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Some of those stories might be true

When Clovis hosts its annual Draggin’ Main/Music Festival June 22-29, a number of high school graduation classes will be joining the festivities for reunions.

There will be talk of long-ago hooky playing, prankstering, sports heroics ... and some of the stories may even be (partly) true.

This summer is a good time to remember remembering because it’s the 80th anniversary of the 1939 Clovis High School graduating class. Most of those students are gone now, but we know a lot about them because they wrote their stories down in a reunion book published in 1989.

It seems a woman named Phyllis T. Moreland wrote letters to class members, letting them know a 50th class reunion had been scheduled for Aug. 12, 1989. Moreland apparently asked classmates to write letters updating each other about how their lives were going at the time.

Here are some of the highlights from the book “CHS 50th 1939-1989.”

• “Dear Phyllis,” wrote Mildred (Brown) Jergins, who lived in Clearwater, Florida, at the time.

“I work part-time (one day a week) as a public relations person for a local optometrist who specializes in contact lenses. ... Also I work as part-time secretary for the Church of Christ in Clearwater, which includes use of the computer. As you probably know, computer work is fascinating!”

Jergins also wrote that she enjoyed crocheting afghans and walked two to four miles a day, three days a week.

• Dorothea Wolf wrote that she moved with her husband, A. B. Cain, to Wichita, Kansas, in 1942 to work in an airplane factory. In 1944, they moved to a farm 25 miles northeast of Wichita where they still lived.

“We both worked in the National and Kansas Pork Producers for many years,” she wrote.

• Marvin Call said he planned to attend the reunion. “My favorite hobby is fishing, and I try to do as much as I can,” he wrote. He also had a “Class A Motor home. The wife and I use it all we can afford. Ha.”

• Doris (Cravy) McCoy was living in Tucumcari, where she worked 28 years for the public schools before retiring in 1982. Her husband, Calvin, was owner and manager of Tucumcari Concrete until he retired in 1980.

“I am looking forward to this reunion very much,” she wrote. “I had planned on coming to the last one, but fell and broke my nose. I will keep my fingers crossed this time and hope nothing will prevent me from attending this time.”

She had enclosed $50 to help cover reunion costs.

• Sybil (Gilliland) Bale wrote that she would be unable to attend, but was keeping busy with her life in Las Mochas Vadito near Taos.

Bale had been teaching music, sewing and battling snow drifts.

“Right now, we are snowed in — we had snow for 48 hours without stopping (and) had drifts over five feet in the driveway,” she wrote in her letter to Phyllis dated Feb. 7, 1989.

• Earl Hankins wrote that he, too, would be unable to attend the reunion “because of emphysema.” But he updated the class on his life.

“I married Betty Hopkins,” he wrote. “(S)he is also a C.H.S. classmate, 1942. Her father was the custodian for the school.

“I worked for the railroad as a machinist and just retired eight years ago.”

Hankins lived in Barstow, California.

• Doris (Johnson) Harrison wrote that she had worked for the FBI and served in the Navy three years in Naval Intelligence. She married a fighter pilot, who had died in 1985.

“This changed my life considerably,” she wrote. “However, I have continued to serve in various capacities at my church ... play some bridge, garden, spend time at my cabin (and) travel.”

So what have you been doing since high school?

David Stevens writes about regional history for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]

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