About 30 friends sat around four tables at Gus and George’s Spaghetti and Steak House in Virginia Beach last month and talked about when gas tanks could be filled for less than a dollar. As they waited for their lunch of fried fish and hamburgers, they remembered a time when Lucille Ball was raging, their parents preached patriotism, and they lived in the realm of post-World War II America.
The octogenarians graduated from Willard Elementary School in Norfolk around 1956 — some the year before, others a few years later — and gather every year for a reunion. The America they knew as boys and girls is gone, says reunion founder Catherine Rutter, but they still have each other.
Rutter, 80, who now lives in Kill Devil Hills, left Virginia after graduating and spent a career working for telephone companies in Washington, DC. She never lost touch with Dorothy Aksteter, whom she met in Willard and grew up with in the neighborhoods near Fairmont Park. When Rutter moved to Carolina in 2001, Aksteter began flying from Minnesota to visit every other year.
“And it wasn’t until around 2010 that I had my ‘bright idea,’” Rutter said. “I said to Dorothy, ‘Let’s see how many of our classmates I can get together.’
Rutter told Aksteter to think about how much fun it would be: “‘We could go to Doumars!'”
She spent weeks researching at a well-known girls’ haven, the downtown Norfolk Public Library, where she once spent lazy, long, sleepy hours reading during summer vacation. As an adult, she copied names from yearbooks and school histories into the stack, combed city directories and pored over obituaries in newspapers. The fact that many of the Willard girls no longer used their maiden names made the search more difficult.
In 2010, she and Aksteter met several friends at Doumar’s Cones & Barbecue before heading to Temple Baptist Church’s social hall. There were 23 people at the first Willard Elementary School reunion. More people came the following year and even more in 2012. Most people still lived close to home.
Snooky Murden, whose father owned the Murden’s Drug Store chain, was there. Judy Commings Welch, who eventually went to work for Norfolk Public Schools and built a reputation as an accomplished line dancer at The Banque, also came. So did Marjorie Joynes, who works at the Regent University Library, and Sidney Skjei, who joined the Navy, and former Elizabeth City Mayor Steve Atkinson.
By 2017, the group had grown so big that the reunion moved to the Virginia Beach steakhouse, where they still meet today. The group has reached a tipping point and the number of participants is shrinking every year. Last month, retired Chesapeake city attorney Ronnie Hallman sat at the dinner table talking about which of his friends had beaten him at the spelling bees.
“It was a great time then. No crime. No silencers. Well, I mean, the mufflers they had didn’t really filter anything out – a lot of carbon dioxide,” he said, laughing. “I think that’s why we’re so crazy.”
The rest of the table laughed too as the food was served. The meandering conversation moved from lost, youthful looks to lost parents and not-yet-forgotten friends.
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com
