For the Oct. 5, 1990, edition of The Richmond News Leader, staff reporter Rex Springston wrote a first-person column about his 20-year high school reunion.  The text is below.

VIRGINIA BEACH — For once, the Kempsville Chiefs fielded an experienced team — a Ph.D. psychologist at shortstop, an ex-convict at second, a mother of three in center. ... We would make the McDonald’s annual picnic people wish they never had challenged us on the softball field.

We sought to prove ourselves at this Class of ’70 reunion, for as Chiefs we had played for, or rooted for, some of the worst sports teams in high school history.

In 1966, Kempsville High was brand-new, like an expansion football team, and like an expansion team, we had no tradition, no identity — in sports or anything else.

We started with an eighth and ninth grade (I was in ninth), added a 10th grade (again my class) the next year, and so on. Members of the class of ’70 were, in effect, seniors for four years. Everything we did was a first.

My contributions: I caught the first kick (by mistake) in Kempsville’s first-ever football game. It was one of our greatest games, a 0-0 tie. I believe I was also the first person to take a 5-foot iguana into a Kempsville biology class; to release homing pigeons from school; and to peddle guinea pigs to classmates.

I won’t try to sell you on a baby boomer notion that those were the greatest years ever. They were strange times, however. Consider:

No. 1 songs my senior year included not only “Honky Tonk Woman” and “Come Together” but “Sugar Sugar” and “In the Year 2525.”

Some girls still wore beehive hairdos.· Some of us put gooey stuff on our hair to straighten natural curls.

One spring, everybody went home wearing their monogrammed sweaters and penny loafers. That fall, they came back wearing rimless glasses, bell bottoms and granny dresses.

Those years also were made special by things not unique to baby boomers.

Like dating for the first time... the smell of perfume and the touch of cashmere as you parked by the surf and didn’t know what to do.

Like totaling the family station wagon two weeks after getting your learner’s permit.

Like playing on those sorry sports teams. Our track team was so green we sometimes said “shoot the put” instead of “put the shot.”

I’m married now, and happy, and there’s no need to impress people the way you must in high school. Still, the night before our reunion dance, I took a pair of tweezers and pulled out my gray mustache hairs — hair by painful hair.

At the dance at Dam Neck Officers Club, I discovered strange things that folks everywhere discover at reunions. …Some of the plainest girls were now pretty, some the coolest guys weren’t. Skinny people were fat; fat, skinny. Two “girls” were now grandmothers.

I found Bob Simmons, now a Chesapeake dentist. I told his wife that back when Bob and I surfed and lifeguarded together, he had hair to his shoulders.

“You mean I had hair,” Bob said, casting his eyes toward his receding hairline.

As my wife stood by my side, three women (two of them multichild mothers) told me they had crushes on me in high school. Now they tell me.

I learned how the Chiefs are making their marks on the world. Bud Hooper sold volleyballs to the Vatican. John Deaton (now of Richmond) sells teddy bears. Web Bryant is a senior illustrator at USA Today.

Perhaps our biggest contribution to society: None of us became lawyers.

The next day, we gathered for our picnic — and accepted the ·softball challenge of the McDonald’s burger slappers.

Classmate Mike Carter, recently paroled on a first-degree murder conviction, led off with a hit. Psychologist Randy Waid kidded him about having had time to practice. Carter took the ribbing well.

Cindy Martin Johnson, the mother of three, made a couple of big catches. The Chiefs were on the warpath.  You could almost hear the school band doing the tom-tom beat. We won big.

Hooper, a towering former member of our gawdawful teams, shouted with pent-up emotion, “After 20 years, Kempsville finally wins a game!”

Walking off the field I saw Larry Osmundson, a big, pleasant guy, the type who excelled in wood shop. He was lugging around a huge cedar bat he had fashioned himself on a lathe. It looked like a caveman’s club.

Larry hadn’t played. In our eagerness to have fun and demonstrate our youthfulness, we had left him out — just like high school kids. Larry, we apologize.

The teen years are traumatic and I wouldn’t go back for anything, but yet.... Now we’re adults, young professionals, and we’re proud of our jobs, but we’ve done them for years, we can do them in our sleep, and days and months go by pleasantly but without the kind of changes that etch vivid memories.

Back then, you felt things — wonderful and horrible new things. As you leave those years, you grow in some ways. In other ways, you die.

Barry Holland, a once-spirited Chief who couldn’t attend the reunion from California, put it this way in a message through another classmate: “Please tell them I’m not the way I was in high school.”

Rex Springston is a reporter for The News Leader’s state desk.