Community connects for school days reunion.

Byline: GARRET JAROS The Register-Guard

LEABURG - There were no strangers at the 45th annual Leaburg School reunion Sunday - even when no one recognized who it was walking through the door.

"Who's that, who's that?" was the cry each time someone new shuffled out of the sun and into the tiny school gymnasium that sits in the center of town.

In a town that doesn't bother to post a population because no one's quite sure what it is, it's impossible not to know everyone.

Some connections just take longer to make than others.

For decades, those connections were made at Leaburg School.

Now a community center, the two-story school was built in 1923 and closed in 1969. A school of some sort had graced the site since 1893.

Event organizer Mark Schibler and his wife, Lois, marked their 12th wedding anniversary at Sunday's reunion. They dated in high school, but lost touch before getting reacquainted 28 years later at an earlier school reunion. They were classmates but strangers when they attended the three-room Leaburg schoolhouse.

"He just wasn't interested in girls first through sixth grade," Lois joked.

The schoolhouse originally had only two classrooms, one for first through fourth grades and the other for fifth through eighth. That was back when marbles was the game of schoolyard champions and before the McKenzie Highway cut the town in half.

Eighty-eight-year-old Henry Carlson hasn't forgotten.

Carlson, the senior returning alumni at Sunday's event, graduated from Leaburg in 1932. The school and the town were bigger then, he said.

"They made the school bigger because the dam and powerhouse were being built," he said. "But when that finished, most people moved away."

So did Carlson, first to join the Army and fight in World War II and later to chase work as an electrician.

But he found his way back home and, on Sunday, was the eldest of nine Carlsons in attendance at the reunion.

Amid fried chicken and salads of all sorts, former classmates took turns sharing what made Leaburg School different or special to them.

Mark Schibler said he believes that he holds the distinction of being the first student to get sick on the school's merry-go-around.

Doris Hansen, who started at Leaburg as a fifth-grader in 1941, remembered roller skating on the gym floor.

"It was wonderful," she said. "The whole community would turn out on Friday night to skate. But we really tore up the floor, so they had to stop that."

Others recalled the rings placed in the playground's trees for kids to swing on.

"I remember the blisters you'd get from the rings," said JoAnn Vance, whose father, Gordon Vance, was a longtime caretaker of the school gym that now bears his name.

"I'm sure by the time the school year is over the kids must have had ridges of calluses because that's all we did at recess - line up and cross back and forth on the rings as many times as possible," she said.

CAPTION(S):

Timminy Carlson (right) tries out the potluck fare as former students and workers of Leaburg School pass down the food line Sunday at a reunion in the old school gymnasium.