By Claudia Levy

MY CROWD at Bethesda–Chevy Chase High School Class of ’61 fancied itself the intelligentsia. Some of the most brilliant students were members along with the top scientists, girls who wanted to be lawyers, kids who read Sartre for fun and those who worshipped Bertrand Russell. There were a few so-so students who, like me, qualified because of their single-minded zeal for nonintellectual but interesting pursuits like news-papering.

Dedicated to discussion, broadened horizons, and having a good time, we called ourselves the “Young Atheists of America,” a harmless description that we felt reflected our thirst for knowledge and which alarmed several local clergymen.

We no doubt were pseudo-intellectual snobs, but we tended to think of ourselves as a counter-culture in a school that had always had its share of rich, society-minded kids from Kenwood and Chevy Chase. (Some Young Atheists, it must be confessed, also were from well-off families).

After graduation, most of us were among the 82.1 per cent of our 660-member class who marched off to higher education. Gradually, we began to lose contact with each other. The last I heard, the others also were launched as predicted??into careers as doctors, corporate and poverty lawyers, physicists and philosophers.

But for the rest of the Class of ’61, I have in hand the 10th anniversary handbook, a slim blue volume decorated with “Peanuts” characters that arrived in the mail several months after last fall’s reunion dinner-dance. (I was unable to attend, but from all reports, most of us have aged.)

We learn from the booklet that Joe Haldeman’s first novel, War Year, is about to be released by Holt, Reinhart and Winston, that Warren Crosby joined the Secret Service and that William Lawrence Brantley owns two Shakey’s Pizza Parlors.
We can claim a fireman, several assistant professors, an astronomer, a gaggle of Tupperware saleswomen, and Carl Middledorf, a pitcher in the late Washington Senators farm system for a while.

Air Force officer Leonard Amick writes from Japan that his hobbies are “shark hunting and entering Readers’ Digest contests”; others report that they do their own canning and make their own bread; Carol Southmayd Marquardt, our nationally known tennis champion says she still plays an occasional tournament in Clearwater, FL.
Jean McCabe married Barry Brown of the Boston Patriots. Marjorie Webster, named for an aunt who founded the local junior college, helps her husband run a funeral home outside Detroit. John Dunton, our student government president, has become a regional group manger in Hartford, CT.

The class bohemian, who wore black tights and her straight long before the rest of us decided we belonged to the Beat Generation, works for the Veterans Administration and is a mover in the Northeast Ohio Sierra Club.

The adventures of J.F.R. (Frank) Slinkman, who joined the Rhodesian Parliamentary Constituency Council and now oversees research into genealogy, read like the plot of a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novel.

Since only 190 responded to the reunion committee’s inquiries, however, we learn nothing of the exploits of two of our most successful classmates: Vicky Tiel, a former cheerleader, who designs fashions in France and married Elizabeth Taylor’s hairdresser, and John Keker, the student government vice president who returned from Vietnam to clerk for former Chief Justice Earl Warren. John married classmate Christina Day and migrated along with a lot of other B-CCers to San Francisco, where he is an assistant public defender.

We are not told if any classmates died in Vietnam, although we know that two died in auto accidents and one, Linda Marshall, was murdered in her Cambridge, MA, apartment.
Our one known desertion to Sweden?? by Navy man Parker Smith?? is not chronicled, nor is the imprisonment of a classmate who is said to have fatally shot a cab driver.

Top motherhood honors go to Bonnie Farmer Lambdin, who produced four children in the decade.
Those of us who once thought track baton-twirling and sock hops were the spice of life, find that our interests now extend to zero population growth (except for Bonnie), Hatha Yoga, Women’s Liberation, our “disintegrating environment,” clean air, Brownies, “personal revolution,” camping and securities investment.

But if anyone in the Class of ’61 has found the good life, it more than likely is Marguerite Carone Roberts, a happy-go-lucky girl who sang in the chorus and cheered in the Pep Club. She writes that she and her husband own a 200-acre farm near Urbana in Frederick county, with a three-acre pond, ”superb for fishing and swimming and ice skating.”
Her greatest pleasure, Margie writes, “is riding to Sugarloaf Mountain.” She invites old friends to “come out and enjoy life” with them.

I wouldn’t be surprised if upwards of 600 old friends eventually happened to find themselves in the vicinity of Margie’s farm.