The Burning Question

 

A question raised recently on our Everett Class of 1970 – Lansing Facebook page, has prompted me to continue on my quest to find an answer before I leave this earth.

On a fairly frequent basis, I get the question “How many were in our graduating class?”  Another question I get is “How many did our class start with and how many did we graduate with?”  And yet another question, “Was our class the largest class that went through Everett?”

One obvious suggestion made by many is to just count the number of names on our commencement program.  I, along with some others, have done that.  But as I started to count, I noticed there were quite a few names I didn’t recognize.   Being the ‘keeper’ of our Everett database, I really looked at it.  Another great source of information for me is a great book Everett High School Alumni Directory 2003, which one of our classmates, Sue Beckner Mayes found at a local thrift store.  It shows all the classes and even cross references maiden and married names on the women.  Of course, since this book is now going on 15 years old, well, names change for a variety of reasons.  What I found is that around 50 of the names that our on our program, did not start out with our class.  They started with another class, but in 1970, when they had enough credits to graduate, they were added to our program.  So that count didn’t work.

Counting the names in the database, isn’t totally accurate either.  I inherited the database from Dave Brigham and I’m not quite sure how he obtained it.  But I have found a couple of people that were in our class but not in the database.  So I moved on in a different direction, determined to get this information.

I sent an inquiry to the Lansing School District, which went all the way up to the top.  Surely there must be some records of these numbers because if my memory serves me right (which is another reason for finding out this information before my memory starts not serving me as accurately), I believe State or Federal funding is received for each enrolled student.  So obviously, they would have to know how many there were.  The head of the District had some others trying to locate this information for me.  They came up empty-handed saying the information didn’t exist.  My take on that statement is that either a) it truly didn’t exist or b) it existed somewhere but they had no idea where or how to get to it.  So that is where I temporarily left it.  Well…… until the question was raised again.

So when a classmate raised the question on Facebook again, we got a variety of responses including:  Heard also started with 1100 and ended with 900 or so; Approx 608. I might be off by a few one way or the other; Class of 68 had a few more and they were the biggest class up til then. We were the 2nd largest at that time. Sorry I can’t be more specific but it gives u an idea; 1968 biggest class we were second. We did start with over 1000. End # is ?; I do believe whatever the final numbers were, class of 70 was the largest graduating class at that point; I’ve always thought it was 700+ that we started out with (don’t know where I got that + from though) I do know at least one graduated lol; Started with 1200, graduated with 857; I heard class of 70 was the largest Everett graduated. I know it was high 700’s; IHA d heard 972 but that was a ‘few’ years ago; Actual correct number was 3267 starting and 4112 graduated. I researched this online and documented it on the most authoritative fake news sites I could find so it is the truth; I thought I remembered that something really close to 920 walked at graduation, if 50 were from other classes that would be pretty close; I also remember some of the scrabble to fit us all in since they already scrabbled for the 69 ers and our class came in larger, so they were constantly having teacher meetings trying to cope, so we had lots of barely supervised time to cause disturbances; I heard 1100 started and 900 finished. And 100 of those were carry overs from 1969; I remember it as 801; 798; For some reason 797 sticks in my head; The number 703 is what I remember; I remember about 715- class of 1965 was the largest and we were second.

So you can see from this variety of answers, we are all on different pages.  Reminds me of the children’s game where the first person is given a statement, then repeats that statement to the next person and on down the line.  What the last person says they have heard is almost always a LOT different than what was heard initially.

So I continue with my Bucket List quest for this information…….