Celebrating Seton’s Class of 1960

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Seton Hall’s Class of 1960 boarded the Barefoot Princess, a riverboat docked in back of the Harbor Crab, for their “last hurrah”: a 60-year high school reunion, taking place 61 years after they graduated from high school.

“We’re calling it our ‘last hurrah’ because, at our age, they’ll be no more reunion in five years or 10 years,” said Mary Lou Martin, who planned the event from her Maryland home.

Of the 34 classmates who attended, most are 79 years old, while a few are 78 years old. Martin said their age would prevent the class from planning and traveling to a reunion in the future, so the plan was to make this year’s celebration a blowout.

The event was held on the Patchogue River, featuring hot food, a cash bar and an evening of catching up. A sign reading “Seton Hall Class of 1960 Last Hurrah Reunion” was hung above a window on the side of the Barefoot Princess. Some classmates, including Mark Rose, joked with Martin about planning at least one more—to not let this be their last hurrah.

Though she said she won’t budge—this year is the last she’ll plan—she did offer some advice for planning a well-attended reunion. The most important aspect is to know where classmates are or to stay in touch with them over the years—neither was difficult for the Class of 1960, as most of the former pupils have remained friends.

“We have a close class. We had a big group of friends who we are still friends with today,” she said.

The friends include 12 couples who met in their high school class and later married. She and her husband, Tom Martin, are one of the couples. Mary Lou Martin said the Seton Hall High School graduates may hold the secret to wedded bliss.

“Twelve couples married and nobody got divorced. None of them. Can you believe it?” she said.

Seton Hall, a now closed co-educational Catholic high school, was later purchased by St. Joseph’s College to support their growing enrollment numbers. The school’s last class graduated in 1974.

For the Class of 1960, when planning their past reunions, planning committee members would call classmates requesting updated mailing addresses, but technology made that job easier; now they use email. Facebook was also used to search for the obituaries of deceased classmates.

“Someone would send in an obituary and we’d send it out and let everyone know,” said Martin.

A lot of finding out who died was done the old-fashioned way, by someone who had stayed in contact with the person or lived near them and gave that information to the other classmates.

Carol Baratta Flood created four framed memorials in honor of her deceased classmates. Each contained a photo montage of the departed classmates with a copy of their obituary and their high school photo. Flood had the memorials on display during the event, each on a wooden easel. Blue Point historian Gene Horton was one of the now-deceased classmates featured in the memorials.

The reunion was originally slated for April 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic stopped the first reunion from happening. Martin and the rest of the planning committee got back to the drawing board and eventually settled on a two-day event in September 2021.

“We really graduated in 1960, so we should have had our reunion in 2020, but nobody wanted to travel in 2020. So here we are celebrating now,” she said. 

In addition to the party boat event at Harbor Crab, the classmates met up the next day for Mass at the Blue Point home of Mark Rose.