We were one of the last high schools in America to operate without buses. They gave us 90 minutes to walk home, eat lunch and walk back. Those of us who lived closer had time for a nap or a driveway basketball game. The hilltoppers had to walk pretty fast both directions. But making two full round trips a day in deep snow, driving rain and blazing sun kept us all in pretty good shape. We came in all shapes and sizes except fat. At right, Tony and Ken pause on the backsteps before heading back to school on a warm sunny May lunch break.

We did have a strong tax base with 11 mills in town, but one of the reasons our school was in strong financial shape was that we did not support a bus fleet. Today, the most cost consuming part of a school system is transportation. After they merged Coraopolis with Neville and went to buses, they started sinking slowly into financial trouble.

Then, just as we moved to the high school, Rogers was also promoted to the Chemistry and Physics position there. This meant he would get us back for 11th and 12th grades. He had already laid a good foundation and looked forward to teaching us on basically a college level. But the high school's labs were antiquated. He needed funding. So as everyone else panicked at Sputnik, Rogers rejoiced. Now he had the money, and he had a year to get ready.

He plugged us into the new Harvard High School Challenge Program. For the students not particularly interested in science, it meant a lot more work. But for those of us with a great interest in science, it meant we were suddenly on the cutting edge, with our hands on equipment and instruments never before available in high schools.

In Chemistry, we got to study Esthers (the aromatics), Plastics, Organics and Inorganics. Instead of one page cookbook exercises, we got to do legitimate experiments. In Physics, in addition to the Mechanic and Gas and Water Pressure units, we also studied Electricity, Ballistics and Particle Physics. Dr. Rogers taught us about the Schroedinger Equasion and showed us the math behind it. When we got to college, we found we were so far ahead of the other students from much larger high schools that many of us got to skip introductory courses and move straight to the 200 and 300 levels. Truly, we were in the right place at the right time.

Eat your hearts out, girls. Oh, not the guy. Forget him. Look at the CAR. Two tone Plymouth Fury convertible with rolled, tucked and pleated naugahyde interior. This was the sharpest car in Coraopolis.

Oh, yeh. The guy. That's Bill.

During our years in high school, Coraopolis had no darkroom, no light table, no separate rooms for publications so work could be spread out and left incomplete until the staff returned, and no Journalism class for teaching fundamental skills to potential staff members. Furthermore, we had an arcane policy forbidding any student from serving on both staffs in the same year. This was the equivalent of telling Nick or Stan they had to choose between football and basketball. A school of 300 did not have enough talent to spread it that thin. The yearbook did have an hour during the school day and carried class credit, but the newspaper did not. The school paid annual dues to Quill & Scroll, National Scholastic Press Association and Columbia Scholastic Press Association, the three major high school Journalism associations. But we were members on paper only. We did not run chapters, induct members, or elect officers. Most students did not even know we belonged. As part of our membership, Mr. Johnson packed up each year's yearbook and newspapers and sent them off to competition, but when the results were announced each July the school did not bother to inform the students of any awards they won. It assumed they would not win any, so attention was not focused on it.

During our high school years, it was Gladys Donaldson's turn to sponsor the yearbook. The closest thing to training was that each year, juniors were brought onto the staff so they could look over the shoulders of the seniors and learn by role modelling. A policy left over from the 1940s was that the yearbook had to be distributed at the end of each school year, meaning the staff faced a February deadline. Anything that happened after February 1 was ignored. A "Spring Supplement" was produced by the juniors as part of their training, after which they were assumed to be qualified to put out a whole book. And the yearbook only got half of the available talent. Clearly, this was a recipe for disaster. In sports terms, Ms. Donaldson had no depth and no experience. But like our sports teams, somehow, against the odds, the talent was there. Judy (right) was intelligent, organized, disciplined and a good manager. She would go on to a career as an Oncological Nurse, so Journalism was not her primary focus. But she could rely on others for that. Louie (above right) was a gifted artist whose particular talents ideally suited the magazine format a yearbook uses. Danny had been trained since seventh grade by Mr. Likens at the Record and had already won awards for his writing. Elaine, Margie and Marianne were among the best products of our very strong Business Department, girls who should have gone to college and majored in business administration. Bill, Lucy, George, Janice, Mary Kay, Linda and Mary Ann were quick learners and precise workers. Yearbooks do not require extensive writing or reporting. They require attention to detail. Judy had a staff suited to that. In July of 1960, after we were graduated and gone, the Review was named Best in Pennsylvania in Class B NonColor Division, with Louie given a special citation for his artwork. The school did not even notify students of their success. The two plaques are still on display in the "Coraopolis" trophy collection in the new school complex. The school was not won a publications award since.

