down 30th Avenue) Friday and Saturday nights. They'd head to the Skyway Drive-In Theatre at the north end of town, or theTowne Theatre on Main Street to watch movies like Ben-Hur, the Oscar winner that year for Best Picture, or the Alfred Hitchcock classic North By Northwest.
They'd tune into CJIB AM radio, a station not even 10 years old, to hear the latest news or music. Tunes like the top song of the year, Mack The Knife by Bobby Darin, or Venus by Frankie Avalon.
This past week, surviving members of the grad class of 130, those who wanted to attend, gathered in Vernon for the VHS Class of '59's 65th reunion.
"They were just a really good bunch of people and they still are," said reunion co-organizer Sarah (Scotty) Morag McLean, who earned the nickname from her classmates for her heavy Scottish accent after moving to Vernon at age 13 with her family. "When we put the message out to form a committee for the 65th, 12 people in Vernon showed up.
"Every month we'd meet and it was like a mini-reunion."
McLean grew up on 31st Street near Vernon Jubilee Hospital and said she "skidded down the hill behind VJHL into Polson Park" to get to school. She became a hairdresser for most of her professional life, and has been associated with Vernon's Powerhouse Theatre for more than 60 years.
One of the people McLean has kept in touch with for 65 years is Mary Charters (née Cohen), who grew up on the Okanagan Indian Band Reserve at Six Mile Creek near the former Little Kingdom Store. She would ride a bus for an hour to and from school five days a week.
She had a lot of fun on the bus, she said, and it was at Vernon High School where she "learned to laugh at myself."
"I was taking Grade 9 French and the teacher asked me to count to 10 in French, but I did it once except in the Okanagan language," laughed Charters. "She asked me to repeat it in French and I did it again in Okanagan. Then I heard the teacher and the students snickering, and I thought, 'Why are they snickering at me?' Then I realized what I had done, so the next time I rattled off the numbers in French."
Charters worked in the Yukon for a few years, then moved to Oroville, Wash. where she became a caregiver and met her husband, William (Dempsey) Charters. They had seven children (Mary was accompanied to the Vernon reunion by daughter, Valerie) and spent life in Merritt, where Mary still lives. She is a board member with the Nicola Valley Museum and Archives, and is an Elder counselling students at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology.
Longtime Vernon realtor George Yamada continues to stay active, playing hockey and other sports. He came to Vernon with his family in 1942, attended Beairsto Elementary and was part of the first class at Harwood Elementary. Grades 7-9 were spent at Vernon Junior Secondary (now W.L. Seaton Secondary) before heading to the Polson Park high school.
"It was the only high school then, and Vernon was a small community, so one of the good things was you knew people that were a year or four years older than you," said Yamada, who worked for the late Ernie Kowal at Ernie's Garage during high school. "The teachers were good and fair."
There were 27 members of the Class of 1959 who attended dinner at the Schubert Centre. Everybody in their early 80s. Not there physically, but certainly in spirit, and represented by his widow, Irene, was Tosh (Zoom) Oizumi. Irene volunteers with the Schubert Centre and wanted to make sure she got this particular dinner gig.
“That’s why I’m here. I wanted to see all of the others again,” said Irene, who grew up and graduated in Surrey. She met Zoom at a university fraternity party when he was a student at UBC.
“This is a real good class of people who I’ve got to know and meet over the years,” she said. “There are lots of wonderful stories.”
A moment of silence was held for all class members who have died.
Classmates also enjoyed a meet-and-greet and breakfast during the two days of reunion festivities.
Vernon High School would later become Clarence Fulton Junior Secondary (Clarence Fulton was teaching at VHS in 1959), a Grade 8-10 school. A new Vernon Senior Secondary was built and opened in 1969 at the current site on 18th Street. The present school opened in 2013.
The school in the park was torn down after a new Fulton Secondary School was built on its current Fulton Road location.
