The Taneytown High School Alumni Association held its annual banquet at the Pleasant Valley Fire Hall on June 27. More than 200 alumni, spouses, guests and friends of the former school, which closed in 1968, were in attendance. A social period preceded the banquet. James Fair, Class of 1946, and David Reifsnider, Class of 1953, acted as masters of ceremonies and conducted the roll-call of classes.
Members of reunion classes for every five-year increment from 1940 through 1965 were introduced and given the opportunity to tell about their class. There was no graduating class of 1950, as Carroll County went from an 11-year to a 12-year educational system that year. The large, framed composite pictures for those years, which used to hang in the hallway at the Taneytown School, were on display. The class of 1965, celebrating their 50-year reunion, had the largest attendance present with 68 members and guests, including Francis Smith and Dean Griffin, faculty members at that time.
This was the 83rd Taneytown High School Alumni Banquet and the 18th year it has been held at Pleasant Valley. The Alumni Association was started in 1926 by some of the members of the 1925 class, with Elwood Baumgardner its first president. The association stopped all activities in 1941 due to war conditions, to be revived again in November 1947. The association then began to hold a catered banquet and dance in the school each June from 1948 until the school's closing in 1968. Following the school's closing the event was moved to Frock's Sunnybrook Farm in Westminster, where it continued until Frock's closed in 1997. The banquet was then moved to the Pleasant Valley and the dance discontinued.
Banquets are held each year on the fourth Saturday in June, and all alumni and friends are welcome.