Class celebrates the heritage of Heritage

By Darrell Laurant

Published: October 24, 2008

Imagine this.

You grew up in Lynchburg, where E.C. Glass was the only public high school (especially since it had swallowed Dunbar after integration). You made it to your sophomore year, and you were plugged into the appropriate clubs, sports teams, cliques, etc. Maybe you walked the halls hand-in-hand with your girlfriend or boyfriend.

And then came the news. Not only were you being ripped away from many of your lifetime friends to attend a new school named (ironically) Heritage, but your first year as a Heritage student would take place at Sandusky Middle School.

Oh, the humiliation!

“There was a lot of grumbling at first,” recalled Dickie Burge, Heritage Class of 1978, who is organizing a 30th class reunion, set for Nov. 1.

“In the long run, though, I think it created a very special bond among those in our class.”

So, if you haven’t heard from the reunion committee, they want to hear from you. Maybe you’ve moved away, or you’re in the Witness Protection Program — it doesn’t matter. Only death will be accepted as an excuse.

“This has really gotten legs over the past few weeks,” said Kelly Crawford, another class member. “I think it will be very well-attended.”

Speaking of legs, the story was, you could always tell a Heritage student after the school opened by his or her calf muscles. The new building was on five levels.

“The coaches loved that,” said Burge. “They made us run up and down all those stairs as part of their training.”

Crawford, a football player like Burge, said his first reactions on seeing the new school was, “Why did they have to take a beautiful building and stick it down in a hole in the ground?”

So who were these Pioneers? Some came from Glass, their places of residence suddenly part of the new order. Others were refugees from Brookville High School, where former Campbell Countians were still fuming over being annexed.

“A lot of my friends’ parents paid the tuition to keep them at Brookville,” said Leslie Graham, “but my family was living on a shoestring. My dad was a school teacher.”

At, ironically, Sandusky. But all the middle school students were farmed out to Dunbar or Linkhorne to make room for the Pioneers-to-be, so Graham didn’t even have the comfort of his paternal presence that first year at school.

“We had what are now called ‘learning cottages,’” said Danny Diehl, who will be the emcee for the event on Saturday night. “That means trailers.”

Diehl was one of the very few new Heritage students who did not, in Leslie Graham’s words, “think the world was ending.”

“Our family had just moved here from Culpepper, where I’d spent my whole life. I begged them to leave me where I was,” said Diehl, who later worked for The News & Advance and WSET, and is now the chief of public relations for Mecklenburg County, N.C.

“As it turned out, though, it worked perfectly. I was new, but so was everybody else.”

And any tendencies toward creating Brookville or Glass cliques were washed away by the shared experience of displacement.

“We got to form our own identity, and that was a great thing,” Burge said. “And all we wanted to do was beat E.C. Glass — in anything.”

The building was actually open for the 1977-1978 year, but the students designated for Heritage spent 1976-1977 at Sandusky.

“The best thing about that was we got to be top dogs twice,” said Leslie Graham.

The ’78ers will gather for a tailgate party at the Heritage football game on Oct. 31 (yes, Halloween), and then have their reunion party the next night. If you still think you might want to go, call Dickie Burge at (434) 660-6337 or (434) 384-5846.