Half a century after they graduated, members of the Oyster Bay High School class of 1975 are preparing to gather in their hometown for a milestone reunion weekend.
The 50th reunion, set for Columbus Day weekend, has been organized by the class’s former Student Council members, who have worked for more than a year and a half to bring their classmates back together.
“It has been truly a labor of love for us to meet every month for the last year and a half,” class President John Sharifi, who now lives in Seattle, said, “so that we could create this memorable, wonderful weekend filled with joy, filled with laughter, filled with all the things that we fully expect to happen.”
The reunion will welcome about 60 attendees from across the country. The activities begin Oct. 10, with a welcome gathering at the Homestead in Oyster Bay. The following morning, alumni will be welcomed back to the high school for a guided tour.
“I walked into the high school and I was like, ‘You have to go on this tour if you’re only coming back 50 years later,’” said Barbara Shapiro, one of two class secretaries, now a New Jersey resident and a reunion coordinator. “The money that they have put into the high school, I think, is just remarkable.”
On Oct. 11, the celebration will continue with the main event, at the Coach Meeting House, where there will be music, memorabilia and Oyster Bay-themed keepsakes. A jukebox filled with 1970s hits, a raffle of Oyster Bay sweatshirts and Bonanza Stand’s Italian ices will be among the highlights.
“We’ve blown up all the senior wills in the yearbook, we’ve got baseball hats in swag bags, and even had matches made because matches were very big back then,” Wendy Binder, the class vice president, who now lives in Maryland, said. “We wanted it to be so memorable, not just, ‘Let’s go in and eat a great dinner and drink the night away.’”
The committee has also prepared a memorial poster with the names of classmates who have died. One who will be deeply missed is Jarod Jacobs, who died this year, of multiple sclerosis. Jacobs had been a regular at every previous reunion, and had hoped to make it to the 50th as well.
The reunion weekend will close the morning of Oct. 12 with a farewell breakfast at the town beach pavilion, hosted by Reunion Committee member John Bruckner, who has been instrumental in organizing class reunions over the years.
The class of 1975 was the largest in Oyster Bay High School history up to that time, with 192 graduates. For many of them, the memories of growing up in a small town and the sense of community that came with it remain.
“We were very much like family,” Sharifi said. “Keep in mind, many of us met each other when we were in third, fourth, fifth grade. We had sleepovers. We knew our classmates’ brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers. So that’s how close we were.”
That closeness was what made high school a special time for many in the class.
“It was such a tight community,” Deborah Willett, the class secretary, who now lives in Brentwood, said. “Looking back on it now, it seems like the community was actually also our family, and that was just so key — that wherever you walked, whatever you did, there was somebody there that knew you. You never really felt like you were an outsider.”
Ellen Moore, the class treasurer, who lives in South Carolina, echoed that feeling. “It makes me tear up, because I’m looking at these friends, and I haven’t talked to some of them for a very long time, but it’s as if we never haven’t talked,” Moore said. “It was the familial feeling I had just walking through town.”
Shapiro added that working on the reunion has reinforced how little has changed about their class dynamic.
“Everybody’s personalities are sort of exactly who they were,” she said. “Things that annoyed me about people still annoy me. You graduate, you go on to bigger things, but you’re still the same person at the core.”
The organizers credit the Oyster Bay community for helping make the reunion possible, especially after the original venue for Saturday’s event closed unexpectedly over the summer.
“What we found was the community rallied behind us,” Shapiro said. “We wound up where we think is a better place for us, but the support from the town of Oyster Bay and everybody in it was so overwhelmingly lovely.”
The group’s goal, Binder said, was always to make the weekend easy and welcoming for anyone who wanted to attend.
“It was never lost on us to make sure that anyone who wanted to come into town could come,” she said, “and whatever we needed to do to make it possible, we were committed to making it happen.”
For the classmates, the weekend will be a chance to reconnect not only with old friends, but also with the memories of their hometown. “When I explain it to my friends now, none of them are still friends with their high school friends,” Moore said. “It’s unique. The town was my family. It took care of us.”
