As Cherry Hill Class of '67 gathers one more time, recalling when the town became 'the place to live'

The boys wore button-down shirts, the girls wore A-line skirts, and they listened to WIBG-AM  ("Wibbage") in subdivisions with names like Knollwood and Woodcrest.

They were the Cherry Hill High School West Class of 1967, raised in a booming postwar suburb, graduating on the eve of a cultural revolution.

And on Nov. 3, some of these classmates — many of whom are grandparents and retirees — will gather at the Doubletree Hotel in Mount Laurel for the start of their 50th-reunion weekend, an event inspired by nostalgia, touched by mortality, and enabled by social media.

More than 200 people, including about 140 class members, have so far signed up (a link to the reunion page on Facebook page is here).

"We left high school wearing Weejuns [loafers] and came back from college with long hair, ponchos, and embroidered jeans," recalls Susan Sokolick Kauffman, 68, now of Lumberton.

"I really became a hippie after graduation," says Eric Goldstein, who's also 68 and lives in Broomall.

"People would be surprised that I ended up as a mental-health professional."

I meet the two reunion committee members in front of their sprawling alma mater on Chapel Avenue and proceed to (where else?) Ponzio's, a diner popular when they were teenagers and still a township meeting place.

Kauffman and Goldstein didn't know each other at West. Their 750-member class included students from across the sprawling township; Cherry Hill High School East had just opened with a freshman class, and the East-West divide was in its infancy.

"In high school, I was a joker, a comic," Goldstein says.

"I was artsy," says Kauffman, a painter who had a long career teaching art in Cherry Hill's elementary and middle schools.

She and Goldstein recall West as academically competitive and somewhat cliquish, with "conserves" who were buttoned-down and "hoods" who weren't. The student body was almost entirely made up of ethnic whites — kids from Jewish, Italian, and Irish homes predominated — with a small number of African Americans and Asians.

And while the gathering storm of cultural, social, and political upheavals in the outside world was visible in Life magazine or on the network news, the late Sixties had yet to cause much of a ripple at West — although Vietnam, and the draft, was on the minds of some of the young men.

Reunion organizers say they have so far been unable to reconnect with several classmates believed to have served.

The West they attended had no antiwar demonstrations. "It was pre-hippie," committee member and retired insurance agent Linda Esrich Mattison, 68, says from Scottsdale, Ariz. "You got sent home for wearing jeans."

She and others on the committee say that while earlier reunions were successful, plans for the 50th were ramped up after far-flung class members began reconnecting on Facebook in large numbers. Some also got reacquainted in person; Kauffman was thrilled when old pals from West converged on an art show she had at the Palmyra Cove Nature Center.

"We decided to run the reunion like a business," says committee member Bruce Butler, who lives in Cherry Hill. He works in sales and is good friends with Goldstein.

"We did due diligence and used a reunion of [Philadelphia's] Northeast High as a guide of what to do and what not to do," he adds. "People are sending us very nice notes along with their checks. They're very, very excited about this. But it's a little sad, too, because some members of the class are no longer with us."

"There are 82 we know of who are deceased, and we have never been able to locate about 150 classmates," says Mattison.

"But the new Facebook page, which Eric created, has done more to get people engaged and excited than anything we've ever done," she adds, noting that class members will be converging on South Jersey from across the country on reunion weekend.

Closer to home, retired and much-beloved U.S. history teacher Walter W. Belfield, 84, is one of several former faculty members who plan to attend. He taught at West from 1960 until 1990 and lives in Medford.

"In the '60s, Cherry Hill was still somewhat rural, and a bit sheltered. The people in the communities that were being built wanted their children to have a good education," Belfield recalls. "They were looking to move up."

Many of the class members migrated to Cherry Hill from Camden or Philadelphia as youngsters, and witnessed the rise of South Jersey's signature suburb — regionally famous as the home of a shopping mall and for destinations such as the Hawaiian Cottage (with its giant pineapple on Route 38), the Rickshaw Inn, and the Latin Casino.

"It was like rapid fire," says Goldstein. "Cherry Hill became the place to live."

Between 1960 and 1970, the township's population more than doubled, from about 31,000 to 64,000. Cherry Hill built schools as fast as it could; some West grads remember when fifth-grade classes were held on the stage of the all-purpose room at overcrowded Kingston School.

While a good number of alums, like Butler, settled in Cherry Hill and raised their own families there ("It's a good place," he says), those returning after many years out of town will find a far more diverse and almost totally developed community, stretches of which — particularly on the West Side — may seem nearly unrecognizable.

A tour of their alma mater is scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 4; if classes were in session that day, I expect these old-schoolers would be surprised by the more expressive atmosphere that now prevails.

Like other baby boomers (me, for instance) who came of age during the era, the Class of  '67 kids grew up with far more restrictive behavioral norms. "Social media" consisted of the family landline, if a parent wasn't talking on it, and the surreptitious passing of handwritten notes in class. And like phones, teenagers weren't mobile.

"Kids didn't have cars," Butler says. "A lot of families had only one car."

Ah, yes, I remember it well. And having attended my 45th high school reunion last year in Massachusetts, I also know what the West committee members are talking about when they reflect on the future all of us — former class clowns and cheerleaders, geeks, geniuses, and football heroes — share.

Whether we like it or not.

"We joke about having a 55th and 60th and 65th reunion. But we just don't know," says Goldstein.

"Everybody's just happy to be here," Kauffman says. "Literally."