Plans Advance for 50th Reunion of Class of 1959
Plans for a 50th reunion of Huntington High School’s Class of 1959 have entered high gear. Organizers are trying to locate classmates and are busy spreading word about the reunion, which will be held Oct. 16-18 in and around Huntington.
An “ice-breaker” is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 16 at the Huntington Yacht Club from 6:30-10 p.m. The next day, Saturday, Oct. 17, the high school will celebrate Homecoming Day with a parade through town at 11:30 a.m. and a home football game against Harborfields at 2 p.m.
Class of 1959 members who played on the Blue Devil football team will be honored at half-time of the Homecoming Day game. A “senior prom” dinner-dance will be held Saturday night at the Crescent Club from 6-11 p.m. A brunch is slated for Sunday, Oct. 18 at the Bay Club from 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.
Huntington’s Class of 1959 consisted of about 355 members according to Jerry Asher, who served as class president, lettered in three varsity sports and went on to graduate from Princeton University and become a successful attorney. Today he is a Suffolk County District Court judge. Reunion organizers have confirmed at least 42 classmates have died. They managed to locate 220 class members to date, “so we are in reasonable shape,” Mr. Asher said. “Responses are coming in.”
One grad who has confirmed he will be attending is Joel Rosenman, who roomed with Mr. Asher for two years at Princeton. Following his graduation from Huntington, Mr. Rosenman earned an undergraduate degree at Princeton and a law degree at Yale in 1966. He’s most famous for having developed the idea that led to the three-day Woodstock concert festival in 1969 and is among a group of four people that produced the famous gathering. “He is the one person that really made it happen,” Mr. Asher said.
One member of the Class of 1959 who won’t be attending is Philip “Flip” Kissam, who passed away on Dec. 23, 2004 after a lengthy battle with biliary duct cancer. Mr. Kissam, who as a senior served as Huntington’s G.O. president, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College and obtained a law degree at Yale in 1968. He spent a year teaching college economics in Nigeria, studied economics at MIT, practiced law in Manhattan, served as an assistant counsel and deputy commissioner for the City of New York, was a professor at Kansas University School of Law for three decades and performed stints as a visiting and/or exchange professor at Duke Univ. School of Law, Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna, Austria and the London Law Consortium. His writings on constitutional law and legal education have been published, as was his 2003 book, The Discipline of Law Schools.
Mr. Kissam was much beloved by his Huntington classmates and was a key contributor on the Blue Devil football, basketball and baseball teams. The Class of 1959 contained so many graduates who went on to notable achievements in their chosen careers.
The Class of 1959 was the first one to graduate out of the “new” Huntington High School, which opened in November 1958. Prior to that, the high school was located on Main Street in a building that is currently used as Huntington Town Hall. Physical education classes and athletic games where held across the street in Heckscher Park.
For more information or to register for the reunion contact Mr. Asher (washer@courts.state.ny.us) or Pat Taylor-Santelli (pats@optonline.net). A special reunion website has been created at www.huntingtonhigh59.com.
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