Feeling a bit guilty about his own high-school experience, author Dave Newhouse searched out classmates from his graduating class, the class of 1956 at Menlo-Atherton High School, to find out what happened to them since high school. The stories run the gamut–some are tragic (three people have died since being interviewed), some classmates were strangers to the author, and some he thought he knew turned out to be strangers, as new information was revealed about their lives. The pom-pom girl he spoke to about breast cancer had been institutionalized. The class clown was terribly abused by his parents. The hot-rod guy was the nephew of the man who invented television. The class geek was Jim Henson’s first hire on The Muppets . A budding activist worked for, and wrote a book about, farm labor organizer Cesar Chavez. The senior ball queen’s son hasn’t been right since getting home from Iraq.

But Old Bears is also about the 1950s, a misunderstood decade of “conformity” that was anything but–an era that brought us the popularity of television, civil rights, the space program, rock ‘n’ roll, the Salk polio vaccine, Queen Elizabeth, Elvis, and, of course, McDonald’s.