This is my report of our twelfth reunion, as I gave it to the Philadelphia chapter on September 11, set down here for those who could not be with us. I have tried to be accurate. Where I have been inaccurate, I trust that somebody's sister will let me know.

Friday, September 3: Coming Home
The three chapter buses left Philadelphia, Newark and Washington before daylight Friday morning, and the Philadelphia bus, which I rode, arrived at the hotel in Florence a little after six in the evening, after eleven hours, two rest stops, one flat tire in North Carolina, and a great deal of singing. The Washington bus beat us by forty minutes and has not let us forget it. Registration was in the lobby, and the lobby was full of people hugging people they had not seen in two years or twenty. That first evening is my favorite part of every reunion. Nobody has given a speech yet. Everybody is just glad.

Saturday, September 4: The Banquet
Three hundred and sixty-eight of us sat down to dinner in the hotel ballroom at seven o'clock. As is our custom, we came in by classes, oldest first, behind our class banners, and the room stood and applauded each class as it entered. Mrs. Ida McKinney, Class of 1929, came in alone behind her banner, on the arm of her grandson, and the applause for her went on for a long time.

The Reverend Herbert Greer, Class of 1932, gave the invocation. Our president, Mr. Thomas Aldridge, '53, welcomed us. Then we honored the classes marking anniversaries this year:

• Class of 1929, seventy years: Mrs. Ida McKinney.
• Class of 1939, sixty years: three members present, led by Mrs. Ann Hyde.
• Class of 1949, our Golden Panthers, fifty years: fourteen members present, led by Mr. James Gholston, who presented the association with a framed photograph of the class taken on the school steps in May of 1949. Each member received a gold pin.
• Class of 1959, forty years: nineteen present, led by Mrs. Darlene McCarty.
• Class of 1969, thirty years: twenty-two present, led by Mrs. Diane Compton. Theirs was the next-to-last class. They reminded us of it.

Two of our teachers were with us, Mrs. Marjorie Boykin and Miss Anna Cornell, seated at the head table, and every class that came in stopped at that table first. Then Mr. James Grant spoke. Mr. Grant came to Longleaf in 1950 to teach mathematics, became our principal in 1958, and was our principal on the last day. He is 75 years old now, and he stood at the podium without notes for twenty minutes. He told us about the morning in 1970 when he locked the front door of Longleaf High School for the last time, and drove to his new job as an assistant principal across town, and how he sat in the parking lot for a while before he went in. He told us we had been the finest students he ever knew, and that he had never said so at the time because it would have gone to our heads. He said it was safe to tell us now. I will not try to say more about it than that. Those of you who were there know.

Mrs. Kathleen Baker, our scholarship chair, then presented the 1999 scholarships to Juanita, Jason, Lori and Marilyn, whose grandparents stood with them. You will find them on the front page. Then the chapters came forward one at a time with their gifts to the fund, and I will let the figures below speak for themselves. After the dinner there was dancing until midnight, and some of us danced, and some of us watched, and some of us did both and are still paying for it.

Sunday, September 5: Worship
We worshiped at eleven o'clock at our mother church, where the first Longleaf classes met in the years before the school was built. The church was full to the walls, with folding chairs down the aisles and the ushers working hard. An alumni choir of thirty-one voices sang, and the Reverend Greer, who is 85 and has preached in that pulpit on and off for fifty-five years, preached from the 127th Psalm, on what it means to build a house that will stand. He reminded us that our parents and grandparents built a school with their own hands in 1923 when nobody else would build it for them. He said that was the sermon and the rest was commentary. Then he preached for forty more minutes, and nobody minded at all.

Monday, September 6: The Picnic on the School Grounds
On Labor Day we went home to Longleaf. The Home Chapter had been up since four o'clock frying fish and chicken under the pecan trees, and by noon there were long tables across the old ball field covered with potato salad, collards, macaroni and cheese, red rice, and more cakes and pies than I could count, and I tried.

At one o'clock, eighteen members of the old Panther band, in the blue and white, some with instruments they had not played in thirty years, lined up in front of the school and played the school song and two marches, under the direction of Mr. Edward Godsey, '55, who was Mr. Willie Mack's drum major. We lost Mr. Mack last November. Mr. Godsey said before they began that this one was for him, and they played it as if he were watching, and I believe he was.

In the afternoon the Northern chapters played the Home Chapter in softball, and the Home Chapter won, 14 to 11, and they will be telling us about it until the next reunion. The Class of 1949 planted a longleaf pine seedling by the front walk. Mr. Leland Coker, president of the Home Chapter, gave tours of the building, and in every classroom somebody stopped and said, "This is where I sat."

The photographs are at the drugstore. When my grandson can borrow a scanner, he will put some of them here. Until then, close your eyes.

At the banquet we stood in silence for the Panthers and teachers we have lost since our last reunion in 1997. As their names were read, a member of each class lit a candle.

Mrs. Ethel Barker sat in front of me in Miss Sanford's English class for four years and never once let me copy. Rest well, Ethel.

Our treasurer, Mr. Edward Logsdon, keeps the fund in a bank back home, and he reports to every chapter in writing every spring. We are $1,250 from our goal of fifty thousand. I am not above asking. Send what you can, through your chapter, or write to me and I will tell you how.

The next reunion will be on Labor Day weekend two years from now, back home, as always. Start saving for the bus.