Rancho High’s earliest grads to unite despite dueling claims

“Original” class. “First” class. After 60 years or so, what’s in a word?

On Oct. 12-13, members of Rancho High School’s Class of 1958 will gather for their 60th reunion. They’re inviting members of Rancho’s classes of 1957 and 1959 to join in. This is collegial of them, given the chronologically tangled history the classes of 1958 and 1957 share.

Rancho was Las Vegas’ second public high school — Las Vegas High School was the first — and the class of 1958 entered Rancho as freshmen in fall 1954. They were assured they’d be Rancho’s first graduating class.

Not so fast. According to Mike Prince, a class of ’58 member and a member of the reunion committee, “in our sophomore year, they transferred a class of (Las Vegas High School) juniors down to the new school.”

Those now-former Las Vegas High students graduated from Rancho in 1957, a year before Prince’s class. That made Prince and his classmates members of Rancho’s second — but, Class of ’58ers maintain, original — graduating class.

“So we were no longer No. 1,” Prince says. “We suddenly had a class over us.”

He laughs. “We were demoted in our sophomore year.”

To be fair, “it was frustrating for both classes,” Prince says. “They had their hearts set on graduating from Las Vegas High School. So they were disappointed, and understandably so.”

Barbara (Dexter) Clark, who’s also a member of the 2018 reunion committee, was one of those transfers. She spent her freshman and sophomore years at Las Vegas High School, moved to Rancho as a junior, and graduated as a member of Rancho’s Class of ’57.

She wasn’t thrilled about it. For one thing, she was dating a Las Vegas High guy and didn’t want to transfer to Rancho. She recalls pleading with her parents to move so she somehow would be able to remain at Las Vegas High.

Her parents, she says, just laughed.

Clark soon got into the Rancho spirit, though. She made friends, became active at her new alma mater-to-be and even was the female lead in Rancho’s senior class play. Prince recalls as a highlight of those years a visit by singer Connie Francis, who didn’t sing but stopped by for an assembly.

Over the years, members of the two classes have become comfortable with their odd, shared history.

“We were the first class to graduate,” Clark says, “but, yeah, I’d say they were the originals.”

The classes have participated in events together, and will again during the Class of 1958 reunion.

Prince recalls that the classes of ’58 and ’57 got along, but never melded as tightly as they might have.

“There was no animosity, but we just didn’t have the same feeling toward the class of ’57,” he says.

Over the years, the two classes have “grown closer,” Prince says.

“We no longer think of them as outsiders,” he jokes.

Contact John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jjprzybys on Twitter.