Nearly fifty years later, the search is on for NBCHS’s Class of ’77 ahead of reunion

“I was on a mission to get out of town and see the world, and for a variety of reasons. And I just thought, I wouldn’t care about any of these people after.”

But time changed that.

“As time goes on and you mature and you sort of see things in a different light, you start to see where there were great memories made, good friendships, solid beginnings,” Ganley said.

Now, 49 years later, he’s leading the effort to bring those classmates back together.

The idea came earlier this year after a song on the radio took him back to his graduation year.

“And it dawned on me that we were coming up to 50 years since graduation,” Ganley said. “Wouldn’t it be cool to see if we could get some people back together and have a bit of a party?”

Ganley reached out to former classmates, and five volunteers joined him to organize it.

Planning the reunion isn’t the hard part. Finding the classmates is.

About 314 students graduated with NBCHS’s Class of 1977, Ganley said. So far, organizers have contact information for only about 60 people. They have also identified roughly 10 to 15 classmates who have died, while many others have moved far beyond Saskatchewan, including to Australia and the United States.

“I think if we get to 100, I think we will be quite satisfied that we made a good number of connections,” he said.

“I mean, obviously, if we can get more, the more the merrier.”

Volunteers have built a spreadsheet listing every graduate and searched Facebook, newspaper archives and obituaries. They’ve even contacted funeral homes in hopes families might help reconnect former classmates.

Ganley hopes the search reaches beyond classmates themselves.

“If it’s not our classmates, maybe their children, we’re using different media to try and make the announcement that we’re looking for people and hopefully it will all pay dividends, but it’s slow.”

This 1977 graduation photo shows members of North Battleford Comprehensive High School’s Class of 1977. (Image Credit: Wendy Davies/ submitted)

Returning to where it all began

One of the reunion’s highlights will be a tour of NBCHS.

“For a lot of people, I suspect, myself included… I’d never been back to the high school,” he said.

“A place that so many pivotal things happen to you in those later teen years… getting back in there and seeing what is the same but seeing what is different was pretty phenomenal.”

Organizers also hope music from the 1970s helps transport classmates back to their teenage years.

“Having a DJ there that’s playing the songs of our era will be really important to kind of just bring us back to that time,” Ganley said, pointing to artists such as Supertramp, ABBA and the Eagles.

“And that in and of itself creates, you know, ‘Oh, we remember that,’ or ‘We went to this concert,’ or, you know, those kinds of things.”

For Ganley, the reunion is ultimately about reconnecting with people who helped shape the beginning of his life.

“And so it’s kind of wanting to connect back with those people that were part of that journey and see if they had a similar experience,” he said.

“So there’s a curiosity about how people have moved on and where they ended up and that kind of thing.”

The committee is asking members of the NBCHS Class of 1977, or anyone who knows how to reach them, to send current contact information to nbchs1977@gmail.com.

The reunion committee includes communications co-chairs Wendy Davies and Richard Walter, media consultant Dana Dekker, venue liaison Don Wheler and Bob Coates, who served on the committee that organized previous NBCHS reunions for graduating classes from 1972 to 1982.

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Kenneth.Cheung@pattisonmedia.com

by Kenneth Cheung

Nearly fifty years later, the search is on for NBCHS’s Class of ’77 ahead of reunion

Returning to where it all began

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