High school glory days were on Calistoga graduates’ minds Saturday as about 450 people milled around the Tubbs Building on the Napa County Fairgrounds, hoping to run into someone they used to know.  All 450 or so graduates were back in town to attend the seventh reunion of  Calistoga High School graduates from every class — a reunion that’s held every three years.

“This is a great time,” said Richard Chester, a member of the Class of 1957, as he waited to get into the party early Saturday afternoon. “You get to see a lot of people you haven’t seen in a long time.”

Chester jumped at the chance to explain how consecutive generations of students have graduated from Calistoga High.

“You have moms and dads here, whose kids also graduated here,” Chester said. “I have three buddies here who graduated with me in 1957, and their grandparents graduated from Calistoga High School in 1931.

“There’s a solid history of people in Calistoga who’ve lived here for a long time whose kids, grandkids and great-grand kids who’ve all graduated from our old school,” he said. “There is a lot of history here today.”

And what a history there is. Some of the former students came from as far away as Japan; as well as from far-flung U.S. states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota and Florida, to be in Calistoga for the reunion. They also came from right around the corner, or just over the hill in Santa Rosa. Not all of those present, however, were students. Jerry Robinson drove over from Santa Rosa to be with his former coach, and his coach’s former coach.

“Coach Jack Anderson was Dick Vermeil’s coach back when he was in high school,” Robinson said. “Later, Coach Anderson told Coach Vermeil, ‘You might want to keep an eye on this guy over in Santa Rosa.’”

“That guy” was Robinson himself, who played 13 seasons in the National Football League, playing in Super Bowl XV with the Philadelphia Eagles, and going to the Pro Bowl after the 1981 season. Robinson also starred at UCLA, where he was a three-time All-American. Eventually, he was recruited as a tight end by Calistoga high graduate-turned football coach, Dick Vermeil, who converted Robinson to a linebacker. In 1996, Robinson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

“Reunions are great,” Robinson said. “In this room full of people, I only know Coach Vermeil and Coach Anderson, and Carol Vermeil, but there is a great feeling of love in this room that makes me happy to be here.”

Anderson coached in Calistoga in 1953, 1954 and 1955 before he was recruited to coach in Santa Rosa.

“There’s a great chemistry that keeps us all coming back,” said Len Friedlund, another member of the Class of 1954. “We were the class that had Dick Vermeil in it, so we were special.

“Every since we started this 16 or 18 years ago I’ve been to every one,” said Friedlund, a Calistoga High 12-letter man, who drove in from Flagstaff, Ariz. for the reunion. “I was the class statistician, and now I try to keep us all together because of that class registry. We had our 50th reunion four years ago, and next year we’re having our 55th in Reno. Dick Vermeil was a 16-letter man, and I called him my best friend when were in school.

“He (Dick) went off to make millions and I worked for peanuts,” Friedlund joked. “We were a special class. Coach Anderson was a Stanford graduate and he was very much a part of me getting to Stanford. We had three people from our class of 28 students who went to Stanford, which is a pretty good percentage. Our principal at the time was also a Stanford graduate, so the both of them did a lot of lobbying for me.”

The “earliest” graduate attending the reunion was Daisy Heitz Dickson, 91, who was among 49 students who graduated in the class of 1934. She is the oldest surviving member of the Heitz family, and she attended the reunion with her nephews, Gary and Mark Heitz, who graduated in 1963 and 1968 respectively. All told, there were 12 children in the Dickson family.

“It was a pretty big class for back then,” Daisy Heitz said. “I remember everything about my school days. I remember all of my teachers, and even kept in touch with a lot of them.

“But I don’t know any of them anymore,” Heitz said. “I remember a lot of things about the town, too. The town was very slow at the time, it only had about 1,000 people in it. You could hear the train whistle as it came to town. I was just a kid when the last passenger train left town in 1929. It was a very sad day.”

“I also remember hopping onto the street car to go to St. Helena, from Calistoga,” Heitz  said. “The fare was only five cents.”

Daisy said she didn’t remember how much it cost to get into the local movie theater. “It was the Great Depression, you know. I didn’t go to the movies much. Things in Calistoga were pretty slow during the Depression, but everybody was neighborly, and helped each other out if they needed to.”

The Calistoga High alumna learned to take shorthand and type at CHS. “I got good grades,” she said. “I won the Silver Cup for excellence. The school should still have it.”

She left Calistoga right after she graduated, she said. The skills learned in Calistoga landed her a job as a civilian employee for the U.S. Army at the Presidio in San Francisco, then later at Mare Island, she said. “I had a very nice job as a secretary.”

Two days after the all class reunion, Arnold Enderlin, who graduated in 1949, was walking past Bank of the West on Lincoln Avenue, when he stopped to praise the efforts to keep the reunions going.

“I think the reunion is the best thing that has ever happened to Calistoga,” Enderlin said. “It keeps people in touch, and it keeps the memories of the town alive. I’m already looking forward to the next one, in 2011.”

The Alumni Association was formed in 1990, according to Everett Ball, president of the alumni association.

“We had our first reunions, from the Classes of 1947 to 1951 out at my ranch in Knights Valley,” Ball said. “We eventually decided to start having the all class reunions. Early on, we had people who came from the 1920s, one of whom was Edith Jaffe, who was my teacher, graduated in 1924.” Ball, who graduated in 1947, said Jaffe continued coming to the reunions late into her 90s.

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