THE LASSIES (see below) of Eastern High School's Class of 1952 will assemble at a downtown hotel Saturday for their 50th reunion.

Just over 100 members of a graduating class of 350 are expected. Reunion organizers figure 50 classmates have died. An optimist would point out that six of seven young women who commenced at the old Poly auditorium have survived a half-century. Not bad. Think of the cumulative millions of heartbeats.

"We're just starting to realize that every day is a gift," said Peg Massey, who invited me to her Baltimore home for the final meeting of the reunion committee. The five women who attended, all 66 or 67, pronounced themselves in pretty good shape. A little osteoporosis here and there, but things could be worse.

They are worse for Eastern, once a premier girls high school in Baltimore. It was closed unceremoniously in 1986, its remaining students and name attached to nearby Lake Clifton High. But there isn't much evidence of the old Eastern in the sprawling Lake Clifton/Eastern High School on St. Lo Drive.

For one thing, all of those girls in the 1952 commencement photo were as white as the gowns they wore. African-Americans couldn't enroll in Eastern until the mid-1950s, after the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.

For another, students in the Eastern of 1952 had to wear skirts - even on class trips on the Bay Belle - and talking to boys during the school day was strictly forbidden. "If you talked to a boy, it meant detention," recalled Patricia Christie of the reunion committee.

Lake Clifton/Eastern students can aspire to college and to careers in professions once monopolized by men. Most of the 1952 Eastern graduates had no such hopes, and many of their parents discouraged them from going on to higher education. The school had an academic program, but its specialty was business and secretarial.

Massey went into nursing and still does in-service training in the field a couple of days a week. Ann Bish worked as a secretary at Black & Decker for 25 years, Betty Prenger as a school secretary for 24 years (four at Eastern).

Iris Black's father told her college was for boys, but she earned a degree at the National Security Agency, where she was employed 40 years as an intelligence analyst.

Christie took the other route open to the Class of 1952: She got married and today has five children, 11 grandchildren and two great-grandsons.

The class once put out a newsletter, but that's been dropped. "We got to the point," said Massey, "where there wasn't much more to say. We've had our kids and even our grandkids, and most of us are retired."

The reunion committee has worked a year on the weekend's events. There will be hospitality time, a Saturday luncheon and a tour of the city Sunday morning. Classmates are expected from as far away as Alaska.

They'll also tour Eastern High School, the one on 33rd Street now mostly occupied by Johns Hopkins University administrators. The impostor in Clifton Park isn't on the agenda.

They'll reminisce about the flying saucer scares, the panty raids, the Korean War and Dwight Eisenhower's victory that fall. And, of course, sing the Eastern school song:

In the ancient realms of Calvert

Lassies gay with joyful voices

Sing the praise of Eastern High.

Baltimore County schools honor their young writers

Len Gutkin of Pikesville High School took first prize for short stories and commentary in the 2002 Baltimore County public schools writing contest. Kate Mullan of the Carver Center for Arts and Technology in Towson won in the poetry category with a poem titled "George's Second Coming."

Short stories were judged by Baltimore author and Pultizer Prize winner Anne Tyler.

Rawlings issues response to protest by teachers

Baltimore teachers don't like the way the school system is evaluating their classroom performance - don't like it so vehemently that the "newly reborn" Baltimore Teachers Union picketed the Ashburton home of Del. Howard "Pete" Rawlings the other day and issued a flier calling for a "massive demonstration" against state schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick at a state Board of Education meeting Tuesday.

"I find this behavior reprehensible," Rawlings said in a letter to James Hunt, chairman of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. "It undercuts those of us who believe every child deserves a quality teacher."

Well said.