We are Survivors!

One of the most sobering realizations for anyone our age facing a 50th High School Reunion is that there are fewer of us around than there were 50 years ago. One insurance website I found said:

Forget the fun, warped mirrors of amusement parks. At your high school reunion, you’ll experience true terror: an irrefutably accurate reflection of the march of time.

For the price of a single ticket home, you can witness the horrifying truth that your former classmates — and you — are getting old. Going gray, getting bald, growing soft. Dying.

Statistics from the insurance industry give us these numbers:

• 10 year reunion — 1 death per 100 graduates.
• 20 year reunion — 1 death per 50 graduates.
• 30 year reunion — 1 death per 20 graduates.
• 40 year reunion — 1 death per 10 graduates.
• 50 year reunion — 1 death per five graduates.

Wow! This means that for a 50 year reunion, about 20% of our classmates should have died. But in fact, if you count up the number of our memorialized classmates, nearly 70 people in our class are on that list.  That means that our class is below the average since we had about 640+ graduates. If you haven’t gone there already, our class website, www.burbankhigh1968.net has a list of classmates who are gone forever but not forgotten: In memoriam  

[EDITOR’S NOTE: You can tell how bad I was in math—My original post said that we were above the average when in fact we are below the average.]

John Curtis died last year.

John Curtis 1968

In trying to contact all our Burbank High 1968 classmates, we found out from Steven Lester that one of the people on our Missing Classmates list, John Curtis, died last year. “John was one of my Facebook friends and we talked occasionally.  When he died last year, I think, his family notified us via a message in Facebook and then they closed his site…  I can’t remember where he lived.  I googled for an obituary but couldn’t find one. He was a very stand-offish person and suffered from lung problems that derived from his experience in the Navy during Viet Nam and was greatly frustrated by the way he was treated by the VA.”

If you have any more information about John or any of our classmates marked “missing,” please send it to burbankhigh1968@gmail.com.

Some links on the website which you may find interesting:

Save the Date
Information about the Reunion FAQs
Tentative Guest List (RSVP)
Senior Class Photos of those planning to attend (in case you forgot!)
Current Photos of the Class of 1968
Missing Classmates
Archive of all posts (Stories about classmates who have contacted us)