By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

OELWEIN, Iowa, August 22, 2026 — Oh, how I love class reunions!

Saturday night, August 15, when the Oelwein Community High School Class of 1966 gathered for their 60-year reunion in this northeast Iowa town, emcee Richard Roepke, now of Ames, asked each of the class members in the crowd to stand and briefly talk about their lives, careers and families.

But when that came around to Margaret Doughty Damge, who now lives outside neighboring Stanley and alternates between being the class spiritual leader and its jester, stood to speak, she opened with a question: “Why wasn’t I on the Homecoming Court?”

Next up was her twin sister Maurine Doughty Daughan, who traveled from Tallahassee, Florida, for the reunion: “I survived a week with Margaret!”

Around the room they went, mixing fun and kidding with tributes to the teachers and parents who saw them through high school, way back a dozen U.S. presidents ago.

Mary Riche, outside her high school alma mater Oelwein Community High School, with the statue of the Husky mascot.

There were fascinating old photos and memorabilia on display. Like an introductory essay that was written in the OCHS 1966 “Ghost” yearbook by its student editor back then.

“Time brings with it many changes,” she wrote. “Memory is when you look back and the answers float into who? What? When? Where?”

And that’s what was happening at this latest reunion. It was not only for the Class of ’66 of Oelwein High but also for that year’s grads of old Sacred Heart High School in the same community.

The ’66 yearbook especially caught my attention because I was attending the reunion as the guest of its editor from long ago, Mary Riche, my wife.

There was a good turnout Saturday night, I thought, of about 77 (classmates & spouses), especially after all these years. The OCHS graduating class had been 168, with 63 of them now deceased.

I had a great time, asking lots of questions and hearing a lot of terrific old stories.

The women who attended the banquet of this weekend’s 60-year reunion of Oelwein Community High School and old Sacred Heart High School in the northeast Iowa town. The formal reunion was held in the very nice “Transco Events on Frederick” venue, now opened in a re-done historic business building in downtown Oelwein.

The men of the Class of 1966 who attended the 60-year reunion banquet in Oelwein.

What I’ve concluded, after listening to the conversations of the classmates and then bugging Mary with dozens of follow-up questions, the mid-1960s was a fascinating time to be in high school. Huge changes were coming, all over America, including in and around Oelwein.

As the Class of ’66 was leaving high school, at least half of them — the young men — had to decide what they were going to do about mandatory military service being required for the building up in the Vietnam War. There must’ve been a half-dozen of the classmates who, in briefly telling their life stories last Saturday night, talked of careers in the military of 20 years or longer.

Higher education was rapidly developing in Iowa, as the state universities were gearing up to accommodate the “Baby Boomers” — the largest generational wave ever to occur in Iowa. The community college system was opening. And the state’s 30 or so private colleges were having heydays, too.

Social unrest was stirring, with the Civil Rights movement growing, the women’s rights movement starting up, and the peace movement emerging to challenge the increasingly unpopular war.

It had to be a particularly interesting time in Oelwein, which was flush with industrial jobs, largely because of the railroad. The town had become the operational hub of the Chicago & Great Western. Passenger service was fading, but freight service was booming, with trains running regularly in four directions — Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Omaha and Kansas City. Plus the railroad, which became the Chicago & North Western in 1968, also operated huge locomotive and railroad car re-building, maintenance and repair centers here.

All the jobs continued a decades-old pattern of attracting a diverse workforce, many of them immigrants, especially Italians, Lebanese and Latinos. They brought with them their favorite foods, music and traditions.

A fun sub-group at the Oelwein reunion were these six friends who started their school years in the small neighboring town of Stanley. They were among the 22 members of what would have been the SHS Class of ‘66 who transferred after junior high when their school reconsolidated into the Oelwein school district. Left to right are Mary Riche, Ray Smith, Bryan Wunder, Diana (Michels) Smith, Les Silka and Richard Roepke.

Older Iowans might recall that a relatively large number of Amish families had settled in the area around Hazleton, Fairbank, Independence and Oelwein early in the 20th century and grew to a population of several hundred by mid-century. They were generally farmers, and they built their own rural schools and churches.

In November, 1965, when the Class of ’66 members were seniors, state and local education officials attempted to require the Amish schools to use licensed teachers and comply with other state requirements. The Amish resisted, setting off an amazing scene when Iowa State Patrol troopers were ordered into the Amish community to direct students to the public schools in the area.

