When Ruth Applin was attending Wiscasset High School’s predecessor Wiscasset Academy, she was asked to play the mandolin at an alumni banquet. The event gave her an opportunity to see what she had to look forward to, she said.

When she graduated in 1935, she started going to the annual banquets and kept on going to them. On June 6 in Wiscasset High’s Stover Auditorium, Applin plans to attend her 80th one as an alumna. The Wiscasset resident, who turned 98 in April, is her class’s last surviving member.

Looking through albums of photographs and newspaper clippings on May 15, she attributed her longevity to good genes. Both of her grandmothers lived into their 90s.

She’s going for 100 years old, and plans to keep attending the alumni banquets, she said.

She and daughter Betty Applin, who this year will celebrate her 45th year since she graduated, said the banquets are a time to see people they may only see at that one event each year. For Ruth Applin, the best part is getting to see family members who live away and return for the banquets, especially on the years that mark a special anniversary for her.

“That’s when I say they have to come,” Betty Applin said, smiling.

Her mother holds the Wiscasset Academy-High School Alumni Association’s record for most banquets attended and is possibly its first member to celebrate an 80th graduation anniversary, Betty Applin said.

Ruth and Betty Applin live together in the Churchill Street house that Ruth Applin’s uncle John Jackson left her. She used to attend the banquets with him.

Mother and daughter have each attended every alumni banquet since graduating, missing none due to sickness or any other reason. 

“But I was very pregnant at one,” Betty Applin said. She gave birth soon after to son Arthur Flanders, who went on to graduate Wiscasset High School in 2001. He will be at this year’s banquet, his mother said.

Ruth Applin, who worked in Wiscasset school cafeterias and at Dodge Inn in Edgecomb, is a third-generation Wiscasset graduate. The family is up to six generations of Wiscasset graduates now, and is on a path to its seventh. Wiscasset Middle School student Noah Haggett, Ruth Applin’s great-great-grandson, will be in eighth grade next fall, the first school year that eighth graders will attend the high school.

President of the alumni association’s association of past presidents, Betty Applin said the banquets used to only be open to alumni; but attendance fell off as some classes, with shallower roots in Wiscasset, didn’t turn out in the strong numbers earlier classes did. The rules were changed to let spouses in, and attendance has climbed back to about 200 a year, she said.

Alumni association secretary Sheila Sawyer is anticipating a strong turnout this year, with Applin’s anniversary, as well as the 76th graduation anniversary for Wiscasset’s Marcia Wilson. In addition, some members who celebrated 50 years last year are planning to attend again this year, Sawyer said.

Members’ attendance in their off-years, ones where they do not hit another five-year mark, adds to everyone’s enjoyment of the banquets, Betty Applin said.

“Especially in a small school, you didn’t just go to school with your class, you went with the classes ahead of you and behind you, too,” she said.

Reservations for this year’s banquet must be made by Saturday, May 23. For information, call Carol Colby at 207-882-7234.