South Panola’s Class of 1966 is planning its 50th reunion for Saturday, October 22, at 5 p.m. at Lee Garner’s Arena One, 562 Cutting Horse Lane off Chapeltown Road. The weekend coincides with South Panola’s 2016 homecoming weekend and Friday night plans for class members to attend the game are coalescing.
Jerry Lightsey has hosted our most recent planning meetings, including this week’s that coincided with his abundant tomato harvest. He had bread and mayonnaise on hand as well.
Gerald Dye is our de facto secretary. He gave a report on the people whose reunion invitation letters were returned because of insufficient or incorrect addresses. Others pitched in useful tidbits about local relatives who might provide updated contact information.
Gloria Griffis Darby said she would make a good detective with the experience she has gained trying to track down unlocated classmates through her local connections.
Phillis Pardoe Floyd is our de facto treasurer. She gave us a report that leads us to believe that we’ll be able to pull this thing off without getting overdrawn. Buddy Gray and I sat there and tried to add useful comments.
We mentioned several who had already locked in other plans before they heard from us about our October 50th reunion — a trip to Europe, a hunting trip to the Dakotas, a daughter’s wedding. We’ll miss them, but we are glad that it is happy occasions that have them sidelined.
Not far into the meeting, someone discovered that she had forgotten a folder with some of the information we needed. Then we all realized that no one had remembered to bring a copy of the 1966 annual to help remind us of who has died, who we might be missing and so on.
“I don’t know where mine is,” Jerry Lightsey said. “I think it’s in a closet somewhere in a box.”
Not so. I’ve had Jerry Lightsey’s 1966 Tigerteer ever since I borrowed it prior to our 30th reunion in 1996. I am looking at it as I write these lines. I didn’t volunteer this information during the meeting because I was not then sure that I could put my hands on it and he might have said he wanted it back.
From these observations you might assume that we need a little help pulling this off. We welcome any classmate who wants to join us for the planning. Not that we can’t get it done, but the planning meetings are a fun part of the reunion as well, even though Jerry said that the heat had ripened all his tomatoes at one time and that those would be the last.
Iris Diane Jones graduated with us, but Gloria has not yet been able to locate contact information or local relatives. She lived on Dummy Line Road, Gloria recalls. Any information that you can pass along to publisher@panolian.com that would help us contact our classmate will be appreciated.
Likewise, any member of the class of 1966 who has not yet been contacted about the reunion plans or anyone who attended some of their school years with us and who wants to attend, please contact us at the same email.
We also lamented about classmates who have never yet attended a reunion and wished aloud that we could see them this time. Many of them live nearby. I have heard the same lament from every class whose reunion planners have contacted this newspaper about publicizing their plans.
For some people, class reunions just aren’t their thing, and that’s okay. But if those folks who have been reluctant to participate in our reunions had any idea of how happy and glad the rest of us would be to see them for this 50th reunion, they would reconsider.