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Commentary: Memories still rich at 74th Central High reunion

By Seymour I. "Spence" Toll On Oct. 10, I attended the 74th reunion of my Philadelphia Central High School class. We graduated at a time when the then-all-male academic Central had two graduations per year, in January and June. Ours was in January 1942, several weeks after the Japanese had attacked our naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which drew us into World War II. Using the school's system of numbering classes, ours was "the 177th."

By Seymour I. "Spence" Toll

On Oct. 10, I attended the 74th reunion of my Philadelphia Central High School class. We graduated at a time when the then-all-male academic Central had two graduations per year, in January and June. Ours was in January 1942, several weeks after the Japanese had attacked our naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which drew us into World War II. Using the school's system of numbering classes, ours was "the 177th."

As students in the nation's second-oldest public high school, which opened in 1838, we spent our freshman year - 1938 - at "the old Central" at Broad and Green. The next year the school moved to "the new Central" at Ogontz and Olney. The old school became Benjamin Franklin High School.

Our luncheon reunion was held in a dining room of the Hilton Hotel on City Line. We had eight classmates, seven caretaking wives and grandchildren, and Central President Timothy McKenna. Being classmates, our ages were close to mine, which is 91. At least half of us had walkers (I use one) or canes. Most of our classmates had passed away in their later years, but several were killed as young service men in World War II. Others, like me, were wounded in that war. After lunch, classmates and McKenna were invited to speak. I sketched my most fortunate family life and legal career, and then expressed our gratitude to classmate Milt Dienes and his lovely wife Harriet for organizing every annual reunion in recent years.

Whatever our physical condition may be, there was a deeply shared sense of warmth and gratitude at being together and recalling the academically and socially rich experience of adolescent male classmates. It was gratitude that developed during our school years when we knew how well we were being taught by a thoroughly skilled, remarkably caring, and well-educated faculty.

Our post-Central lives were geographically and vocationally diverse - coast-to-coast business, education, law, medicine, technology. What we had in common were our Central diploma and lifelong respect and gratitude for the value of the school's academic excellence and our socially and racially diverse friendships.

Our studies then included current events, so we were well aware of the course of World War II, especially the horrifying 1940-41 Nazi bombings of London and other English cities. We wanted to punish Germany for that. In our non-study hours, we developed our fascination with classroom mischief. One example was in a history course taught by professor Warren D. Renninger.

Elderly, learned, kindly, and hard of hearing, he spent much time at the blackboard, where we focused on him rather than the lesson at hand. When we had a pre-class strategy meeting on the bombing of Berlin, we knew that when he was up at the blackboard all of our conspiratorial vocal mischief had to be in voices just below the level of his hearing. When his back turned to the class, one of us had the immediate responsibility of declaring "ATTACK!" in a muted voice. Then another one of us sounded off with restrained, siren-like alerting sounds, followed by whispered bomb explosions.

If Professor Renninger turned around to speak to the class during a bombing attack, with perfectly coordinated discipline we were immediately silent until he turned to the board again. Then we continued with our bombing mission.

My closest school friends have passed away, but an important legacy of going to Central was a lifelong sense that all our classmates would always be good friends because they shared a crucially important learning experience. As we exchanged warm good-byes at the end of the reunion, the classmates' prevailing mood was precisely that which is expressed in our beloved school song, "Central High":

We'll ne'er forget those days gone by,

those glorious days of old.

Seymour I. "Spence" Toll is a Philadelphia lawyer and author. spentoll@aol.com