A look back at the Class of 1940

It has been 75 years since Betty (Everist) Vyvey graduated from high school. She attended Platte Valley High School in Saratoga and graduated in 1940.

Vyvey was born in a homestead cabin in southern Colorado. The closest school to their home in Colorado was more than 20 miles away. There were no school buses at that time, leaving only horses and her own two feet as options for getting to school.

Her family moved to Saratoga in 1936 when she was 13 years old because her uncle owned the grocery store here at the time and needed some help. Betty's father also saw it as an opportunity to get his children a high school education.

Vyvey graduated with a class of 14 students, only two of which are still living. It was difficult for her to keep in touch with her former classmates before they passed on. "It was harder in those days because we moved a few times. We didn't even have a telephone in our house," Vyvey said, "[although] they did on some of the ranches, my husband's folks homesteaded and they had an old crank phone."

Back in the 40s, school sports and activities were much different than they are today. Girls were only allowed to play basketball and it was only half-court. "We had a good cheering section and a pep club. My mother helped make uniforms, we usually had the purple trousers and the gold shirts with big puffy sleeves." Vyvey's sister Phyllis Everist was one of the club's leaders. The pep club was about the only club in the school at the time.

A few of Vyvey's classmates went on to do great things after graduation. The valedictorian of the class of 1940 at Platte Valley High School was Calvin King. Vyvey said that he went on to live in Thermopolis, Wyo. to work for the Game and Fish Department. He also wrote a few books before he passed. Ruth Ryan Kelley was the class salutatorian. Many might know her as the aunt of Greg Ryan. Kelley went on to be a reporter for the Denver Post after graduation.

Another classmate that was successful after graduation was Alvin "Buddy" Kernan, who is the one other person of the class that is still living. Vyvey told about Kernan's journey after high school. "He joined the Navy and wrote a book about that and a book about the Cosy Canyon Ranch on Spring Creek. He is very intelligent," Vyvey said.

In 1949, Kernan received the Rhodes Scholarship which yielded $1,500 a year for three years to Oxford College. He took up residence in England at Oxford to further his studies upon receiving the scholarship. In the biography of "Westering: Wyoming Homesteading In The 1930s," a book written in 2006 by Kernan, he writes more about where he received his education. "After five years in the Navy during the war he attended Williams College, Oxford University and Yale. His later life was spent as a teacher and scholar at Yale and at Princeton, where he was the dean of the graduate school." Kernan graduated from Williams College, received his masters degree from Oxford and his PhD from Yale.

Kernan had a book published by the U.S. Naval Institute in Maryland 1997. The book was titled "Crossing the Line, A Bluejacket's World War II Odyssey." At that time, Kernan was a senior advisor in the humanities to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at Princeton.

Over the past 75 years, Vyvey held the class reunions in Saratoga with the help of her sister Phyllis because the other classmates had all moved away. Not many of the them attended the reunions because traveling was costly. The last reunion held for the class of 1940 was around the year 1988. Vyvey said that a couple of the reunions included a class that graduated a couple years ahead of them. They also held an all-school reunion in which many people attended.