Santa Rosa's Vikings and Panthers celebrate 50 years

Dan Kelly was Montgomery High School's student body president back in 1959, and yet he bleeds a bit of Santa Rosa High Panther orange and black.

Sacrilege to have feelings for both sides of the Vikings and Panthers arch rivalry?

Not for the class of 1959 — a group divided not-so-neatly down the middle when Montgomery High School opened in the fall of 1958 with a student body pulled directly from the only high school in town: Santa Rosa.

“It was kind of tough to handle, quite frankly,” Kelly said of being separated from many friends and teammates he was with for years. “Fortunately when you are that age, you are resilient.”

Members of the class of 1959 — from both Montgomery and Santa Rosa — have celebrated their resiliency and gathered for joint reunions ever since that school year five decades ago when they were split apart.

“It's a great way to do it,” Kelly said. “We are putting back together what the school district tore asunder.”

The group, whose senior school year was determined solely by home address, will gather as one class for its landmark 50th reunion at the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa Saturday night.

The group has a shared history, so it made sense to share reunions through the years, grads said. In fact, many in the group struggle to remember who graduated from where, just that they graduated together.

“I keep the database, I had everybody listed,” said Nadine Wiggins Smedshammer, who graduated from Montgomery. “I had a column for Santa Rosa, a column for Montgomery, but now we don't even look at those columns, they have kind of disappeared. It seems to me that they have melted together.”

Darla Buonaccorsi Weeks, who graduated from Santa Rosa High, said she supports the joint reunion:

“When the school split, we had been with them since grade school and junior high. And we went to the one high school and then all of a sudden they built another school and all these kids you've gone through the years with and know, all of a sudden they are gone.”

That split was particularly rough on Weeks; her longtime boyfriend was transferred across town and suddenly became a Viking.

“We made it work. Weekends we were inseparable,” she said. “But we always went to my football games, that was a given. I was faithful to Santa Rosa.”

Two years after high school, Darla Buonaccorsi and Larry Weeks might have become the first marital pairing of a Panther and Viking in Santa Rosa history. They were married 15 years and had two sons.

For some, a new school offered a fresh start or a chance to try something new.

Moving to Montgomery gave Joan Bushman Felciano a shot at student government that she said she didn't feel comfortable striving for at Santa Rosa.

“Some people, like myself, might not have had the opportunity and such at Santa Rosa High School because sometimes it was locked up with certain kids,” she said. “Those of us who went to Montgomery, for whatever reason, were all of a sudden faced with the opportunity to run the school.”

Felciano became commissioner of rallies at Montgomery.

Aside from the name Montgomery, little was set at the Hahman Drive campus when seniors and the rest of the new student body arrived.

Students chose the nickname Vikings over argonauts, lions, mustangs, rams or wolves. Students chose the colors, red and gray.

For some teachers, the move across town to a new facility was refreshing.

As a young teacher at Santa Rosa, Bob Acquistapace taught in four different classrooms in the school day — none of which he could call his own. At Montgomery, he got his own room.

“For me, it was great,” Acquistapace said. “We felt like we had a chance to develop a spirit and to really mold a direction and tradition for a new school. We were very aware of it.”

But for many students, tradition meant Santa Rosa. A few students went to some length to remain at the Mendocino Avenue campus.

“I was supposed to go to Montgomery,” said Pat Townsend Thompson.

But Thompson had run for song leader and won, she was active on campus and did not want to leave. So she and a handful of other girls petitioned to take part in Santa Rosa's vaunted agriculture program — something that did not exist at the new campus across town.

“It was kind of wrenching,” Thompson said of seeing friends fall into what she described as “the little rivalry thing.”

“The first game we had, we didn't know where to play it. They didn't have a big field like we did so we played it at Santa Rosa Junior College,” she said. “So who is going to be the home team, because none of us really belongs there.”

Kelly, who was a member of the North Bay League champion baseball team as a Santa Rosa High School junior, still feels a bit cheated that the nucleus of what could have been a repeat championship team was ripped apart when half the squad was shipped to Montgomery, including him.

“We thought we would be insurmountable and as it turned out, the team got split right down the middle,” he said. “And both teams were kind of mediocre.”

In the intervening years, loyalties have switched again.

Acquistapace, who spent most of his schoolboy years at Santa Rosa and whose parents were Panthers, became a tried and true Viking after 28 years as a teacher, counselor and administrator at Montgomery.

Smedshammer, who called her senior year at Montgomery “amazing” because of her involvement in student government and establishing traditions there, said that although her diploma says she's a Montgomery grad, her heart bleeds orange and black.

In addition to going to Santa Rosa through her junior year, Smedshammer spent decades working in the front office on the Mendocino Avenue campus.

“I have feeling for Montgomery and what it all was,” she said. “But it is just one year. Everything else is Santa Rosa High.”