One more time: Class of '59 celebrates Happy Days and hard work at Highland High School

Students moving quickly through Highland High’s halls during an afternoon class change last week may have noticed five visitors in their early 80s standing quietly against the school’s walls.

Those five, all 1959 graduates of Highland, watched the students intently.

Jim Cole commented on the casual dress and the variety of hairstyles.

“When I was in school, jeans were the dominant pants for boys, but I don’t recall ever wearing short pants or T-shirts,” he said. “Back then, most of the men teachers wore ties. Boys had short hair. A lot had crewcuts.”

Jean Grigsby Van Dusen said the girl students back in ’59 wore saddle shoes, bobby socks and dyed-to-match sweaters and skirts.

“They didn’t make jeans for girls back then,” she said. “We would sit in a bathtub of hot water in (boys) jeans until they shrunk. And they never fit.”

Carol Culbertson Tinnin Hoffman marveled at the diversity of today’s Highland students, who speak a combined 20-plus languages, much different from 1959, when most of the school’s kids were English-speaking Anglos.

Ray Rondeau was impressed by how well the old Highland building, which dates back to 1949, had been maintained. He said the ceilings have been lowered, but much of it remains the way he remembers it when he was a student and a halfback with the Highland Hornets football squad.

“I felt at home,” said Beth James Nicholson. “The layout has not changed. I found my old locker, No. 7.”

The last hoorah

Highland High’s class of ’59 celebrated its 65th anniversary the past couple of days. There was dining and dancing at the Albuquerque Country Club on Saturday night.

Van Dusen said the class, which included 577 students, has had a reunion every five years since its fifth-year reunion.

“At our 50th reunion, we had 150 people, including spouses,” she said. “Five years ago, we had 102, including spouses. This year we are expecting 67. Forty-four of those were members of the class.”

Van Dusen said this reunion is the class’ last hoorah.

“Because we are old,” she said. “We are losing a lot of classmates.”

A notable loss is Lee Trussell, who died in April. Trussell was president of the class of ’59, a member of Highland’s football team, a champion pole vaulter on the Hornets track and field team, a Navy veteran of Vietnam and an Albuquerque business and community leader.

Van Dusen said Trussell was chairman of the class’ first reunion committee in 1964 and chaired every subsequent reunion committee until his death.

“The reunions would not have achieved the success that they have had without his leadership,” she said.

Meet at Frank’s

In 1959, the top music hits in the country were “The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton, and “A Big Hunk O’ Love” by Elvis Presley. “Ben-Hur” won the Oscar for best movie, and the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series. Dwight Eisenhower was president.

Here in Albuquerque, Highland High students cruised Central from San Mateo down to 12th Street and back and went to drive-in movie theaters, such as the Tesuque, on Pennsylvania north of Central.

And everybody hung out at Frank’s Drive In, on Lomas near Washington. Frank’s has been described as a drive-in right out of the TV series “Happy Days” or the movie “American Graffiti.”

“If someone had a car, we all piled in and went to Frank’s,” Cole said. “It was a busy drive-in. It was all paved and concreted and the car hops were girls on roller skates.”

“I used to go to Frank’s and hope a boy would talk to me,” Van Dusen said.

On TV, kids and parents watched ‘Maverick,’ ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ ‘The Dinah Shore Show,’ ‘The Jackie Gleason Show,’ ‘I Love Lucy’ and ‘Your Hit Parade,’ the last a pop-music countdown program that rock ‘n’ roll finally managed to kill in ’59.

The Highland High students of 1959 were like many other American kids of that era. But they think their school was special.

Nurtured to explode

Highland, 4700 Coal SE, is located in busy portion of the Southeast Heights today.

In the ‘50s, however, Tinnin Hoffman said a lot of students who went to Highland lived on a sparsely developed east mesa, on roads that had not yet been paved.

“But our faculty was excellent,” she said. “There was an aura of respect for learning at Highland in the 1950s. Highland nurtured us to explode in college and our careers. We didn’t know we were being prepared. We took what was being offered.”

During her visit to Highland last week, Tinnin Hoffman, despite the passage of 65 years, felt a twinge of apprehension when approaching the room where she studied Latin under Madalene Hendricks.

“She was a pistol, she was great,” Tinnin Hoffman said of Hendricks. “But Latin class was absolutely terrifying. We were scared of her standards. We were scared of not being perfect.”

Tinnin Hoffman had wanted to be a teacher since she was 4. She used to create a class of students by lining up teddy bears, and she was a member of Future Teachers of America at Highland.”

“I wanted to be a teacher who taught kids to love literature,” she said. “(Highland English teacher) Gertrude McGowan pushed me to the limits. There was no ‘How are you today?’”

Tinnin Hoffman credits the demanding regimen at Highland with earning her advanced placement at Indiana University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in English.

She went on to teach for 37 years at Sandia High School and was awarded the Albuquerque Distinguished Teacher Award in 1987.

Van Husen also belonged to Future Teachers of America at Highland. She played bass violin for the Highland orchestra and the Albuquerque Youth Symphony and was recruited, while still in high school, to perform with the University of New Mexico orchestra.

“I loved Highland,” she said. “I was sort of a nerdish person. I got straight A’s. Except for a B in physics.

“I had a college prep English teacher at Highland. She was so hard. You had to do research papers. And if you made a spelling mistake, or three grammatical errors, you got an F. After that, I breezed through college.”

She earned a full academic scholarship to UNM, where she majored in English literature and secondary education and minored in political science. She was a teacher before transitioning into a successful business career.

“Because of the excellent education that Highland provided us, our graduates went on to become judges, doctors and dentists, financiers, developers, school teachers, social workers, nurses, artists ... The list is endless,” she said.

After he got a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry at UNM, Cole went on to a prosperous career as a dentist and oral surgeon. His three years in the Air Force were devoted to practicing dentistry.

At Highland, however, he said he was probably a nerd before they even came up with the word.

“I was an introvert,” he said. “I was kind of shy. I was 6-4, 140 pounds and just didn’t fit in. I was focused as a student. I enjoyed school. I just didn’t have a lot of time for the social aspects of it.”

That changed. Cole has made it to as many class reunions as possible.

Together again

A newspaper story in the fall of 1957 heralded a new star on the Highland Hornets football team.

The article reported that 132-pound junior reserve halfback Ray Rondeau scored two Hornet touchdowns by racing nine and 12 yards around Las Cruces’ right flank to spark a 26-0 Highland win over the Bulldogs at Albuquerque’s Milne Stadium.

“That was crazy. That was amazing,” Rondeau recalled. “That’s my greatest football memory.”

Highland’s 1957 team went on to compete in the state AA championship game, losing to Artesia.

Rondeau played for Highland’s football team his sophomore, junior and senior years and was a pole vaulter on the track and field team his junior and senior years.

Beth Nicholson, who was Beth James in ’59, was senior class vice president, served on the student council her junior and senior years and in the student senate her sophomore, junior and senior years and was a member of Future Nurses of America her sophomore, junior and senior years.

“I was always doing something,” she said. “I was active in the politics of the school. We were expected to achieve.”

In her senior year, she won top honors in New Mexico for a script and oral presentation she prepared on the topic “My True Security.” That got her a trip to the national competition in Washington, D.C., where she and winners from the other states met President Eisenhower.

Rondeau and Nicholson were selected king and queen of Highland’s fiesta celebration in spring 1959, which seemed only appropriate since they were sweethearts.

However, life’s twists and turns do not always take young love into consideration. After graduation, Nicholson moved to D.C., where her father, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, had been transferred.

She attended nursing school at Georgetown University, worked as an inner-city critical-care nurse in Washington for five years and taught critical care nursing at the College of Southern Maryland for 25 years.

“Every paramedic in southern Maryland knows my name,” she said.

Rondeau, inspired by Highland history teacher Bernice Rebord, got degrees in history and political science from UNM. He served 10 years in the Army and is a Vietnam veteran. Later, he earned a master’s in counseling from Webster University and worked as a career services counselor at UNM’s Valencia campus.

Rondeau and Nicholson married other people. But Rondeau’s wife died and Nicholson divorced. They met again in 2007, when Nicholson was visiting Albuquerque.

“I called him and said, ‘What are you doing?’” Nicholson said. “He said, ‘Having dinner with you if you want to.’”

By 2009 they were a couple again.

‘Impressed and proud’

And now, perhaps, the last reunion for the Highland High class of ’59 has come and gone, although memories of lives lived as if they were scenes from “Happy Days” and “American Graffiti” persist.

Those times aren’t coming back. But members of the class of ’59 who visited their alma mater last week found more familiar than halls and walls and lockers.

The students dress different, look different and some speak different languages. But an aura of respect for education lingers.

“The kids in the classrooms looked engaged,” Van Dusen said. “And the ones we talked to were nice. I was very impressed.”

Tinnin Hoffman agreed.

“We walked down the halls and saw teachers teaching advanced placement world history and physics,” Tinnin Hoffman said.

“From top academics to special education, those people are working hard over there. I was impressed and proud.”