The results of their labor can be seen at left. This is the annual Snowball Dance, held in January. Like most of the semiformal dances, it featured a live band. The money from paid admissions each week had to be carefully managed to afford to bring in live bands and disc jockeys on occasions. Even though the name said Saturday Night Club there were a few occasions each year when dances would be held after home games on Friday nights.

The photo below of the girls kneeling on the school steps shows, front from left, Lynn, Leona, Honey, Olive and Rose. In the back, from left, are Harriett, Cookie, Barb and Ida.

Below left are from left Leona, Lynette and Rose.

Below right are Barbara and Georgia.

Our July 2000 40th Year Reunion. Seated (L to R) : Bobby, Bob, Janet, Ross, Alex, Margie, xxx, Don, xxx. Second row xxx, xxx, Grace, Lucy, Carolyn, Harriet, xxx, Barbara, Charlene, Kathryn, xxx. Third row Ange, xxx, Danny, Pete, Bill C, Tony, xxx, Michaele, David H, Ronnie, Dave D, Louie.

In February of our senior year, BillR received his Eagle Scout award at a ceremony at the Presbyterian Church. He is shown here with his mother. Back in the fifties, Scouting was a more prominent activity than it is now, and the Eagle rank was extremely hard to achieve. The two biggest hurdles were the Swimming and Lifesaving merit badges, which many of us suspected were made unnecessarily difficult just to weed out the less determined. Because some of the merit badges were prerequisite to others, it usually took a boy until age 17 or 18 to finish the requirements, and often time ran out, because it had to be completed by age 18. In our class, John and Danny also earned this rank.

Bill went on to a career in Scouting Administration and won several adult awards. Three of his fellow scouts from Troop 133 would go on to serve as Scoutmasters elsewhere and five would go on to careers in Outdoor Education, Widllife Biology or the Depart- ment of the Interior.

Carol finished off her high school career in spectacular fashion, being named to represent Pennsylvania at the White House Conference on Children and Youth.

Then, in May of our senior year, she was named Pennsylvania Girl Of The Year by the Pennsylvania Federation of Women's Clubs.

We continued to finish each school year with the Kennywood Picnic. For several years we had all been intrigued by The Racers. There were two trains on parallel tracks. Nowhere along the ride did the tracks cross. But if you got on the blue train in the right hand lane, you returned to the platform in the left hand lane. On each ride, the red and blue trains switched places. We rode this ride over and over, walked all around it, and could not figure out how this worked. Finally, in Geometry class, Miss Malter explained it to us and diagrammed it on the board. It was a Mobius Loop. The mathematical phenomenon had been discovered early in the century and John Miller incorporated it into the Racers' design.

We all had to try our skills at the rifle gallery, skee ball and baseball toss. The Penny Arcade had lots of arcade games, a fortune teller, The Giant Claw, and even a photo booth, each for a penny. In the evening we could grab a seat at the Band Shell and see Spike Jones and the City Slickers, Bill Haley and the Comets, The Everly Brothers, Frankie Avalon, Buddy Holly and Bobby Darin.

Those of us in the band got to go to Kennywood a second time every year. The band always took part in the Fall Festival, an August parade through the park. After the parade, we got to spend the evening on the rides. It was great, but didn't match the school picnic. It was hard to enjoy a ride in a band uniform.

For our sophomore year, Kennywood added The Rotor, a huge cylinder. We stepped inside, lined up along the wall, and as the ride began to rotate, the floor dropped out. We were all stuck to the wall like flies. For three minutes we got to crawl around in defiance of gravity. Then the ride would slow down and we'd all drop or slide to the floor, which slowly rose to meet us. Shown here stuck firmly to the wall in the white sweater is our foreign exchange student, Annie Bergvist.

