Iowa high school class beats 1-in-177 million odds: All alive six decades after graduation

MILFORD, Ia. — Del Matheson was preparing the mailing list for his high school class's 60-year reunion when an improbable thought occurred to him: What are the odds that all 14 graduates are still alive? He figured it was one in a million shot, considering they’re all between ages 77 and 79 and no one had died from a car wreck, heart attack or cancer.

Matheson was dead wrong: It’s a 1 in 177,467,459 chance.

For comparison, that’s better than the chance of winning the Powerball, calculated David Herzog, Iowa State University assistant professor of mathematics, and “it is way less likely than an individual being struck by lightning twice in a lifetime (1 in 9 million odds).”

“We all talk about who will be the first to die,” Matheson said. “It’s like a contest.”

It appears no one wants to lose and disappoint the Ringsted High School class of 1958.

Kenneth Pedersen said he nearly ruined this story when he woke up one morning last March to an aortic aneurysm. He spent nearly three months in the hospital hanging by a thread but survived. His wife, Betty, had only one explanation.

“He’s ornery,” she said of the man classmates labeled the class clown.

Perhaps it’s due to membership in the class of '58, which should be studied by longevity experts. Though they are squarely at the age of life expectancy today in the U.S. — 78.8 — the law of averages should mean at least a few are gone.

They started out like most kids in rural Iowa, walking to class, doing farm chores and eating from the garden in a northwest Iowa town that once was big enough to have schools and ample business but today is “twice the size of nothing,” Matheson said.

The class has outlived its high school building, which was bulldozed, and reunions often take place in a surviving tavern where conversation often gets around to still breathing.

“We always joke that we are all still alive and how lucky we are. We see it as something to strive for. But we did nothing. It was a gift,” said Matheson, the ringleader in keeping the class connected across the country from his home in Eugene, Oregon.

Luck? A few class members say so. Lightning does strike even the healthy.

Good genes?

“Many of our parents died shortly after high school graduation, so we don’t have a good record there,” Matheson said.

The keys to beating such long odds circled the table over coffee recently with class members Judy (Pedersen) Eisenbacher of Spencer, Lois (Jensen) Platter of Graettinger and Eileen (Emmick) Harkema, a Spencer woman who cried when she had to move before her senior year but is still allowed unofficial membership in the long-living class.

Among the reasons: They were a class of low-key kids who took life as it came; they worked hard and were physically active; they have no alcoholics among them and few smokers.

“We were raised organic,” said Platter of the vast gardens of fresh vegetables their families tended.

Sure, there have been divorces, hip replacements and spouses’ deaths to endure, but a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves sank into their bones and helped lead to a long life, class members said.

Even though Kenneth Pedersen and his buddies set up snowballs on the second-story ledge above the elementary school entrance to drop on classmates, there were few hard feelings through the years of school together.

“We had so many ornery boys in our class,” said Eisenbacher. “But they were the top students.”

They were like family and are family, including three cousins and two brothers.

Many classmates joined for wild rides on toboggans pulled behind a pickup truck, a practice that surely lengthens survival odds. They went to the nearby lake to swim and row boats. They acted as a team to put on a grand prom for seniors, doing field work to earn money.

When their own senior prom occurred, they wore dresses they already had.

The women said they were poor by today’s standards but didn’t want for anything.

They played basketball and baseball for the Great Danes, a hardy group of Scandinavian descendants who so loved their teachers they would join the music teacher after school to listen to records or an instructor to a summertime foray at the lake.

Long into life they would visit coaches and teachers at nursing homes in their dying days.

It was a togetherness that has lasted their whole lives, some more than others.

Classmates Margo and Mike Glasnapp started going steady as freshmen and eventually got married. They’ve stayed that way, living in Colorado City, Colorado, a town Mike helped build from the ground up.

“Mike said to tell you all he got out of high school was me,” said Margo over the telephone.

She added that what they also got was a sense of calm, allowing life to unfold, followed by the brains to pursue good opportunities when they arose.

“Graduation was a good day. It was a chance to see where life would go,” said Steve Glasnapp of Des Moines, who ended up with a successful career in construction management.

He avoided the killer wars, though a couple classmates were in peacetime service. Glasnapp said the draft board came calling in 1963 as Vietnam loomed but he was already married and had kids.

Matheson became a librarian, owned a printing company and today writes novels.

“We learned work ethic. A good job is part of being happy,” he said.

A fierce independence grew on the Iowa prairie, too: “Deep down, we all knew that if we didn’t guide our own ship, nobody was going to do it for us, so we went about staying in the wheelhouse and working at it.”

The reunions every five years are typically attended by the entire class and several teachers. They would pack into a hotel for a long weekend at a nearby town big enough or sit for hours at one of the few places to meet in Ringsted, the laughter from the tavern spilling out into the vacant streets of a town whose school long ago merged with Armstrong before melting into a larger group in Emmet County.

This fall, the reunion will be another celebration of life.

Ken Pedersen of Gowrie worked 43 years in natural gas, raised children and survived. He will be happy to see his good buddy Karl Fliehler of Texas, the class valedictorian, and all the others.

He looks at the 1958 high school annual at the kitchen table and tears form in his eyes. He shed his cane recently but it’s still tough for him to form all his thoughts; he lost a lot of blood and goes to speech therapy.

He said every reunion gets more precious.

He may share stories of the time he somehow found himself gripping the ankles of a student dangling out the school window, while the women may talk of spitballs, prom and the well-dressed, lead-footed teacher who sped into the school parking lot one day with a pheasant plastered to the grille of her car.

Maybe it was togetherness that kept them all alive, across six states and over six decades.

When Pedersen was in the hospital, he got calls from every single classmate.