The Amish kids ran into cornfields surrounding their own schools, and a photo of that chase by the Des Moines Register’s Tom DeFeo was published worldwide and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

A compromise in that dispute resulted in a dozen small Amish schools still in session today in Buchanan and Fayette Counties, most operating with rules established by their own patrons. Local people at the Class of ’66 reunion told me they think many of the schools now have teachers with at least some higher education credentials.

Oelwein’s population was about 7,000 in the mid ’60s, just down from the all-time high of 7,800 in 1950. But from the ’60s into the new century, the railroad drastically scaled back its operations here, and one or more industries left. The town’s population is now about 5,700.

But the community looks good to me. One positive sign I spotted is that the Oelwein Daily Register is still printing five days a week. And with its online coverage, too, the Register claims 13,660 readers. Not many Iowa newspapers are as healthy.

What I really see here, still today, is something that Mary Riche and her classmates experienced back in the 1960s and took every advantage of — opportunities.

Rich Roepke, the reunion emcee, built a successful insurance and real estate business in Aurora and served 28 years as the town’s mayor. Maybe Margaret Doughty Damge didn’t make the Homecoming Court, but she helped build a very successful farm that in 2026 is observing its 150th anniversary and she practically runs the local Democratic Party. Her twin Maurine Doughty Daughan has now retired after a career of teaching at every level of education in Florida, including a state university.

“I think our class produced a whole lot of people who have turned out to be ‘solid stock’,” Mary told me. “Growing up, we were involved in high school activities and community activities, too. A lot of us have continued that all our lives, and we’ve had a lot of people become real leaders of their communities, while also being very successful in good careers, too.”

I think her own story may be one of the best examples of that.

An early starter on saxophone and with the Oelwein Community High School band, Mary Riche is shown marching with the band in a long-ago parade in Waterloo.

Mary started playing piano and singing solos in the Stanley Union Church when she was 4. By the time she was 12, she’d taken advanced music lessons and was invited to play saxophone and march — in uniform — with the Oelwein High band. She scored 32 points in a seventh grade basketball game. A farm kid, she joined a boys 4H club so she could show cattle and in her early high school years was “Buchanan County Beef Queen.”

Also in her high school years, she had part-time jobs as a checker at the Sun Mart supermarket, where she also won the “sacker of the year” competition; then she fitted and sold shoes at Brown Shoe Fit Co., then worked with legendary KOEL radio newsman Dick Petrik in the station’s newsroom and doing on-air interviews with 4Hers at county fairs around the area.

Meanwhile, she’d make time for the Sunday afternoon softball games that she, her parents Verda & Frank Riche and her younger sister Bette would play on the farmhouse’s front lawn.

She went on to earn a journalism degree at the University of Iowa; worked in big business, government and politics at the national and state levels; ran her own public relations company in Des Moines for more than a decade; went back to the U of I for a master’s degree in social work then had her own sole proprietor private counseling practice for more than 25 years.

And she’s been a recognized Iowa leader in progressive politics and advocacy for women’s rights for more than 50 years, and currently is on the speaking circuit highlighting the history of women’s suffrage.

Mary Riche, wearing her nametag which reunion organizers niftily made to help classmates remember who they are now from their graduation photos in 1966. She explains the hairstyle she was wearing back then was “my mile-high hairdo.”

Yes, I’m bragging on her. But my point is that as Mary and many others among her OCHS classmates have demonstrated with their own lives and careers: You can grow up in places like little Stanley and Aurora, and around the county seat town of Oelwein, and have opportunities that kids growing up in larger places only see in their dreams.

“You can grow up in rural Iowa, have a mom who was a schoolteacher, a dad who didn’t see any limits to you as a girl, and they even let me turn into a classic tomboy,” Mary said. “All that gave me a natural curiosity and interest in living a zestful life. That started early for me, and I had the kind of parents who made it happen for me.”

Mary and I met and became friends 52 years ago when she was the press secretary for Jim Schaben, the Democratic nominee for governor in Iowa, and I was a young reporter for the Des Moines Register. We remained friends through lots of changes in our lives. Five years ago, we started looking at each other with totally unexpected new feelings. Four years ago, when I talked her into marrying me, I wrote that she’d made me “the luckiest SOB in Iowa.”

So I’ve known her very well for most all of our adult lives.

And as I told her after hanging out with her and her classmates at their 60-year reunion last weekend, I can see how almost all that she has done and has become in her life traces back to where and how it all began.

Right here in small town Iowa.

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