Class of 1964 Reunites in Alaska
Amazing! That’s the word that kept coming up the week of June 18-25, 2014 as graduates from the Class of 1964 and our spouses took a cruise from Vancouver, BC, up into Alaska on the Holland America Line ship, the Volendam.
This was not the first time our group has gotten together. The Class of 1964 has met five times in the last fifty years. We met at the school in 1994 to celebrate our 30th anniversary and in 2007 at Redeemer University for a weekend reunion. We met again at Redeemer in 2009 for a full-scale reunion to celebrate our 45th anniversary. In 2011 we got together for dinner in Niagara and an evening at the Shaw Festival Theatre for a production of “The Admirable Chrichton”—a play that some of us had worked on while we were students at HDCH.
In 2013, Wilma (Willie) Kat contacted a travel agent on Vancouver Island to start the planning for our 50th anniversary reunion. Invitations went out to all parts of Canada and the United States, and fourteen of the thirty-three graduates committed to attend. The cruise itself was, of course, an amazing experience. We were in awe of the beauty of God’s creation all around us. Even a little bit of rain on some days could not dim our spirits. On the Sunday that the ship was actually in Glacier Bay and sailing past a number of active glaciers, we experienced the greatest number of “calvings” as parts of the glacier fell into the water that had been seen all year so far. Many of us caught those majestic events on our cameras and phones.
We have found these reunions tremendously exciting. There has been fun and fellowship, and there has been a time of healing for some of the struggles we had during our high school years. If you are interested in joining the Class of 1964 on our next reunion or if you just want to stay in touch, contact Eveline (Prinsen) Stout at estout@cogeco.ca. She would be happy to add you to her email contact list.
By: Rudy Ouwehand ‘64