By Khalida Sarwari
Herriman Avenue may as well be called Memory Lane next month when the members of Saratoga High School’s class of 1965 come together to walk down the hallways some last walked 50 years ago.
The impressive group not only includes the usual cast of judges, lawyers, teachers and doctors, but also owners of companies, a Spanish TV star, a criminal investigator, a missionary, a museum curator and a director of Hollywood films.
Just don’t expect that last one to show up.
At least 60 of the 300-strong alumni will be making an appearance at the 50-year reunion, scheduled to take place at the Saratoga Foothill Club at 5 p.m. on Sept. 12, preceded by a tour of the school led by former teacher Hugh Roberts. The reunion committee, chaired by Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Phil Pennypacker–who, perhaps not surprisingly, was class president–has planned a weekend of activities that includes a golf tournament and informal get-togethers around town.
Some of these folks will only be a hop and a skip away while others will be coming from as far away as Sweden and Alaska, according to Marsha Johnson, a member of the 1965 class who is leading the organization of the reunion events.
The reunion will give classmates an opportunity to reconnect with people they were close to and also connect with folks they might have overlooked or didn’t get to know well, she said.
After graduating, Johnson went on to study at a community college in Iowa and then UC-Santa Barbara, where she met her husband. They have two adult sons, one of whom just got married. Johnson and her husband remained in Santa Barbara and she taught for 39 years. She currently works as a part-time elementary school teacher.
Johnson has been hard at work trying to track down her classmates through email, Facebook and classmates.com, as well as the old-fashioned way by relying on word-of-mouth.
“Some of them are tech-savvy and some aren’t,” she said. “We don’t have everybody because they didn’t all grow up with technology.”
Sadly, not every member of the class went on to experience successful careers or long lives. The 1965 class includes folks such as Barry Williams, one of several soldiers who died in the Vietnam War shortly after graduating.
The director, of course, is a reference to legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who has said the school was “the worst experience of his life and hell on Earth.”
Spielberg elaborates further in a 1993 New York Times article: “I got smacked and kicked to the ground during P.E., in the locker room, in the showers. Pennies were thrown at me in the study hall in a very quiet room of 100 students. People coughed the word ‘Jew’ in their hand as they passed me in the hallway. We couldn’t stop it. So my mom picked me up in her car every day after school and took me home.”
While acknowledging that Spielberg “didn’t like us very much,” Johnson pooh-poohed his claims of anti-Semitism and bullying by the wider student body, insisting that it was actually just a few students who created problems for Spielberg.
“The thing is we had many Jewish people in our class,” she said. “We didn’t care, but he felt picked on for some reason. Somebody had called him Jew or Jewish. He was already pre-sensitive to that, I believe. None of us remember ever doing that, but somebody may have in the locker room. For the rest of us, we didn’t do that. It didn’t make a difference to us who was Jewish and who wasn’t.”
In an effort to bury the hatchet, Johnson said she had invited Spielberg to the two previous class reunions at Vasona Park, but he didn’t show up. He did, however, send a staff person over to the school 30 years ago to retrieve a short film he’d made while he was a student there after they screened it at the 20th reunion, Johnson said. The film was on his classmates who had participated in a ritual known as “senior sneak day.”
The cost of admission for the reunion is $85 per person and includes a buffet dinner. Registration is still open; contact Johnson at mjohnson@sbceo.org.
