Few people have the rare opportunity to find out what happened to their elementary school classmates. Twenty-one graduates of St. Rita School in Alexandria did just that at a reunion honoring the first class to attend the school for all eight grades (1953-60).
After a couple of years of planning, two postponements due to COVID-19 and a lot of sleuthing to track down former classmates, members of St. Rita’s Class of 1960 got together for their two years late 60-year reunion last fall. Since many of the students went to different high schools, some had not seen each other in more than 60 years. Those who had kept in touch decided it was time for a reunion.
The group reacquainted themselves over a 2021 Zoom call, but a couple of the former students remarked how natural it felt to meet in person despite all the time that had passed.
Rita Hansbrough Fernandez, who traveled 3,400 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, described that first Friday evening as “great and comfortable and just wonderful.” She noted that “as everyone arrived it was almost as if those 60 years hadn’t occurred. We were right like when we were kids.”
Phil Gallery who attended the school from 1958 to 1960 described a similar experience. “There was one girl who was kind of a loner but within 10 seconds we were joking with each other,” he said. “Within 20 minutes we were singing songs together.”
Gallery, Fernandez, and their classmates Bob Wallace and Rich Comisky agreed that one of their favorite parts of the reunion was literally taking a drive down memory lane. A Saturday bus tour took the group through the Alexandria neighborhoods where the former students grew up, passing by each attendee’s childhood home.
“It was quite interesting to see where the other kids lived,” said Gallery. “It was nice to see and say ‘Oh yeah that’s where Mary Jones lived’ and ‘There’s my house.”
Walking the school grounds brought the men back to their days on the playground.
Wallace said. “The playground was just a parking lot. It still is. And on the playground, the sisters separated the boys from the girls with the boys on one side and the girls on the other, and you couldn’t cross that line.” Comisky added that the boys “were a tight group” recalling that they played “sports or marbles or baseball cards in the parking lot at recess.”
According to Gallery, the 12 old classrooms he and his classmates remembered are no longer used as classrooms but Fernandez was nonetheless surprised by the small size of the first graders’ desks. “I used to really fit in this,” she said laughing. Comisky similarly noted that the school seemed different seeing it as an adult. “It just seemed to me that the building was smaller on the inside than I had envisioned but of course as a 7, 8-year-old everything looks bigger and then you grow up and things start looking smaller.”
On Sunday, the former students gathered inside St. Rita Church where the group honored their deceased classmates and the sisters who taught them. The experience reminded Rita Hansbrough Fernandez of all the reasons she loved the parish she was named after.
“The church was always special to me. I don’t know if it was a special feeling when I would be there of safety and calmness, and I loved being there. I came from a rather chaotic family so church was kind of a refuge sometimes,” she said. “The church was exactly the same as I remembered except they had a brand new, beautiful pipe organ. It was like going back in time.”
The class of 1960 took time to remember the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood, who taught them. The group held an auction that raised $1,250 for St. Joseph’s Villa where the last living sister who taught them resides.
Those who reconnected through the Zoom meeting and in-person reunion plan to stay in touch. “Now I have lots of new old friends again,” Fernandez said with a chuckle. “We all have each other’s email and Facebook, and in fact we are already talking about another reunion.”
Pariseau is a freelancer in McLean.
