If you read the last post you know that I’m still remembering The Greatest Generation and my high school chums who are like family.

As we gathered this week to celebrate the life of Wilma Hooker. It gave our classmates an opportunity to spend two days together, and it was 1965 all over again. We don’t see each other for months or years, but when we come together we pick right up where we left off – and we’re 16 again – crazy and goofy as ever.

We all have different memories, and combining them when we meet forms a priceless composite of our childhood and adolescent years. Our reunions have become a highlight of my life. The minute a date is set, I start on a new diet. (I’d be big as a barn door if we didn’t have those reunions.)

Seated around the dinner table, I listened to the conversations taking place on either side of me. Some were comparing cholesterol numbers and others were discussing their bad knees, the result of long distance runs which most of us gave up long ago.

I smiled as I remembered a time when we were focused on the theme for the Junior Senior Prom or Red Lawson’s perfect record for extra points on the football field. We collapsed into hysterics recalling the night two of the guys put a dead buzzard in the high school auditorium and gave us a smelly surprise on Monday morning.

It was a real treat to get together for lunch following Miss Wilma’s funeral service. We met at The Ritz Café which is located in the old Ritz theater. We spent every Friday night and Saturday afternoon in the same spot back in the late 50s and early 60s. Ruthie remembered that we would sit all together on a row and hold hands during the scary movies.

For a quarter we could get a Coke, a bag of popcorn and watch a double feature, a cartoon and a short serial where the heroine was always left tied to a railroad track with a train barreling toward her. We cut up so badly, we were threatened by the harried usher to be banished from the theatre forever. The movie, usually a B grade film starring Ronald Reagan or Boris Karloff, didn’t much matter. It was more like background noise for our weekly fun fest.

Carole and gang during reunion at the Ritz

Today The Ritz has been renovated into a plush convention center and bears no resemblance to its earlier days. Billy Damron recalled shooting bubble gum balls at the back of out heads. The girls showed up for school on Monday morning with huge hunks cut out of their hair. (Yes, girls, Billy was the culprit.)  Oh to have my natural hair back again.

Who are these old people?  I yelled at the girls to hold their heads high to hide double chins.  Barton is the only one who obeyed!  (She'[s going to kill me.)

While reminiscing, we were reminded of The Greatest Generation which raised us and provided the moral and spiritual fortitude to get us through life’s inevitable ups and downs. For those of us lucky enough to still have our parents, we are reminded to cherish them…and try our best not to embarrass them! Here’s to The Greatest Generation to whom we are forever grateful to have been raised in a small town in Mississippi, where the men are all good looking and the women are the most loyal friends a girl could have.