Pat Christopher and I met on the first day of first grade (1953) in Ms Petty's class at Irving School.  We've pretty much been best friends since day one, when Pat came over asked me for some of the candy I was eating – close to 56 years.

It was late 1985.  1986 would be our 20th Anniversary of HS Graduation and Pat & I were eagerly awaiting the Poly High class reunion.   We had called the school to inquire but there was no information available about whether there would be a reunion.  Although our mothers still lived at the old address, Pat was in Cincinnati (working for IBM) and I was in the Washington DC area (active-duty Army).

I can't even tell you who thought up the idea.  We discussed how few of our black friends attended the 10-year reunion and how we wanted to see people from a year or two ahead of us and behind us, too.  Somehow one of us said we should plan our own reunion….we'll have a  neighborhood reunion.  And that was that.

We had no lofty goals.  We simply wanted to get back together with childhood friends and neighbors and recapture the joy and camaraderie of the community we had grown up in.

In early 1986, we sent out flyers to all of the old crowd we could find asking if they would be interested in getting together.  We included a short questionnaire for them to return to us and asked them to forward the information to other friends that they were in in contact with.  The response was tremendous and we proceeded with the planning.