David was one of our more inspirational classmates. Blind from birth, he insisted on doing everything everybody else did. He had a silent braille typewriter which he pecked away at during classes. Nick would hang his cane from the overhead pipes as a prank. At first teachers would apologize to his mother, but she would wave it off. If we were so uncomfortable around him that we did not treat him like everybody else she said she would worry. The fact that we played tricks on him meant we accepted him as one of us, which she wanted. But David was not defenseless. He would sprinkle salt in Nick's soft drinks, pepper on his french fries. Over the years David had overcompensated in other ways for his blindness. He could sit on his front porch and tell the kind of car driving by from the sounds it made.

One of the more interesting aspects of life with David was his music. He played a special instrument called the Theramin. As you will recall from the photo at right, it had a long metal rod extending vertically and a second one extending horizontally. Moving hands back and forth along the rods and closer or further from them, he could control the notes, tone, pitch, and volume. As we all learned, the Theramin is the instrument used in scary movies to play those eerie musical strains. At concerts and talent shows David would play his Theramin. We found it quite weird but one of the highlights of the show.

David went to Thiel College and majored in Physics. Along the way he became fluent in nine languages, but he would graduate with honors in science and go on to Pitt, where he earned a masters and doctorate in Physics. He has spent most of his career researching Acoustics as it relates to music and sound systems.

By the time we got to high school, Rock n Roll was in full bloom, the clarinet, trumpet, and sax had been replaced by the guitar as America's favorite instrument. and we had a long list of vocalists for the girls to fantasize about and the guys to try and imitate. There was Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, Ricky Nelson, the Everly Brothers, and some guy from Tupelo, Mississippi, trying to mix black gospel music with white rock. There were also black singers like Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis.

But it was a skinny glass clad white kid from Lubbock, Texas born Charles Hardin Holly who took over the decade. He had started out as the opening act for Bill Haley and the Comets, then for Elvis during his rhythmn and blues phase, drawing upon both and adding his own innovations. We weren't musical theorists or historians. We didn't understand how he was pioneering the use of sharps and flats, establishing techniques the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Beach Boys would use a decade later. We didn't know he was inventing whole new guitar chords, paving the way for the instrument to continue its rise to dominance. All we knew was that when Buddy Holly sang Peggy Sue, Rave On, Oh Boy, and That'll Be The Day he was somehow bringing together all the various elements of rock n roll, synthesizing them into what the new music had been trying to become. What we somehow sensed and had confirmed later was that the others were being programmed, managed, packaged. Their music was Corporate Pop. Holly left Nashville because they would not let him perform what way he wanted. We wouldn't know until we graduated from college that critic Bruce Eder, considered the chronicler of 20th Century music, considered Holly the most influential musical innovator in American history. Bob Dylan said Holly didn't create rock n roll; he merely perfected it. When we went to see Holly perform in the Kennywood Band Shell it was a pilgrimage. When Buddy Holly died in a plane crash on February 3, 1959 it was one of the great traumas of our young lives. For a lot of us it was The Day The Music Died.

The officers of the Buddy Holly Fan Club pause on Neely Heights before a road trip to Kennywood Park to see Buddy Holly and The Crickets perform in the Concert Bowl.

That's President BillP at left, who went on to earn a doctorate in plant pathology at the University of Vermont and has just retired as Supervisor of Tongass National Forest in Alaska.

Vice President Buzz, second from left, majored in Public Administration and minored in Journalism at Penn State, spent most of his career as a reporter with the Johnstown Tribune Democrat, Outdoor Editor at Grit (a weekly national newspaper), and Outdoor Correspondent for the Associated Press, and is now retired living near State College, Pa. and fishing as often as possible, including trips to Alaska to fish with Bill.

Secretary Tony, in the white letter sweater, spent most of his career on Neville Island before being transferred to Houston, and moving again to Tulsa before retiring in 2008. He has now moved back to Coraopolis.

Treasurer Ken, at right, worked in the testing division for General Motors in Detroit. Ken is now retired and living in Highland, Michigan.

