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SD27 dorm students of the 50s and 60s host reunion in Williams Lake

Williams Lake High School’s early dormitory students hold a reunion in Williams Lake this weekend
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The organizing committee for the high school dorm reunion taking place in the lakecity this weekend are pictured with some of the photos from their high school days in Williams Lake. Event organizers standing in back are Diann Reay (from the left) and Dale Benastick. Seated in front are Barry Laird (from the left), Lucille Earlandson, and Loren Buckle the organizing committee chair. Gaeil Farrar photo

During the 1950s and 60s students came from all over the Central Interior to attend school in Williams Lake.

They came from the Chilcotin, Quesnel, 100 Mile House, Big Lake, Horsefly and even the Pemberton area.

And they all needed somewhere to live.

In those days School District 27 provided a dormitory for the students. During the 1950s and 60s that dormitory was located in the same building which now houses the district board office on Second Avenue.

Right across the street was the Rosary Hall dormitory for Catholic students.

This Saturday, April 29, students who lived in both of these dorms between 1952 and 1969 will be reuniting in Williams Lake.

Between the former dorm students and their spouses and partners more than 200 people will be participating in the reunion taking place in the small arena at the Cariboo Memorial Complex, said event committee chair Loren Buckle.

The organizing committee which also includes Lucille Erlandson, Barry Laird, Diann Reay, Dale Benastick, June Eckert, Carol Taylor and Donna Ablitt has been working on contacting former students and organizing the reunion for more than a year.

“We’ve had a great response,” Erlandson said.

Buckle came to school in Williams Lake from Riske Creek in 1964 at the age of 12 to start Grade 8. He was young for Grade 8 but was able to take grades 1 and 2 in the same year at the Bald Mountain Elementary School.

Buckle’s mother came from the Wineglass Ranch and his stepfather was a lumber truck driver.

For most of his high school, family members would pick him up on Fridays and deliver him back to school on Monday mornings. For the last two years of high school the district estiblished a school bus route that would take the students in his region to the top of the Sheep Creek hill every day and parents would pick up and drop off their children at that stop, Buckle said.

For the most part, Buckle said dorm students went home on weekends but later in high school some stayed in town on weekends for sporting events or to work.

But for most students he said it was important to get home on weekends and holidays.

“There were chores to do,” Buckle said.

Students also had chores to do around the dormitory, Erlandson said, but they also had a lot of fun together.

In those days she said parents paid $26 a month for room and board and the school district subsidized the rest of the cost. They made their own breakfasts but always had a hot meal made for them at lunch time, such as liver and bacon one day, roast beef another, spaghetti another and fish on Fridays.

“I would always trade my liver for something else,” Erlandson said.

Erlandson and her family moved up from California to Big Lake in the winter of 1951/52. That winter she rode her horse to the Big Lake school where she worked on her Grade 9 studies by correspondence. In the fall she started Grade 9 all over again in Williams Lake.

Barry Laird, former owner of the Open Book whose daughter now owns the business, was sent to school in Williams Lake in 1954 from Devine, about 26 miles north of Pemberton. He spent his Grade 9 year attending school in Williams Lake before his mother moved the family here permanently. During that year he said the easiest way for him to shuttle back and forth to school for the Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays was by train.

One holiday when he was heading home he said there was a slide blocking the train so a taxi came up from Lillooet to pick him up and a float plane took him the rest of the way home to Devine.

“That was a fun year,” Laird said.

Dale Benastick was born and raised on the Lyne Ranch 14 miles north of Williams Lake and came to school in Williams Lake 1956 mid-way through Grade 8.

She spent a couple of nights at the school district dorm before a bed became available at Rosary Hall.

“I was only at the dorm for three months,” Benastick said. “The next fall they put in a bus route and I was on the bus.”

Benastick was born in the same house on the Lyne Ranch that her mother and grandmother were born in.

Diann Reay came to school in Williams Lake for Grade 9 from Canim Lake. Her father was a lumber inspector and she attended the Forest Grove school until Grade 8.

“There wasn’t a high school or a hospital in 100 Mile House then,” Reay said. “The saw mills were out in the bush.”

She said her family and friends would carpool back and forth to Williams Lake for the school week.

Reay took grades 9, 10 and 11 at Williams Lake High School, then went to Kamloops for her Grade 12 year.