Groton — In Eddie Powers’ high school days, students paid 11 cents to go to the movies on Sunday afternoons. Powers played baseball in a horse pasture in Mystic, after he and his friends shoveled away the manure.

“It was a much smaller community at that time, so you knew more people,” said Powers, 83, of Mystic, a member of the Robert E. Fitch High School Class of 1951.

A dozen members of the class, all in their 80s, celebrated their 65th reunion along with their spouses at a luncheon on Friday at Filomena’s in Waterford.

“I took the bus to school from Groton Center and if you became ill, you would go to the office and say, ‘I need to go home,’ and they’d say, ‘OK.’ They didn’t have to call your parents. They didn’t have to check up. They knew you,” said Ann Southard Danenberg, 83, of Milford.

“I don’t remember any drugs of any kind. You know, there was some drinking, especially senior year, but I don’t remember anybody getting out of control," she said. "Two or three of our boys left to go to Korea.”

The high school was housed in what is now the former Fitch Middle School next to Town Hall on Fort Hill Road. Students played football on the fields along the building's left side and baseball in the back.

Ted Hespeler, 82, of Groton, former quarterback for the football team, recalled beating Bulkeley School in New London.

“The whole school went to Bulkeley’s and then we paraded down State Street to the monument in front of the railroad station,” Hespeler said.

He just made it through high school, he said.

Few students had cars because they were too expensive and few went to college, he said.

“You weren’t smart enough or your parents didn’t have enough money,” Hespeler said.

He went to work for Pfizer and retired in 1988.

The Scarlet Tanager, the school newspaper at the time, received an All-American rating from the National Scholastic Press Association for the fourth consecutive year in 1951.

“We had to be very, very careful about what we wrote, what we said and it had to be very proper,” said Danenberg, who wrote for the newspaper.

On June 4, 1951, the Tanager ran a story about the 105 graduates and in two of its inside pages used the headline, “May The Good Lord Bless And Keep You Near Or Far Away."

Powers was overseas at the time. He'd joined the National Guard and his outfit was sent to southern Japan to defend an air force base with planes bound for Korea. He finished school when he returned home.

He said he didn’t have the opportunities students today have.

“Back then I had a mother and father, who were great," Powers said. "But when I came home, I heard conversations like, ‘How are we going to pay the bills?’ Not, ‘Where are you going to go to college, Eddie?’”

Powers ultimately went to college and worked for Electric Boat for 42 years.

He said there are some things the present generation can learn from earlier ones.

"I think one of the key things would be treating one another more respectfully," he said. "A little more courtesy, I think, would be a big improvement for the whole country and the world."

d.straszheim@theday.com