The Class of 1959 gathered on Saturday, May 16, 2009, to celebrate our 50th anniversary of graduation from high school. The festivities began with an informal gathering in the St. Richard Social Hall followed by Mass with the parishioners of St. Richard Parish in Westland.
Fr. James Wieging was the principal celebrant with Fr. Gary Tierney doing the preaching honors. I concelebrated along with Fr. Edward Scheuerman and Msgr. Thomas Villerot, who were both on the high school faculty when we were students. After the liturgy, the classmates gathered for the class photo with their spouses.
After the brief photo session, we drove to Amantea Restaurant in Garden City for our dinner. At the dinner, Father Scheuerman gave an enjoyable talk about our class both in the seminary and after graduation. Dr. Bob Preuss read an account of the activities of various members of the class. The folks who were present were more interested in talking with one another than in giving short or long accounts of their lives since graduation. That leaves an opportunity for further gatherings.
By and large, the gathering was enjoyable and most of all we all celebrated our years together as a pleasant time well spent. Our class motto still lives: Rough, Tough, and Hard to Diaper!
Thomas Gaspard
Sacred Heart Seminary High School, Class of 1962, Sacred Heart Seminary College, Class of 1966
The reunion of the Sacred Heart Seminary High School Class of 1962 and College Class of 1966 was held July 18-19, 2009. The venue was the Inn at St. John's in Plymouth, Michigan.
On Saturday, class members enjoyed cocktails and dinner, with several out-of-towners staying overnight, some from as far as California. On Sunday, we met at Sacred Heart for Mass in St. Joseph chapel, breakfast and a tour of the seminary.
Thirty alums attended the event, plus several spouses. That is nearly twenty-eight percent of the original total 177 base names for whom we have good addresses (148 attended high school sometime during the years 1958-62, plus twenty-nine incremental college attendees during the years 1962-66).
There was lots of catching up and story-swapping. Each of us had a name tag with original photos-regrettably necessary for present day recognition. Class diversity was captured in a sixty percent response rate survey done pre-reunion. Just ten percent were clergy/religious, seventy percent not retired, three quarters have graduate degrees, more than half have moved over five times and a quarter have lived overseas. A sixty-seven-page reunion bio book evidenced this diversity.
The reunion was organized by Msgr. Bill Easton, Bob Heinrich, Dave Padilla and me. This was actually our second get-together in forty years, having had a smaller "Reunion 1" in 2007.
