‘We were a pretty good group’: Morgantown High Class of 1956 assembles for reunion

MORGANTOWN - With his flip phone and Lucky Strikes, Daniel Mansberger was the epitome of Old School Cool, as he talked about the schoolmates who graduated with him in 1956 at Morgantown High.

"Yeah, I think we were a pretty good group," he said, as the years peeled off like old paint to reveal a grain that had been there all along.

Mansberger and 17 others from that kindred class got together last week in Morgantown for their 70th reunion.

Everyone, Mansberger said, fell in like they always had - just like the main hallway at the red-bricked school on Wilson Avenue back in ’56.

As Mansberger, who took a lead role in the planning of this gathering, said: The world then was a different, evolving place.

Even so, he said, the conventional trappings were still there.

At MHS, young ladies still had Home Ec on their schedules and young gentlemen still signed up for shop class.

If you were female, it was assumed you would become somebody's wife and somebody's mom - even if you did by chance work outside of the home as a secretary, receptionist or some other gender-assigned role.

And if you were male, greetings from Uncle Sam were inevitable.

Four years out of high school, Mansberger was drafted into the U.S. Air Force, where his aptitude for numbers - encouraged by teacher Lorna Carlin in her algebra and geometry classes at MHS - netted him some high-tech assignments with serious security clearances.

Mrs. Carlin would make her charges go outside and measure the shadows cast by utility poles in mid-afternoon sunlight, so they could translate their findings into geometric principles and the like.

"She was a good teacher," he said. "There were a lot of good teachers there."

Was he a good student?

"Yeah," he said, grinning. "When I wanted to be."

He was in the marching band - but he didn't need shop class. He learned how to turn a wrench working at the Esso station his dad Paul owned on Listravia Avenue.

"He taught me how to do brakes and mufflers and points and plugs," Paul's son said. "Back when gas was 28 cents a gallon."

Mansberger and his brother Leroy also delivered newspapers - the Morgantown Post, an earlier version of The Dominion Post - and during the weeks when the collections were good, both lads were in possession of solid, walking-around money.

"Eight or nine bucks," he said, smiling at the memory.

"We bought the best Schwinn bicycles you could get. I had the model with the saddlebags and fat tires."

After his military postings in the Far East, Mansberger came back to Morgantown and his old job at the Esso station on Listravia.

Mansberger graduated from West Virginia University on the G.I. Bill and made a career keeping the books for Morgantown business magnate J.W. Ruby - whose wife, Hazel Ruby McQuain, is still hailed as one of the city's top benefactors, years after her death.

Along the way, he married and started a family. He and Harriet have three children: One an attorney, the other a nurse and the other an automotive production manager.

"I'm proud of ’em," he said.

He's also proud of the Class of 1956.

They were kids during World War II and Korea. They came of age in the Cold War and all the societal changes that followed.

Morgantown High's then newly minted grads of seven decades ago became educators and entrepreneurs.

And matriarchs and patriarchs, also.

Some were trailblazers while others kept it tamped down at home.

"We all still get along," Mansberger said.

"We're not supposed to be able to still do this," he said. "Not when you were 17 - 70 years ago. But here we are. We're gonna start making plans for 71."