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IN YOUR PRIME
Class of '32 Reunion
“We’ll meet as long as we’re alive,” says Rachel Blessley Snavely, who turns 91 this July. She was laughing, as she spoke:
“Of course, there are just the two of us now.”
This mother of three, grandmother to eight, and great-grandmother to seven, was referring to the reunion dinners of
Mechanicsburg High School’s class of 1932. The annual affairs continue uninterrupted--and now, intimate.
In June of that long-ago season, 84 girls and boys, all eager to find jobs and help families strapped by the Great
Depression, were graduated in the small farming town west of Harrisburg. Today, there remain only Rachel, of hometown
Mechanicsburg, and Frank McGuire, who’ll be 92, and lives in Hartford, CT.
The reunion is always on June 29th, the original graduation day. Last year, Rachel continues, “We were surprised the dinner
aroused so much interest. There were telephone calls from all over the place; Louisiana even. The Carlisle newspaper did a
big story and the television stations showed up…”
The dinner, at a table for two, was held per usual at the Dodge City restaurant in Harrisburg, the state capital. “People
kept wanting to pay for our dinner,” Rachel remembers. There were so many, “We didn’t know who to thank.”
“I had sea food, crab cakes,” said the Reunion chairwoman. “Frank had some kind of steak. I had a glass of wine, Chablis, I
believe. Frank had a beer.”
In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt won a landslide Presidential victory (he carried all but six states); Cole Porter’s play “Gay
Divorce” opened on Broadway; the Yankees won the World Series, sweeping the Chicago Cubs in four games; British novelist
Aldous Huxley published “Brave New World” while in London there were “hunger marches” and 15,000 jobless young people rioted
over four consecutive days. In Washington, Roosevelt pledged to “restore this country to prosperity.”
“Those days were different,” widow Rachel Snavely said, explaining that she grew up on a farm (“We always had plenty to
eat.”) seven miles from the high school. “I walked, or in rough weather I waited for the milk truck. I got a ride that way.
One classmate actually drove a horse and buggy to school…”
Flipping through the years since, Rachel recalls that Joe Myers, “a wonderful person” was killed fighting in Europe during
World War II; Frank McGuire, survivor and reunion partner “used to pull pranks in school”, and everyone “was interested in
being in high school. Remember, you didn’t have to go. You could quit at 16…”
But why, I asked, has your class been so steadfast, so loyal to the concept of reunions? Rachel Snavely thinks it has to do
with the town and the times. “I was born and raised here; I’m happy here, and people were different back then,” she says. “Do
you know bankers were jumping out of windows, committing suicide, rather than face their customers or to foreclose on
farms?”
Explaining why she chose to attend an out-of-town school reunion, author Anna Quindlen wrote, “Many of my first lessons in
friendship, loss, loyalty and love came from a group of people I have not seen for two decades…” and then, “We know how
important the early years are, but the early years lasted longer then…”
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Outrageous Associations
