GRANITE FALLS — Ulrich “Babe” Scherrer looked down at several felt letters on a table in the Granite Falls High School commons.
The smallest “G” was the athletics letter he received for playing baseball his freshman year, said Scherrer, 93. Another was for playing basketball.
“I remember playing basketball in Lake Stevens and a girl there said, ‘Look at the figure on him,’ ” he said. “I didn’t score a basket the whole time.”
Scherrer was part of the Granite Falls High School graduating class of 1936. There were 16 students in his class, he said, and the school was a brick building on Granite Avenue. He was the oldest alumnus of the Granite Falls School District at a school assembly Thursday afternoon at Granite Falls High School.
“I won that battle,” he said. “I was the last one standing.”
The assembly honored this year’s graduating class of 187 seniors and gave special recognition to the first graduating class in the district. The class of 1911 consisted of three students: James Ashe, Lizzie Keifer and Fred Noble.
Pat Huntley of Bellingham attended the assembly with her sisters, Mary Lou Hinds of Bellingham and Helen Ashe of Seattle. The women are the daughters of James Ashe, who opened a car dealership in 1918 with his younger brother, Frank. Her father moved to Bellingham to open another auto shop in 1928, Huntley said. The family regularly visited relatives in Snohomish County. Huntley remembers playing on the ranch in Granite Falls where her father grew up.
“Practically every weekend we would come to visit cousins and other relatives here and in Everett,” said Huntley, 80. “I can remember running from the cows and jumping in the feed bin.”
The district asked alumni to bring items from their school years to celebrate 100 years of graduations. Huntley’s cousin, Margaret Bond, lives in the city and told her about the celebration. Huntley brought her father’s diploma.
“I was glad I had it,” she said. “My mother kept things safe.”
Other alumni and their families brought photographs, school sweaters and books from decades past. The Granite Falls Historical Society also brought school artifacts to share, including a wooden desk from the late 1920s.
Some of today’s students who looked at the artifacts seemed interested in how people in some of the earliest classes dressed, said Penny Cruger of the Granite Falls Historical Society.
“The kids come up and say, ‘Oh, look at how they’re dressed,’ ” she said. “They’re just flabbergasted . . . I can hardly wait until they can look back on their graduating class.”
Senior Maia Hanson, 18, found her first-grade photograph in a Mountain Way Elementary School yearbook. Her own copy is “somewhere in a black abyss” at home, she said.
“Maybe it will come out eventually,” she said. “Maybe in 50 years when I have kids and I want to show them what it was like.”
Juniors Emma Wysocki and Viviana Aquino looked over each table of artifacts.
Wysocki, 17, snapped photos of the things that interested her, including a high school baseball uniform from the 1940s.
“I’m surprised at all the alumni that came back and all this cool stuff people collected,” she said.
Amy Daybert: 425-339-3491; adaybert@heraldnet.com.
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