At the Blue Hill Event Center in Chapel Hill, a sense of camaraderie spilled out of the doors Friday night.
Dozens of longtime friends and former classmates gathered together to start a weekend full of events to celebrate Chapel Hill High School alumni’s 50th reunion. A table with 70s and 80s trivia was set up, as well as a yearbook booth where people could see old class photos and share memories on white cards. And while people wandered over to do this, more of those gathered simply spent the evening catching up with people they hadn’t seen in five, ten, or even more years.
Beachy Riggsbee Sanders served as the chair of the organizing committee for the reunion and said since the goal was for the first night to serve as a “meet-and-greet,” it was a clear success.
“We’ve been working on this for about a year now,” she said. “It was a lot of planning, a lot of hard work. But we met on a regular basis to decide what we wanted to do, and we came up with pretty much a three-day weekend [of events].”
A group of Chapel Hill High School classmates from the Class of 1973 gather for a photo together on Friday, August 4.
Attendees of the 50th reunion celebration mingle at the Blue Hill Event Center.
A booth at the event had old Chapel Hill High School yearbooks and cards to share memories of school.
Gayle Rancer was only able to attend the opening event, but said she was glad to travel from West Virginia and reconnect with many classmates. While she said she initially felt insecure and a little apprehensive of visiting with people she hadn’t seen in a long time, that changed after spending a few minutes in the event center.
“But then I saw everyone,” Rancer said, “and we all look older, but we look the same and we recognize each other. We couldn’t wait to reconnect, and hug, share stories, and make plans to get together in other places. So, it’s a wonderful thing.”
Miriam Dixon, who lives in Raleigh, agreed that coming to a high school reunion can sometimes be a vulnerable moment. But she said she enjoyed marking the 50th anniversary of graduation – as she had with the other Class of 1973 gatherings Dixon has gone to over the years.
“It takes a lot of nerve to go to a reunion,” she said. “I remember [for] my tenth, I was living nearby and I thought, ‘If I don’t have a good time, I can just walk home.’ But Sharon Smith, Dean Smith’s daughter, greeted me at the door. And I had a good time after that!”
Saturday’s events offered a change of scenery and a chance to take a trip further down memory lane. The class of Tigers alumni gathered on the Chapel Hill High School campus to tour the new building, which was constructed just yards away from where they attended school 50 years ago.
Chapel Hill High School circa 1973. (Photo via the Hillife 73 Yearbook.)
Chapel Hill High educator Tripp Price gives a tour to the Class of 1973 alumni gathered for its 50th reunion on Saturday, August 4, 2023.
A group of the Class of 1973 examine a timeline of Chapel Hill High School’s history posted in the newer building’s history wing.
Opened in 2021, the new facility offers several upgrades to its current students, with state-of-the-art classrooms and space for high-quality CTE programs, like its firefighter academy and automotive shop. The dozens of alumni also visited the gym, cafeteria, and auditorium – some of the only remaining parts of the high school they attended. They also got to take a group photo with a special mural of a tiger in the Chapel Hill High courtyard, which was painted by one of their former classmates: Michael Brown, who was also in the Class of ‘73.
On the tour, Dixon said she was impressed to see what resources the current students have at their disposal.
“I could’ve had better grades [with all these changes],” she said with a laugh.
Touring alumni look up at the state titles won by Chapel Hill High athletic teams in the gymnasium, which is one of the few original buildings left from the 1966 campus.
The Class of 1973 were among the first to enter Chapel Hill High School as an integrated group of students. The building they attended was built in 1966, as Chapel Hill High not only moved from Franklin Street but integrated its all-white population with the Black population that had attended Lincoln High School.
At the time, the class of 1973 was on the cusp of entering junior high, and got integrated among their elementary school classes before making the jump. The change was a little abrupt at first, but looking back, it set up the students well for success by the time they reached high school.
Mary Jones, who worked as a business education teacher at Chapel Hill High until just before the move to the new building, remembered that transition. She said her sixth grade class was put together with other sixth graders for a while at the Lincoln Center, which now operates as administrative offices for the district.
“We were all in one building together, so it was kind of like an experiment,” she described. “We had to get used to, ‘hey, I’m not in a class of all Blacks any more,’ or ‘I’m not in a class of mostly whites any more.’ We were fully integrated in 1966-67. I think it was a rough year for me, because I was top of my class at Frank Porter-Graham [Elementary] and I found that the teacher wouldn’t even call my name.
“But we had unity as a result of that,” Jones added, “because we were together before the whole system was really fully integrated.”
That experience was a theme of one classmate’s poem that he performed Saturday night during a banquet at the Carolina Club. Christopher Smith shared the piece, which he said felt fitting since it was a creative writing course he took at Chapel Hill High School that inspired him to become a poet. Smith said he wrote a similar piece for the class’ 25th reunion that he kept to himself – but was proud to write another 25 years later.
“We all came together and figured out that just because your skin color is different, your ethnicity is different, we’re [still] all the same,” he said. “During that time, we made the world better because of how we came together and we were a model for the rest of the nation.”
On Sunday, some of the alumni attended church services together or explored other parts of Chapel Hill. The closing of the reunion took place in Pittsboro, as two members of the Class of 1973 hosted everyone still in town at their restaurant, The MOD.
Sanders said she ultimately wishes the reunion served as a way to strengthen the ties between old friends – even after everyone returns to their day-to-day lives.
“I hope we won’t [wait] until another five years to go out and do something,” the organizing chair said. “You know, if you’re local, let’s get up and maybe have brunch or dinner. And then [for] the people that are away, if we’ve got phone numbers, just pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, just want to check in and see how things are going.’”
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