About 25 members of Hauser Junior High School’s class of 2006 came together on Saturday, Aug. 1, for a 20-year middle school reunion.
The event was masterminded by Tom Doherty, who said the idea had been bouncing around his brain for a few years before it “crystallized” one night at a bar with friends.
“I’m still very close with a lot of those people, and whenever I see random people from that era, I can’t stop laughing. It dawned on me: This would be a silly, fun thing to consider, but to be honest, I really had no idea how people would react,” he said. “I was quite surprised at not only how interested people were but how excited they were about the idea. It was like we were all on the same wavelength in a way.”
Doherty said he quickly put together a small group to act as a planning committee, consisting of former classmates Audrey Hursh, Stephanie Sauer, Connor Halline and Caley Fox Shannon.
“They were pretty much immediately in,” Doherty said. “It mostly played out over group texts and Google documents, but over the course of about six months, we basically put this all together piece by piece.”
“We took on a ‘If we build it, they will come’ mentality. We were like, ‘If only we come, we’ll have fun, so, hopefully, some other people will come,” Shannon told the Landmark.
Doherty said much of the work boiled down to trying to find as many former middle school classmates as humanly possible.
“We had 158 people in our class, and we literally busted our yearbooks and were going name by name, being like, ‘What’s this person up to? Where do they live? Do we have their contact information?’ That ended up being a lot harder than I thought. I assumed we would be able to find everyone online,” he said.
Doherty said he continued to search for people to invite them as other details of the reunion solidified, even through the night before the event, when he invited classmate Yetta Sejdiu by leaving a voicemail at the beauty salon she owns in the city.
“We basically cold pitched her to come to this party, and within an hour, we found her on Instagram. She responded and was like, ‘Oh my God, your employees forwarded your voicemail!’” he said. “We were so excited. Like, I can’t believe that worked.”
Different members of the planning committee took on different tasks, Shannon said. She made the music playlist while Doherty put together a series of Hauser trivia slides. The group also made Hauser bingo cards, asking attendees to find a former classmate who, for example, was in their same homeroom or didn’t go on to attend Riverside Brookfield High School as a way to break the ice between people who might not have interacted in two decades.
On the day, a good time was had by all, Doherty said, especially when he brought out the celebrity guest: David Mason, who many of the attendees had as an English teacher during their time at Hauser. Mason still teaches at Hauser and runs its theater program like he did back in the day, Doherty said.
“I called him personally out of nowhere one day, and he picked up the phone, and he was overjoyed that I called. It was crazy,” Doherty said. “Originally, it was going to be like, ‘Hey, can you film a quick video for us to say hello to people?’ but he was so excited about it that he was like, ‘Is it alright if I come?’ and I was like, ‘Hell yeah, it’s alright if you come! That would be amazing!’”
Doherty said there were “a lot of surreal moments” shared between the attendees. Shannon agreed, saying it was fun to reminisce about old times and gain new perspectives on them.
“I had a conversation with two different people who, we were articulating that we didn’t think we were cool or that people liked us, and the other person was like, ‘No, you were great,’” she said. “It’s a time in your life that has a lot of insecurity, maybe, and you’re very worried about thinking you’re cool or a loser or whatever, and it was fun to be like, ‘I didn’t think you were a loser!’”
She said the focus of the event allowed the group, who have all grown up in the 20 years since middle school, to “be kids for the day again together.”
Doherty said he was grateful to everyone who attended and especially the planning committee.
“It really warmed my heart and was lovely. I think, also, to be corny, it just goes to show that Riverside is a really special place,” Shannon said. “It’s such a privilege, of course, to have grown up in Riverside, gone to Hauser and been in such a tight-knit community. We don’t live in Riverside anymore, most of us, so it’s not every day we get to feel that feeling again.”
