Amid the sharp parts and bob cuts of the 1920s, all the way through to the flyaway collars of the 1970s and pastel jewelry of the 1980s, there always seemed to be a boy with a slicked-back cowlick and a girl just a few inches taller than the rest.

Sunday marked the first anniversary party for the 109-year-old school, the source of primary education for generations of Olympia residents.

The school's location and design had changed altogether to many at the reunion, but for the several dozen returnees, the memories remained the same.

"Here I am right here -- the good-looking one," chuckled Dale Hume, who was a buzz-cut Garfield basketball player in the 1930s.

"That could be argued," shot back classmate and class clown Ben Bean.

"It's always been a tight-knit school," said Betty Holt, who helped sponsor the reunion with the Garfield PTA.

Opened in 1893

In 1893, Garfield was a handsome three-story stone and brick school on the northwest corner of Madison Avenue and Rogers Street.

Bob Woodard graduated from eighth grade at Garfield in 1927, when girls still entered the wood-heated building on the east side and boys on the west side. Just about everyone walked to school, and recess was often in the building's basement when it rained, he said.

"I was the smallest kid in school when I graduated here," added Woodard, who now stands over 6 feet tall.

A new Garfield school was built in 1929 at 325 N. Plymouth St., where Bean remembers an open-air shed as the site of many a winter recess.

"The guys stayed warm by running around," he chuckled with a wink.

Janice Dohn and Harold Yantis, classmates from the 1930s, remembered Garfield Principal Harold Potts and his ambitious school plays.

"(Potts) saw that everyone had a part in it," Dohn said of "The Golden Apple," a play where thespians dressed like ancient Greeks. "It was good that everyone was in it, because it brought all of the parents there."

Students from kindergarten through eighth grade attended the school through 1975, when the school district began sending sixth-graders to middle schools. The existing Garfield school was built in 1989, when the 1929 structure was razed.

But amid all that's changed during the past 109 years, some things never will.

Pete Seward, a 1975 Garfield graduate, sat next to his fourth-grade teacher, Arlene Reynolds. The two poured through old class photos and laughed. She remembered him as a little "pill."

Seward grinned and looked down at the table. She was still "Mrs. Reynolds" to him.

On the Web:

- Garfield Elementary School: http://kids.osd.wednet.edu/garfield