Photos by Kelli S. Hewett.
Sarah Creveling, right, has helped reunite classmates from the former Crestline Heights School Class of 1953-54, when the group graduated eighth grade. The school was later replaced by what is now Crestline Elementary. Friends have been meeting to share memories and find other students for a reunion they are planning for this fall. Other alumni include, from left, Lucy Allison, Billy Hood and Ellen Erdreich.
They met as kids in the post-World War II glow of the 1940s, walking to the two-story wooden building with the pot-bellied stove that was Crestline Heights Elementary School, grades one through eight.
More than 70 years later, members of that graduating class of 1953-54 are meeting again. Now 86 years old, they gather over lunch at Magnolia Point in Southside. They reminisce to understand why this place never quite let go of them.
They are working to organize a bigger reunion in the fall to reconnect with even more schoolmates.
Billy Hood and Sarah Creveling recreate a favorite moment from their school days.
“Memories at the age of 85 or 86 are precious,” said Sarah Creveling, who went on to become Crestline’s first kindergarten teacher.
Creveling organized the first lunch earlier this year to hear about the life of a fellow classmate, Billy Hood, who had returned to Birmingham after 52 years.
Hood spent much of his life focused on the Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, studying and living in Rome and New York.
“Crestline was not only the name of the school, it was the name of the area of Mountain Brook we lived in,” Hood said. “It felt — even when I was too young to realize it — cozy and safe, the way one feels when everybody knows everybody else.”
But Crestline and Mountain Brook were never just one experience, the schoolmates said.
Their paths and political views were different, their families delineated by religion or economic stratification. And childhood experiences weren’t always as easy as their zip code may have implied.
“It’s easy now to forget about judging our classmates; we are simply curious about them and interested in their lives and so pleased to be with them again,” said Ellen Erdreich, the first curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art, a UAB art history instructor and wife of former U.S. Rep. Ben Erdreich. “It’s a gift to reunite.”
The former classmates share photos and other memorabilia from their time at Crestline Heights School.
There were 70 graduates in 1954. The building stood through renovations and expansions until 1986, when it was demolished to make way for the new Crestline Elementary.
But Crestline, while not as close-knit as it once was, still fosters the kinds of relationships that not a lot of other communities share today.
“Our parents thought about it,” Creveling said. “They wanted us to have those relationships; they wanted us to have those friendships.”
Some of the schoolmates kept in touch over the decades. Others are reconnecting.
“I just think it’s really interesting that we’re all still alive,” Hood said. “And it’s interesting to see how life plays out in people’s lives who have this same core, who started together.”
Will today’s Mountain Brook children gather like this 50, 60 or 70 years from now?
“I think there’ll be some,” said Lucy Allison, who was voted Most Athletic and still golfs. “But it will be the hardcore Mountain Brookers.”
