Pensacola High School's Class of 1940 held their 25th class reunion at the old Scenic Terrace on Scenic Highway where most of them spent their youth dancing! Many of the old teachers were present as well as the football team's coach Ernie Priest. Music from the 1940s era was played while they danced the old dances that none of us today could hope to imitate! Former members of the Tiger's varsity football team were present to speak with whispered voices of former glory upon the gridiron.
A moment of silence was also held in honor of the boys of the Class of 1940 who lost their lives on battlefields far and wide across the globe during WWI. Such men as Ensign Edward Barrow "Teddy" Bibb who was a Navy pilot on the USS Ommaney Bay (CVE-79) when he was killed by a kamikaze in 1945. Then, there was USMC Leo John Carvalis Jr. who was killed in the Battle of the Tenaru on Guadalcanal in 1942. James Glen Connor was a 2nd Lieutenant with the 384th Field Artillery as an observer on a reconnaissance aircraft shot down in 1945. Another was 2nd Lieutenant John O'Donovan Dargacz, a bombardier with the US Army Air Corps killed on a bombing mission over Germany in 1944. Another graduate with the Air Corps was 2nd Lieutenant Clarence Cecil Daw, killed on a bombing mission over Berlin in 1944. But not all perished in bombing missions! There was 1st Class Navy Radioman Jack Gifford Ehlerding aboard the submarine USS Trout. He and his shipmates would perish from enemy depth charges after decimating a Japanese convoy and now rests today at the bottom of the Pacific. Much farther to the west of Ehlerding was a young Air Corps pilot, James Frank Folmar flying his P-51 Mustang fighter over the Yantze River in China and was shot down during a 1944 mission. Another Army Air Corps pilot was 2nd Lieutenant Archibald "Archie" Solomon Mills Jr. who was flying a combat mission in 1944 over New Guinea when his B-24 was hit and badly damaged. He and the pilot nursed it back to his home airfield in Australia only to crash upon approach killing him and the crew. And last was Ensign Thomas Franklin Allen Stanley, a Navy dive bomber pilot aboard the USS Wasp. During the famous Battle of the Philippine Sea, he was ordered to take off, locate, and bomb the Japanese fleet knowing that he and his comrades did not have enough fuel to make it back to his ship. They never hesitated to do their duty! Stanley found the fleet, sunk a Japanese oiler, and was shot down and killed along with his gunner. However, his remaining comrades from the other carriers annihilated the enemy fleet thereby changing the course of the war!
Other heroes that survived the war attended the reunion as well, but all paid homage to those that didn't!
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