Bertha Pleasants Daniel: “We had big commencement exercises that lasted a whole week. Friday night was gym exhibition. Then it would start Monday night, and went through the next one. It was a real big thing.

When I graduated from Cary High School in 1932, we had 50 class members, and that was the biggest graduating class they had ever had.”

Esther Ivey: “We used to have a whole week of activities at close of school, with graduation exercises. There were only 13 of us in my class [of 1906]. The exercises at the close of school were called the commencement. People who had studied piano would perform. We would have elocution recitals. Younger people would have drills. We would have debates. We had three debating societies. The boys had two: the Clay Society and the Calhoun Society. The girls had only one: the Browning Debating Society. We’d meet on Friday evenings after school [to practice]. Our commencements were a big event. People came from all around to the Cary school. We always had a big picnic dinner on the school grounds. You opened your house, and you had a lot of company come in [and stay with you overnight]. You might have to pay [to see] part of it.”

Robert Heater: “We had a May Day celebration where they had big tables stretched out on the campus grounds. Everybody’d bring food out there, and everybody helped themselves. And everybody was trying to out-do the other one with the quality of the food, so their food would be the favorite.”

Marie Seeger: “When I was in high school, every senior class was taking a trip to Washington D.C. Our class of 1953 decided we were going to New York City. Clare Marley, [the drama teacher], was all for it because she wanted us to see a Broadway play. So we chartered a bus and off we went.

They were very brave chaperones. We saw Mary Martin in ‘South Pacific’ — absolutely wonderful. We were in the nosebleed section, but that didn’t matter to us. We were on Broadway. We were gone a week and that was quite a feat. We did all sorts of things to earn money to make that trip. After that, then other classes started going a little bit farther than Washington D.C.”

Fred Seeger: “I graduated in 1949, and we were not taking senior trips back then. But we did go to Red Springs one time, to Flora McDonald College when it was a private, all girls’ college and quite exclusive.

They put on Shakespearean plays. As a drama teacher, Mrs. Marley was very much into Shakespeare. So we went to Flora McDonald College and saw three Shakespearean plays in their amphitheater in one afternoon and night. When we got back to Cary, we had quite enough of Shakespeare for a long, long time.”

Cary’s Heritage is taken from the book, “Just a Horse-Stopping Place, an Oral History of Cary, North Carolina,” which is on sale at the Page-Walker arts & History Center in downtown Cary. The book is a collection of oral history interviews conducted between local citizens and Friends of the Page-Walker Hotel. Proceeds from the sale of this book support the preservation of Cary’s history through the Cary Heritage Museum.