Old-timers gather for Fossil Festival

The Great Northern Fairgrounds usually deserted this time of year, were crowded with campers and alive with memories reawakened as graduates from decades past gathered there this past weekend for the once-every-five-years Fossil Festival.

The event, organized by the Havre Public Schools Education Foundation, started in 2000 as a reunion for those who graduated from Havre high schools in the 1960s, but has since grown to include graduates from across the Hi-Line as far back as the 1950s and as recent as the early 1990s.

Throughout the weekend, festivities included tours of Havre and Central high schools, a brunch at Boxcars, Happy Hour, recounting class history, a barbecue, music and dancing. But even more than that it was a chance to retrace old footprints and see one another again.

Saturday morning, graduates, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, trickled in to the fair Commercial Building, adding their signatures to lists of names from their respective classes, squinting and moving a finger across the paper, in search of memories lost in the clutter of a lifetime of faces and events. Others stood in small groups laughing about old pranks and fellow classmates and asking each other about all that has happened since they received their diplomas.

Later in the day, the scene was similar at the barbeque outside the Bigger Better Barn, where two women with smiles on their faces were among the many in attendance.

Nancy Nordling Evans and Sheila Clancey, graduates from Central High in 1967, were among those in attendance. The two women have known each other since the age of 2, when Clancey's family moved into a newly built house across the street from Evans. They were best friends throughout high school and though they have remained good friends, they have taken two different paths.

"I was forced against my will to come here as a 9-month-old child and I can't get away," said Evans jokingly. Though she had left Montana briefly, she ended up marrying a man from Illinois who wanted to move back to the area and she has lived there ever since. The two eventually had one daughter.

Clancey, on the other hand, left Havre for college after graduation. She moved to Vermont, Wyoming and other places teaching everything from elementary school to college and has been away from the area for many years, though she did attend a 10-year class reunion with Evans.

Looking back, Clancey describes the Havre of her childhood and adolescence as a quiet "slow-paced" community.

"Some townspeople are snarling at each other all the time. In Havre it was never that way." said Clancey.

When he thinks of those final years of high school, Tom Fussell, member of the class of 1970, squints.

Looking back, Fussell recalls his time in the high school band and the football games, where he played the baritone. He also remembers the graduating kegger parties.

After moving to Bozeman and graduating from college, Fussell moved throughout the country.

He relocated every 10 years or so, to major cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and others where he has worked as a mechanical engineer. He is now married and lives in New York City. He hasn't been back to Havre since 1990.

But despite the memories, Fussell said he has not kept up with many of his friends over the years.

"I'm careless with that," he said. "I haven't really ... So back here tonight, I have seen people that I haven't seen since basically 1970."

Not having kept in touch, he has been surprised by some of those he has not seen since that day they walked across the stage and received their high school diplomas. Among those fellow classmates was one who, unbeknownst to him, went on to serve in Vietnam after high school.

The name of the event, Fossil Festival, also makes Fussell laugh a bit. When he was in high school, his peers would tease him, intentionally mispronouncing his name as among other things "Fossil."

It is something the man who just returned home finds ironic and looks back at with a smile, showing just how much time can change things.