Can a meeting of some Clarence 1973 graduates be considered an official reunion event, even when it is someone else's reunion?   We need a ruling.

The Clarence 1974 class had its 30th reunion the weekend of July 23-25. It featured a session at Brennan's on Friday night, a dinner at the Pierce Arrow Museum in downtown Buffalo on Saturday night, and a family picnic at the Town Park on Main St. on Sunday. Sally (Danna) Abell was one of the organizers, and she was nice enough to encourage me to attend any of the functions.

I only could participate in the Brennan's session on Friday, but I ran into Bill Irr, Don Smith and Greg Wolmering there. I was expected to be home after a couple of hours, but wound up staying until 1:30 a.m. When I got home, when my wife asked how it was, I replied, "wonderful." I saw some people I hadn't encountered in 30 years, and it took Virtually no time to get up to speed with them.

The next day, what struck me was how many different connections to the various parts of my life popped up in the conversations. Allow me to go through them for demonstration purposes; perhaps you'll recognize some of the names and be interested in their lives. (No married names are listed; I wasn't taking notes.)

• Barb Haas, now a teacher at Cleveland State, was one of the few people to attend high school and college with me. I told Karen Cashmore about the time at Syracuse that Barb wrote my name in during a student government election, and since there were more offices than candidates, I won election.
• Mark Herle got to hear again that he was the last friend I saw while I was single. Mark was a chef for Rich Products, and bumped into me moments before I walked up to the gazebo in the Rich Products Atrium to get married.
• Bill Wende put up with me when I told others how he had married a woman, Mary Summers, who had been one of my press box volunteer staffers when I worked for the Sabres in the late 1980's.
• Bill Ganzenmueller and I compared notes on our respective families, who were friends as our fathers both worked at the same place. I didn't get to comment on the fact that he was one of my first bosses, an assistant manager at Burger King on Transit Road.
• Andy Coppola's wife, Karen, told me how their kids discovered Andy had been named King at a prom, and wondered what Mom's title was. Karen, who with her family lives in suburban Boston, and I also suffered through the Red Sox loss to the evil Yankees that night.
• Marc Vincent, my former next-door neighbor and now an artist in Virginia, reminded me how much fun the kids on our Wenner Road block had when we had our own radio station, powered by a nine-volt battery, that could be heard up and down the street. And I told him how much fun it was to see one of his paintings on display in Salt Lake City.
• Tom Keohane told me about what life was like for a Northwest Airlines pilot in a post-9/11 world. And I told his wife Amy about the time that I did a play-by-play description
of one of Tom's club hockey games from right behind the bench. (I still have the tape, of course.)
• Carolyn Kosobucki, who chases down her two kids around Clarence, came out with a big smile when I said I recognized her as a member of our championship co-ed volleyball team from the mid-1980's.
• Scott Rollo, an assistant football coach at Iroquois, told me about the Buffalo News' high school sports coverage from his standpoint, and why he's happy not to be a head coach any more.
• Larry Paul was stunned to get an official Brothers of Mercy water squeeze bottle, which was given to me at a Clarence Rotary Club 5-Kilometer race in June. One of Larry's first job was at Brothers of Mercy,one of Larry's first jobs. His first job actually was at Grant's in the Clarence Mall.
• Debbie Wijnberg told me about bouncing around from Pittsburgh to Chicago to Atlanta to a place in Northern New Jersey called Boonton. I shocked her by saying my mother used to buy shoes in Boonton when we lived in a neighboring town in the early 1960's.

Reunions sure can be a lot of fun, even when they are with the wrong class. When's the next one, anyway?