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It doesn't happen every year, but Prospect's high school reunion is ... Worth waiting for Photo by Drew Fleming 1944 graduate Cleo Merritt and 1945 grad Lee Cushman flip through the "Tum Tum Alola," the Prospect yearbook, at the reunion Sunday. By BILL KETTLER PROSPECT -- Once every five years this little mountain town fills with old friends. They return to renew old acquaintances and visit old haunts, to retell old stories and revisit their youth. They come from Medford, Central Point and Jacksonville -- and New Jersey, Arizona and Texas. It's impractical to organize an annual high school reunion in Prospect, where the graduating classes could often be counted on one set of fingers and toes. So Prospect organizes one giant reunion every five years and opens it to anyone who ever attended the school or worked there. On Sunday more than 200 Prospect alums and former teachers gathered in Lions Park. Loaded down with picnic lunches, cold drinks and cameras, they spread blankets under shade trees, sharing food and tall tales, and looking at old pictures of the kids they used to be. "Let me see your glasses again," said Lee Cushman, class of '45, to Cleo Merritt, class of '44, as he struggled to make out the fine print in the "Tum Tum Alola," the Prospect High School yearbook. Many who returned to Prospect on Sunday said the best thing about living in a small town was learning how to get along with different kinds of people. "There wasn't a separation between ages," said Bobbie Fry, of Trail, who helped organize the 1999 reunion. "You knew everyone and everyone joined in, whether you were a little kid or a big kid. "Prospect was the place where all the parents raised all the children," said Fry, a member of the class of 1949. "You were always welcome in everybody's home. "Children who grow up in larger communities miss that closeness." "We were more like a family than a school," said Jerry Brewer, who traveled from Richardson, Texas, to attend the reunion. "Everybody knew everybody. There were no secrets." A member of the class of '47, Brewer came to Prospect in his junior year of high school, transplanted from a school with 5,000 students to one with just 60. "Here you had to deal with everybody, not just a few people you shared interests with." Jack Hollenbeak recalled that the Prospect school had just three students when he started the first grade, back in 1915. "My brother and I and Heston Grieve" made the whole school that year, said Hollenbeak, 89. The two brothers walked two miles to school from their home on Red Blanket Road. "When we couldn't get there," he said, "(Heston) had it all to himself." Hollenbeak graduated from the high school in 1927, in the high school's second graduating class, with two other boys and three girls. He said growing up in Prospect taught him that "life was something you couldn't depend on all the time. I lost three brothers growing up -- all by accident." Rose Draper said Prospect kids had to learn to make their own entertainment. "We had to stick together," said Draper, of the class of 1950. "Everybody was really close. We didn't go to town. It was 50 miles on a curvy road. Roads were bad enough in those days that students who lived more than five miles from the bus route were boarded in town during the school year. Some Prospect graduates liked the town enough to make their lives there. Steve Little and Janna Walker married soon after their 1969 graduation and will celebrate 30 years of marriage in October. Little said staying in Prospect has helped him build relationships that people in big cities rarely have. Little said it's hard to predict who will show up every five years. "Some people drive thousands of miles to get here," he said. "Other people live just across the street and don't show up. Maybe they're still mad about something that happened in high school." Fran Bean, who worked at the school for years, circled the park Sunday gathering names and addresses for the 2004 reunion. Bean said a new computer database will help keep track of people who move. "I'm really determined to get more people out next time." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA