Now, my highschool was small, and I don't think we had any more than 60 kids in our graduating class, and those around us were similarly sized, so the "pool" of available alumni is pretty thin ... except that a lot of us did stay in the Chicago area. However, Facebook has that one useful feature (if you've not been paying attention, I'm not a big Facebook fan) of being able to find folks that you've not had any contact with in the past 30 years ... and this was being set up by one of my few "FB friends" who dates back to highschool, and she was able to get in touch with quite a number of folks.
Now, if you're not quite as, uh, "seasoned" as I am, you might not appreciate just how hard it is to recognize folks whom you've not seen in 30-40 years, and especially ones that weren't in your immediate circle of friends. One of the attendees had been one of my younger brother's best buds, so I knew him, but aside from our hostess and her husband I doubt I would have known ANY of the people there. I recall that at my 25th college reunion, when I got our class pic my first reaction was "who are all these OLD folks?", as most of them had grown up and gotten Very Serious And Respectable ... and, while I can do a good "Suit" when I need to, I've never quite settled into that stuff. Of course, having been a "moody loner" for most of my school years, I hadn't spent a lot of time working on making connections with anybody that I didn't have a fairly good reason to deal with, so with a few exceptions I may not have have had much contact with any of these folks back then (I really wish I had my yearbooks from highschool handy to get some clue about who these folks were, as, frankly only one of them looked even vaguely familiar as a "worn and weathered" version of a person I might recognize).
With two exceptions, everybody there were in classes behind mine, so there was a certain level of my being the "mythical" BTRIPP (not as much as was the case in college, where I was somewhat notorious). One thing I was told was that there was some rumor that my neck was hideously misfigured ... and the person telling me this was rather surprised to not see a mass of scars there! I guess (as in the picture here), I pretty much wore turtlenecks all the time in highschool. I certainly recall wearing them (thinking of it brings back a certain tactile memory!), but I can't imagine it was an "every day" thing. Kind of funny, though.