Looking ahead to their sixtieth reunion, members of a high-school class reminisce about school days and share the stories of their years since graduation. A series of notes and photos offers glimpses of the reunion event itself.

I attended my 55th high school reunion in July of 2012 and was inspired to write "Home Town Memories of Grinnell, Iowa." This work is not intended to be an all inclusive, comprehensive, scholarly history with a preoccupation for exact dates, etc. It is simply a personal history, my recollections of the old home town during a limited period in the town's history the 40's, 50's and 60's. I have written in my own way using a flow of words that came to me as I wrote. In a town of 8,000 9,000, as Grinnell was in those days - you eventually get to know and have some contact along the way with most people. My intent was to communicate in simple, straight forward terms and was not concerned about presenting it as "a triumph in English language grammar."

We are a gathering of extraordinary individuals who met under extraordinary circumstances. Coming of age in a small high school in Morocco decades ago, we have something unique in common, and decades later it has somehow never left us. We are the Sultans of Thomas Mack Wilhoite/Kenitra American High School. Be it the first graduating class of three Seniors in 1956 to the last Class of 1976, our experiences as students were sharply tuned to our environment. We were not strangers in a strange land; we were welcomed by the Moroccan people as if we were visiting relatives. The sights, sounds, tastes and smells of Morocco were absorbed by hundreds of students no matter what span of years we were there. We can all relate, and laugh at, similar experiences of our teenage years growing up in and around Kenitra/Port Lyautey, Mehdia Beach, Rabat, and other nearby military bases. Within this book are the memories of those days as told by the former students and teachers of our school.