James Etheridge

Walker High School Class of ‘73 had our fifty-year reunion two Saturdays ago. It was a relatively low-key event, at the 57th Fighter Group Restaurant at Peachtree-DeKalb Airport in Chamblee, Georgia. The venue has a unique atmosphere, the weather was perfect, the food was great and we had the entire bunker room and outdoor patio area to ourselves. We had opened the reunion up to other classes and as a result there were over a hundred Walker Warhawks in attendance.

Fifty years. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one. When the committee met for our forty-fifth reunion five years ago, I looked around the table and said, “You know, guys, it’s been fifty years since we started Walker.” Now it’s the fiftieth anniversary of our graduation. Back in those years there were no middle schools in DeKalb County. The elementary schools were grades one through seven. The high schools were eight through twelve. They were situated in neighborhoods so that the kids could walk to and from school and the parents could conveniently drop them off and pick them up.

In the spring of ’68, a month or so before we were to graduate Gresham Park Elementary School, Mr. Art Van Tone, head counselor at Walker, came and talked to us about what lay ahead for us in high school. “You are about to go from being a very big fish in a very small pond to being a very small fish in a very big pond,” he told us. He could not have been more right. The first day I stepped through the doors of Walker, I was overwhelmed. The school was huge, there were what seemed like a million students, the upperclassmen were giants and the girls were all full-blown women.

After the reunion, something occurred to me. We walked through the doors of WHS as children. We walked out as young adults. We had grown up together. And little did we know that when we stepped through those doors, we were about to make lifelong acquaintances and friendships. Some of us would meet future spouses. We may not have realized it at the time, but life had changed forever. We may have only been eighth graders, but we were now high school students.

I loved high school, every minute of it. While I was never a star student by any stretch of the imagination, it was the social life and school activities that I loved. I think that is one of the reasons that I love the reunions so much. As we all gathered together a couple of Saturdays ago, the years peeled back, old friends were reunited, stories were told, laughter was shared and maybe a tear or two was shed as we remembered classmates that are no longer with us. And that is what makes our reunions so special. We are all growing older and moments and events like this are to be cherished.

On that note, I would like to personally thank David Whitehurst and Debbie Moore Herzig for their tireless work putting not only this special reunion together, but also for the gatherings we have had in the past. We are indeed blessed to have you both as Warhawks. I’m looking forward to the fifty-fifth! Go Hawks!