GREENFIELD — Fifty years ago, life as a student at the former Greenfield High School looked a little different than it does now. The school didn’t bus students, and the building didn’t even have a cafeteria.
When the final cohort of students at the high school — which still sits in downtown Greenfield and now operates as Lincoln Park Apartments — graduated in spring 1969, it was the “end of an era,” said alumna Marciann McClarnon Miller. The school consolidated with Hancock Central High School that fall, and the black and gold Greenfield Tigers of old were replaced with blue and gold Greenfield-Central Cougars.
About 85 members of the 127-student Greenfield High School class of ‘69 will meet next Saturday at Bradley Hall, a few blocks away from their old stomping grounds, for their 50th reunion. They may reminisce about the high school’s prominent sports teams, McClarnon Miller said, or how they sometimes chose between going home for lunch or eating at a popular downtown Greenfield drug store.
“We just had a different experience than kids do today. It was such as different world,” McClarnon said Miller, who’s also a retired Greenfield-Central teacher.
Tom New, a ‘69 alumnus, said the class was supposed to be the first seniors to graduate from the new Greenfield-Central High School. But when construction ran behind schedule, it meant they would be the last class at Greenfield High School. The administrators at the time came to some outgoing seniors at both Greenfield and Hancock Central and asked them to decide the new school’s colors, mascot and song.
“Every time I hear that song or see something like that, I sort of smile,” New said, who served as student class president for three years and student council president his senior year at the high school. “The thing I’m most proud of is not what we did while we were there, but the legacy we passed on.”
The class of ‘69 also has the most alumni of any Greenfield or Greenfield-Central class in the corporation’s alumni hall of fame, which include the late J. Wayne Leonard; Judy Sheldon Swift; Teresa Cooper Shook; Mike Edwards; and New. Edwards, a Greenfield basketball star, is one of the four inductees for 2019. Three were named to the prestigious group over the last three years.
“In my view, I know I’m little biased,” New said, “we thought we were an exceptional class.”