Elaine was a key member of our class since 7th grade. She was an important officer in most of the clubs, was central to the planning of school events beginning with Friday Night Club and continuing through high school homecomings. She maintained one of the highest grade averages in the class for six years.

In May 1960 she was named Coraopolis Girl of the Year by the Coraopolis Association of Business and Professional Women.

If you had a relative who worked at Dravo, you could snag a season pass and either bike or drive over there every day all Summer to swim in their huge outdoor pool with its grass beaches and concession stands. Otherwise, your best bet was The Chute, a classic woodsy Swimming Hole below Wildcat Rock. It was not exclusively a Coraopolis retreat. Situated right below Charleton Heights and the Felician Sisters Convent, it drew a lot of Moon Township kids and even some adults. It was especially good after a rain, as it appears here (notice the muddy water). Just below this pool, the actual chute pours down a rocky slope. A photo of that scene is on the junior high page. Those people too lazy to walk down the Wildcat Rock Trail could drive by turning right off Montour Street at Morgan's Store and going up Brook Street to the dead end, then walking up the level trail. By our junior and senior years, it had become common to bring supplies and stay for the evening, cooking dinner and relaxing before heading home around dark.

Dale glides through some riffles out on Raccoon Creek. By this time he had transferred to Montour and was starring on their football team against us, but still participated in Troop 133 at the Presbyterian Church and had many friends in Coraopolis. Most of us loved canoeing and looked forward to it at church camps, Y Camp Konokwee, one of the Boy Scout summer camps, or weekend trips with local Scout troops to nearby streams. By the time we graduated from high school many of us had become good enough to take a canoe down Class III streams. But we also received instruction and practice and earned certification in water rescue, so if we were out on a creek or river and somebody, whether one of our group or someone else, got in trouble, we were trained and equipped to do whatever was necessary to get them out of trouble. As adults, most of us bought our own canoes and continued to go paddling whenever possible.

Just because we had drivers' licenses, part time jobs and sports didn't mean we forgot about sledriding. Lynette is shown in December 1957 (our 10th grade Christmas) up at Omlors Hill. A lot of the Lincoln kids had gone there when they were in grade school because it was off road and when they got cold Mrs. Omlor was happy to fix them hot chocolate while they warmed up by the fireplace. Lynette moved from Lincoln over to the center of town but still returned to Omlors a few times a year to sledride. There was usually a gang up there, especially on weekends. "First Tracks" was a special privilege, getting there before everyone else so one could go down the hill a few times before the snow was all packed down. In these photos Lynette is making the first few descents. Later, as the snow is packed into ice, it becomes much faster and trickier to steer. Like the streets and other major slopes, it was a great ride down but a long hike back up, towing the sled behind. It wasn't the cold or the riding that wore us out; it was the 30 or 40 hikes back up the hill. No wonder none of us were fat. The girls had a huge advantage in that they could buy hooded coats. Companies did not seem to make hooded coats for boys, so they had to wear scarves, earmuffs and bomber hats. Long underwear, wool sweaters and heavy buckle rubber boots were the standard clothes.

Chuck (left), John and Frank here inspect one of the log cabins built by George Washington and his men as they established a Winter camp at Valley Forge. It was one of the coldest Winters ever recorded in North America, with some of the deepest snow, and the Colonial troops had a terrible time, but the British assumed few would survive, and withdrew to Trenton to enjoy the warmth and comfort, figuring they would round up the remaining Americans, if any, after the Spring thaw. While they were not paying attention, an idealistic French nobleman, the Marquis de Lafayette, arrived with his personal fortune, ships of food, weapons, ammunition and warm clothing, and his Dutch companion, General Von Steuben, took over the training of the Colonial soldiers. On Christmas Eve Washington launched the famous crossing of the Delaware in a blizzard, surprised the British, captured Trenton, and suddenly what had been a hopeless case became a serious war. It would take another year, but the Americans left Valley Forge on their way to winning the Revolution.

The feel our dozen Coraopolis kids gained for the American Revolution from our two weeks at Valley Forge would remain with us for our entire lives. We met boys our age from all over America, came home with patches and slides and live animals like Texas Horned Toads, but most important we came home with a personal relationship with George Washington, Colonel Parker and Lafayette.