European edition, Sunday, October 20, 2002

Steve Liewer / Stars and Stripes Leon and Patty Darms Bowen of Vandalia, Ill., dance at a "sock hop" at Leighton Barracks in Würzburg Wednesday night. The Bowens were among 200 alumni and faculty who attended Würzburg American High School between 1955 and 1963 who traveled to Germany last week for a first-ever reunion.

WÜRZBURG, Germany — Everywhere we go-oh, people want to know-oh, who we are. So we tell ’em, we are the Wo-olves, mighty mighty Wolves.

The chant of this ancient sports cheer echoed through the halls of Würzburg American High School last week, but it wasn’t from high school kids psyching themselves up for Saturday’s game against Wiesbaden.

Instead, it came from the voices of some 200 self-described “older-than-dirt Wolves” who descended on Würzburg for the kind of homecoming celebration almost unheard-of at overseas military high schools.

They were graduates of Würzburg High between 1955 and ’63: the founding fathers and mothers of the school, which was established for the 1954-55 school year.

These Wolves came armed with pompons and letter sweaters decorated with W’s of purple and white, colors they selected for the school in a vote almost half a century ago.

“We’re not just a reunion,” said Joannie LaFond of the class of 1962, who started tracking down schoolmates for the event three years ago. “We were the first. We were the test-tube babies.”

Homecoming Week at overseas schools often is something of a futile exercise because few alumni trek from their distant homes for the festivities. So the current crop of Wolves was delighted and amused to meet these spirited old fogies who once roamed their halls with slicked-down hair, poodle skirts and bobby sox.

“It’s great just to have them here. We see their faces light up when they see how the school’s improved,” said Steven Church, a 16-year-old junior who plays on the football team.

“It boosts my spirit. Now I feel like I really have to go out and win.”

Senior Jessica Blount, 17, interviewed some of the alums for her student journalism class.

“It was really, really cool. It’s so great hearing silly stories from back then,” she said. “I didn’t really like the school when I first came here. But these people liked it so much, now I’m beginning to appreciate it a lot more.”

The returning Wolves had been part of Operation Gyroscope, an Army effort in the late 1950s to rotate entire divisions of soldiers — with their families — to overseas bases at once.

At the time, Army leaders saw it as a way of giving more Cold War-era divisions exposure to the kinds of training they might need if the Soviets invaded. They also thought it would build unit cohesion because soldiers would work together for longer stretches of time.

“They probably didn’t count on the esprit de corps filtering down to the families,” LaFond said.

“We came together. We left together. We were family,” said Jean Covington Simonsen, LaFond’s twin sister, who also attended the reunion. “That’s why this is not the normal kind of rah-rah reunion. Your father was over here, laying his life on the line, and your family was here, too.”

The students’ families had traveled to Germany together on airplanes or troop ships. Sponsor families from the departing division met them and escorted them to their new houses, which already were stocked with a three-day supply of food.

Grey Edwards Jr. graduated from Würzburg High in 1963. Now he is director of education for the 284th Base Support Battalion in Giessen, one of only two at the reunion now living in Europe.

Edwards said he and many others remember their time in Würzburg more fondly than any other part of their military childhoods.

“The camaraderie was so much stronger,” he said. “Here, we were all outsiders coming together as one. It was probably one of the most incredible experiences of our lives.”

Operation Gyroscope faded in the early 1960s. According to declassified Department of Defense documents on the Web site of the 3rd Armored Division, the Army abandoned the experiment because it proved too cumbersome at the time to move an entire division overseas at once.

Though a few of LaFond’s classmates had met in 1987 in Washington. D.C., this was the first real reunion of these early Würzburg graduates. She had painstakingly tracked down some 300 alumni and teachers using the Internet. More than half of those students, and 14 faculty — including the school’s first principal and first three football coaches — traveled to Germany for the week’s festivities.

They included a Wednesday night “sock hop,” bus trips to the villages where they had lived back in the ’50s, visits to high school classrooms to talk with students, a tailgate party before Saturday’s homecoming game and a dinner cruise on the Main River afterward.

Most of them hadn’t seen each other, or Würzburg, since they left about 40 years ago. The bustling, modern, fully restored base and city staggered them.

“There were piles of rubble downtown, burned-out buildings,” said Rita Parker, from the class of 1956. “Coming to see what the Americans and the Germans have done, I just couldn’t believe it.”

“It’s kind of disorienting to come back and have everything be a little bit similar  and a whole lot different,” said Mary DuBois Heathman, who attended the school in 1959-60.

The first part of the current Würzburg high school building was constructed in 1956. Back then it consisted of eight classrooms on two floors, plus some unheated Quonset huts to handle the overflow. About 80 students attended the school, compared with 600 now.

“I just walked down the hallway where my locker used to be,” said Tony McClendon, who played on Würzburg football teams that lost only two games in three seasons between 1958 and 1960. “I feel like the walls are talking to me.”