It could have been any high school reunion except these alumni never graduated.
“Did anyone here graduate?” asked reunion organizer Dennis Haas of Ruidoso, N.M. There were no takers.
Actually, it differed from your standard high school reunion in another respect. Everyone was glad to be there. Stories seemed to pick up where they left off 25 or 30 years ago.
The Dropout Reunion on Saturday at Abilene State Park was a reunion of guys who grew up in the city’s Alameda area. There were Haas and his brother Rex, brothers Sollie and Floyd Morris, Terry Morris (no relation), and brothers Cliff, Eddie and Richard Mann.
Missing were brothers Gary and Randy Ellison as well as the Stevens brothers. Still more had passed away. What the group had in common was growing up along Elm Creek in the 1960s.
“We just lived in the creek,” Rex Haas said. “We go out early in the morning and stay out till dark, and our parents never worried about us.”
Not that the boys didn’t do some things that would have given their parents pause, had they only known.
“We were thick as thieves back then,” Dennis Haas said. “Some of us were thieves.”
Mostly though, they were just kids. They swam and fished in Elm Creek and played in the Tye Little League together.
“We didn’t have anything,” Dennis Haas said. “We didn’t have Internet; we didn’t have video games. We didn’t know we were as poor as we were. We just played with each other.”
They attended Reagan Elementary, Lincoln Junior High and Abilene High before dropping out. Terry Morris and Sollie Morris were classmates from the first grade on. Some went into the military, like Dennis Haas and Sollie Morris, but they all found jobs and have provided for their families. But they wouldn’t recommend dropping out to anyone.
“Stay in school as long as you can,” Dennis Haas advised. “I had some good things happen to me, but it was tough finding a job when you’re 17 and don’t have a high school diploma.”
“It was pretty tough,” Sollie Morris agreed.
Dennis Haas, who worked as a firefighter and fire investigator after leaving the Navy, used the Internet to track down his former neighborhood buddies, who last gathered 25 years ago.
“I guess I’m a bit nostalgic,” he said. “As you get older, these relationships become more important, and we don’t have that class year that keeps you together. I hope we can do this every other year.”
Certainly this group would not run out of stories to tell.
“I don’t know what the biggest told is going to be, but I’ll bet he’s going to tell it,” said Dennis Haas, pointing to Terry Morris, who responded with a not-too-sincere pained look.
Cliff Mann thought he knew what the biggest lie was going to be.
“The biggest lie is going to be, ‘I didn’t do it,’” he said.
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