It’s been 75 years for class of 1942, but who’s counting?

SNOHOMISH — Bob Bisnett, 93, remembers bringing home a lot of tardy slips as a young man.

He delivered milk in the mornings before school.

At the time, he was too young to have a driver’s license. Bisnett slouched down on a wooden bench, thinking about the police officers who would carefully watch him drive his route in Snohomish.

“They knew who I was,” Bisnett said.

He sat beneath a picnic shelter at Hill Park near Blackmans Lake last week. He and eight others celebrated 75 years since they graduated from Snohomish High School. The class of 1942 has been getting together every year for more than a decade. They gathered around a table with sack lunches and shared stories about growing up in a small agricultural town.

Bisnett spent summer days cooling off in Blackmans Lake. The lengthy swim from one dock to another seemed a test of bravery.

He comes from a longtime Snohomish family. They bought a dairy farm that housed 18 cows near Machias from a former Snohomish High School teacher. He learned the value of hard work. When he was 11, he delivered newspapers. Later on, he worked in the local grocery store.

But when it came to school, Bisnett said he probably should have taken it more seriously. A former classmate at the reunion asked about a speech course they had taken together.

“I think I took it three times,” said Bisnett, who ended up becoming a teacher himself. He taught biology and traffic safety for about 30 years.

George Gilbertson, 92, graduated a year after Bisnett. He attended the last few reunions with his friend, June Gregory, 93, who has coordinated the annual get-together. The two weren’t close in high school, but reconnected after running into each other at church.

“June became widowed and I became a widower, and we’ve been keeping each other company ever since,” Gilbertson said.

He has spent almost his entire life in Snohomish.

His family opened a drug store in 1936, which was well-known among teenagers for its soda fountain.

Gilbertson was hardly home as a boy. He and his friends rode bikes around town, only heading home for food and sleep.

“We were out prowling,” Gilbertson said.

They looked for fruit trees and may have swiped the occasional apple. When it was too cold to be outside, they whittled wooden airplanes in Gilbertson’s garage.

The town has changed since then.

The high school resembles something closer to a community college, Gilbertson said. The hall where a fraternal order met across the street from his childhood home is no longer there. But the trees, houses and people are familiar.

The graduates packed up their sack lunches after finishing pieces of celebratory cake. The superintendent of schools invited them to the high school for next year’s reunion.

The 1942 graduates will get to walk the halls again.

Caitlin Tompkins: 425-339-3192; ctompkins@heraldnet.com.