by Kristina Gabalski
Evelyn Bentley looks over photos old and recent at her home in Spencerport. She is a member of the Spencerport High School Class of 1951. Her former classmates have been lifelong friends and continue to gather regularly for lunch. Also in the photo is a copy of the 1951 Spencerport yearbook “Panorama.” According to the Roman philosopher Cicero, “Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.”
Those words certainly apply to members of the Spencerport High School Class of 1951, who remain close friends more than 60 years after graduation.
Class member Evelyn Bentley says there were 38 members in the class and close friendships were formed while attending grade and high school in the former Spencerport school building on Lyell Avenue, which is now an apartment complex.
Many of the women in the class who stayed in the area after graduation have maintained friendships over the decades. “We’ve been getting together for lunch forever,” Evelyn says.
The group continues to meet on the second Wednesday of every month (Sept. – June) at Slayton Place in Spencerport Village Plaza. The ladies have been joined in the past couple of years by two male members of the class, Evelyn notes.
“The Spencerport High School Class of 1951 has a very long history together,” she explains. “Two of us – Eleanor Neubauer and myself – started together in first grade in the two-classroom school on Elmgrove Road (now also apartments). Then for 7th Grade, we took the school bus to Spencerport and that’s the year we met the rest of the Class of 1951.”
Evelyn says students from Gates and Hilton, as well as Spencerport, all attended the old brick school which housed all grades at that time – kindergarten through 12th.
“We all knew each other well,” she says. “We went from having boyfriends and girlfriends to becoming engaged; then married. We shared the adventure of becoming first-time parents. We all watched these children through childhood, school, graduation, and their marriages. Soon, we were all grandparents. We have shared good times and bad. We have been there for each other through the years and now some of us are great-grandparents.”
A few class members have been lost to ill health and death, Evelyn notes.
“We have a very loving friendship,” she says. “We consider ourselves very lucky to have shared these friendships for so many years.”
One of Evelyn’s happiest memories is of renting a cottage annually at Wautoma Beach on Lake Ontario in Parma with several of her girlfriends. She fondly remembers riding the merry-go-round and swimming in the lake.
The year they graduated, the girls had already been to the cottage before the ceremony. “We got sunburned before graduation,” she remembers, “when we put on our gowns – ouch!”
After graduation, some class members went on to college, but many went right to work, including Evelyn, finding jobs at places like DPI – Distillation Products Industries – a division of Kodak.
“We were Depression babies,” she says. “There wasn’t money for college.”
Several of the class members – including Evelyn – are now widowed, but she says there are many life-long marriages. “The majority of the girls and guys are still married to their original spouses,” she says.
The class also regularly attends the Spencerport High School Alumni Banquet and Evelyn is a member of the Alumni Association.
She says she and her classmates not only appreciate all their years together, but also the simple pleasures they enjoyed growing up when they did.
“It was a different era,” Evelyn says. “We are all glad we, ‘were when we were.’
I feel so lucky after all these years that I have these wonderful friends.”
