Tomorrow Plans
That's the last time I saw differently below:
Tomorrow morning, I will return to my high school, Seabreeze, in Daytona Beach for celebrating 100th anniversary of Seabreeze with other graduates and students and old teachers. There will be a party. I will bring my digital camera with me. I will show these future photos to u next week. They will going to be a slideshow. Anyways, my high school is getting bigger since I left there in 1989. Wow! It looks changing now. Seabreeze High School have had 2 different other sites since 1908. First, the building of high school looked a medium, like 3 floors house. Several years later, it moved to a 2nd site on the corner of Grandview Avenue and Earl Street. Earl Street is where my deceased paternal grandmother lived with my Dad and his brothers when those boys were young. Dad and his brothers went there but 2 of them graduated from a different high school. Seabreeze High School moved again to another site in 1962. It's across the road from beach. See a yesterday's online article about 100th anniversary of Seabreeze High School below:
Seabreeze plans 'huge homecoming' to celebrate 100 years
Inundate would be a better description.
"I started three years ago on this," she said, of planning Seabreeze High School's 100th anniversary. "It's going to be a huge homecoming."
The stacked and tattered early yearbooks, dating back to 1912, are small in size and content, filled with fresh-faced, well-dressed students starting out in life. They are now gone. Only their photographs remain.
Each yearbook captures a piece of history, a reflection of the styles and culture of a bygone era, from Rudy Vallee and Sinatra to Elvis and the Beatles to Gwen Stefani and T-Pain.
But on Saturday, starting at 10 a.m., all those students from all those years will be honored during a once-in-a-lifetime celebration of a school. At least 1,000 graduates and their relatives are expected.
"We're getting 20 to 30 e-mails, and five calls a day," said Labno, an administrator and fixture at the school for 37 years. "Word's gotten out."
Bit by bit, Labno found former students from as far away as Seattle, and digging through decades of yearbooks, old photos and stories, the event came together with the help of others.
"But I haven't found the oldest surviving graduate," she said, somewhat disappointedly.
Labno did find an original 1908 diploma, though, like the three handed out to the original graduates of Seabreeze High School.
"There were about 18 to 20 students then, depending on reports," she said. "There aren't a whole lot of records."
This year, there are 1,865 at the latest of the school's three locations, built in 1962.
The 100th anniversary celebration will include a specially produced school play honoring Seabreeze's past, alumni marching bands and historic mementos, athletic uniforms and photos on display.
A time capsule will be buried at 2:30 p.m. and commemorative yearbooks will be on sale for $70.
Meagan Strasser, the 17-year-old senior editor, helped decide what would go into the historic yearbook, something she considers an honor.
"I'm so glad to have been part of it. It's been incredible for me to have gone through 100 years," said Strasser, whose father, two sisters and brother also graduated from Seabreeze. "I don't think I would have known as much about the school otherwise."
Gayleen Snead, class of 1951, is looking forward to the school's big anniversary party, and recounting a very different time at the Daytona Beach school with former classmates.
"It was so small and nice, and we'd have a lot of sock dances, and after-the-game parties," she recalled. "Everyone lived around the school. It was on Grandview then, behind where the Ocean Center is now. Everyone walked to school."
She paused and laughed: "My brother-in-law, Walter Snead, almost got expelled for riding a horse to school."
All five of her children, her late husband, Edwin, and his three siblings attended Seabreeze. So did Bill France Jr.
"He was a character," she recalled of the late NASCAR patriarch. "All I can think about is the country music he was playing all the time. Bill was a loner. He didn't talk a lot, unless he'd make a comment."
She said another graduate, Deanna Lund, found success in Hollywood, best known for her role in the popular late '60s TV series, "Land of the Giants."
"I don't think she's coming," Snead said.
Organizers said other notable graduates such as Gregg Allman of the Allman Brothers Band, 1950s and '60s singer Jane Morgan, former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Kerry Murphy Healey and NFL place-kicker Sebastian Janikowski aren't expected to attend either.
But ultimately, it's the memories, not the memorable, that will take center stage.
"Looking back, I feel blessed we had so many years of camaraderie and fun at the school," Snead said. "We all were born and grew up here. This is a landmark that's important, to have people stop and think, 100 years have passed."
Family boasts 3 generations of Seabreeze graduates
Lorraine Lewis, Lorraine Miklos and Jaclyn Miklos have much more in common than three generations of family lineage.
Each woman attended Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach.
"We had a lot of fun. I remember Friday night dances at the pier," Lewis recalled, as she looked through a 1936 yearbook from the year she and 43 others received their diplomas. "I played piano on stage at graduation."
These days, Lewis, her daughter and granddaughter are looking forward to the 100th anniversary celebration of the school on Saturday at the beachside grounds where the school has stood since 1962. Nearly 1,000 graduates and their families from across the country are expected to attend.
Lorraine Micklos, a math teacher at Seabreeze and a 1973 alum, never questioned that she'd follow in her father and mother's footsteps, just like her daughter did after her.
"What we always talk about is how nice it is to have the history in the same place," she said, her mother and daughter sitting at her side. "We knew we were Sandcrabs before we hit school. I started going to the football games at age 5. So it was not a choice."
The family history wasn't lost on Jaclyn, 20, a 2006 graduate now attending Flagler College who finished at the same high school 70 years after her grandmother.
"Since I was in kindergarten, they said I was going to Seabreeze," she said, smiling. "It's amazing that my grandmother and mother went to the same high school."
Her brother attended Spruce Creek High School in Port Orange, which was OK with her mom.
"It wasn't Mainland," Lorraine Miklos said, laughing.
Lewis, 88, added: "It was just accepted that it was the way it would be for all four of my children who graduated from Seabreeze."
The three Seabreeze graduates are looking forward to the 100th anniversary celebration, where old stories and friendships will be rekindled with classmates from three very different eras.
"I think there's a sense of belonging when you come back to a place," Lorraine Miklos said. "What I remember about high school is all the administrators and teachers who knew my parents. I never left home, when I left home. I was just going to a different set of parents."
And in not too many more years, there should be a fourth generation of Seabreeze girls carrying on the family tradition.
"I have a granddaughter who lives in this zone," Lorraine Miklos said, smiling. "And she has no choice."
Seabreeze High: 100 Years and Counting
· Seabreeze officially becomes a high school in 1908, with the graduation of its first senior class; formerly called the Memento School in the peninsula town of Seabreeze, starting in 1886 on the corner of Halifax Avenue and Ora Street.
· New concrete-and-steel building costing $58,000 opens in 1917 on the corner of Grandview Avenue and Earl Street.
· New building opens in 1962 at 270 N. Oleander Ave. on 23 acres. Construction cost: $1.25 million. The old school becomes Seabreeze Junior High School.
· Three-year school renovation and modernization completed in 2002 for almost $33 million.
Here is an aerophoto of huge Seabreeze High School below:
Wow! Sounds like it will be a great celebration! Have fun :-)
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