Fifty-three- plus-year-old memories of days at Ceres High School were shared by the remaining graduates of the classes of 1970 and 1971 who reunited once again.

About 212 members of the class gathered for a combined anniversary reunion held Saturday, Oct. 26 at the Ceres Community Center. The reunion skipped music and dancing in lieu of a quieter setting conducive to catching up about the past 54 years. The graduates feasted on tri-tip, chicken, potatoes and green beans catered by the Branding Iron.

“I think it turned out well,” said Jeanette Gillman Mullens, a 1970 graduate who helped organize the class reunion along with her reunion committee members Howard Mullens, Ilene Simar Worthington, Linda Simmons Aycock, Harold Aycock, Dee Johnson Gotelli, Ron Foust, Glenda Safrit Brush and Mike Pratt. “We kept it simple. We didn’t do a lot of loud music and dancing. Everybody just wanted to visit.”

The Class of 1971 reunion committee consisted of Sharon Tobler Fisher, Susan Sinclear Pratt, Tony Betschart, Don Cool, Dave McCullough, Darrell Moore and Dale Ghaner.

“It went well,” commented Dave Hosmer. “It was well planned and well attended.”

The two classes combined reunions to bolster numbers of attendees and since many of the classmates have friends in the other classes. Mullens said the last time her classmates gathered was for their 40th in 2012 and that plans for their 50th anniversary reunion were pre-empted by COVID. 

“We try to stay connected,” said Mullens, who mentioned the challenge of tracking down graduates to notify them of reunion plans. “A lot them here in Ceres we stay connected through church and just try to keep in touch with each other friends.”

Set up inside the center’s large assembly room were boards that featured portraits of classmates who’ve passed away in more than the half decade since they departed the campus. A total of 61 portraits were on the board representing the departed classmates of 1971 and 61 names were listed for deceased 1970 graduates. Two more names joined them.

A 1970 graduate, John Hance, had planned to be at the event but died of a heart attack. Also unable to attend was Carol Edwards-Hawn, owner of Edwards Cake & Candy Supplies in Modesto. In fact, her business donated the Bulldog stencil to place on cakes made for the reunion but she died of cancer days after the event.

“We were all looking at the boards there and I’m thinking, back in high school not one of them would have thought that they would miss this event but here we are,” said Hosmer.

Kathy Letras made an appearance on behalf of her late husband, Jim Letras who died in 2019.

When asked if was shocking to see the changes in classmates, Hosmer chuckled and answered: “Well, I’m sure everybody looked at the others and thinking how old everybody looked and you were the rare exception, of course.”

Everything is relative, of course. Hosmer recalled the time his mother attended her 35th anniversary class reunion and he thought, “These are old people here.”

“After a while every day is kind of like the last day and they’re all forgettable and by the time you get to 50-plus years it’s like where did the time go?”

Art McRae, who taught science and coached at CHS in the 1970s, came to catch up with the lives of his former students.

Display boards displayed the football and baseball schedules adorned with Pepsi advertisement and some team and individual player photos. Other boards contained clippings of newspaper articles and photos of graduates taken as time aged them. Another board had a blow-up of the entire class of 1971 in seven rows assembled in the football stadium bleachers. Photos taken from the 1970 Cereal also served as a reminder of youthful days gone by when John Wilson was principal of Ceres High School after longtime Principal Fleming Haas retired.

Mementos on display included music uniforms and band emblems, cheerleading uniforms, letterman jackets and block C’s, and a graduation programs yellowed with age and a copy of the school newspaper, the Barker.

Hosmer remembers Ceres having only one junior high school, which was Walter White Jr. High where the present elementary school is. Mae Hensley Jr. High School came on line after these graduates left the system. The only other elementary schools were Westport, Whitmore School (where the CUSD offices are today), Caswell, Carroll Fowler and Don Pedro.

Howard Mullens and Jeanette Gillman graduated the same class of 1970 and when he kissed her that night it sparked a relationship that led to their marriage a year later. 

Howard Mullens may have a dimmer view of his Ceres High School experience than his classmates.

“Ceres High, at that time, was pretty sorry in my opinion,” said Mullens. “We didn’t have books. We had a resource center with a limited amount of books because the state of California was in dire straits at the time, I guess. If you had an assignment, say in history, you’d go check out the book and if they were all gone you were S-O-L. That was one thing.

“The other thing is that my freshman year was the first year that Ceres had the modified scheduling where you had mods of 13 or 15 minutes and your class would be three to six mods long but then you might have three or four mods where you didn’t have a class and as a freshman you were expected to go study. Well, that’s a college scheduling and high school freshmen are too stupid to use it that way. So, you know, we had an open campus and we’d sneak off campus, get caught once in a while, get in trouble. But my education basically started when I got out of high school teaching myself.”

Initially Howard found work in restaurants and then got into construction for 34 years, helping to build things like Emanuel Medical Center in Turlock. Before he retired he was a maintenance worker at Davis Guest Home. Jeanette went to cosmetology school.

Some graduates went on to become successes in life. Jeanette Mullens said one “pretty bad guy” in high school who could not attend graduation because he was in jail became one of the pillars of the community. Lonnie Davis became a Christian and not only started Davis Guest Home on Hatch Road but does humanitarian work distributing refurbished wheelchairs to the impoverished in Third World nations.

The class of 1970 produced one doctor, Scott Harper became a heart surgeon, Preciliano Martinez became a lawyer and many started their own businesses.

Tim Fujii, a 1970 graduate who was unable to attend, recently was inducted into the California USA Wrestling Hall of Fame and honored by the city of Fresno which declared June 1, 2024 as “Tim Fujii Day.” 

Ken Thornberry, class of 1971, is co-owner of River Oaks Golf Course.

Mike Pratt, who went on to earn his bachelor’s degree in architecture at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, became an architect and helped design additions to Memorial Medical Center and Emanuel Medical Center.

Hosmer left high school to earn a degree in Biology and worked at the Lawrence Livermore Labs for seven years and went on to own and managed Capital Door Sales in south Modesto.