NORFOLK, Va. — About 30 friends crowded around four tables this fall at Gus and George’s Spaghetti and Steak House in Virginia Beach chatting about when gas tanks could be filled for less than a dollar. As they waited on their lunches of fried fish and burgers, they remembered when Lucille Ball was all the rage, their parents preached patriotism and they were living in the empire of post-World War II America.

The octogenarians graduated from Willard Elementary School in Norfolk around 1956 — some the year before, others a few years later — and gather each year for a reunion. The America they knew as boys and girls is gone, said reunion founder Catherine Rutter, but they still have each other.

Rutter, 80, who now lives in Kill Devil Hills, left Virginia after graduating and spent a career working for telephone companies in Washington, D.C. She never lost touch with Dorothy Aksteter, whom she met at Willard and grew up with in the neighborhoods close to Fairmont Park. When Rutter moved to Carolina in 2001, Aksteter started flying from Minnesota every other year to visit.

“And it wasn’t until about 2010 that I got my ‘bright idea,'” Rutter said. “I told Dorothy, ‘Let’s see how many of our classmates I can get together.”

Rutter told Aksteter to think of how fun it would be: “‘We could go to Doumars!'”

She researched for weeks at a familiar girlhood haunt, the downtown branch of Norfolk Public Library, where she once read away lazy, long and sleepy hours on summer breaks. In the stacks as an adult, she copied down names from yearbooks and school histories, combed city directories and pored over newspaper obituaries. That many of the Willard girls no longer used their maiden names made the quest trickier.

In 2010, she and Aksteter met several friends at Doumar’s Cones & Barbecue before heading to Temple Baptist church’s social hall. There 23 people became that first Willard Elementary School reunion. Even more people came the next year and more still in 2012. Most people still lived close to home.

Snooky Murden, whose father owned the Murden’s Drug Store chain, was there. Judy Commings Welch, who ended up working for Norfolk Public Schools and built a reputation as a veteran line dancer at The Banque, started coming too. So did Marjorie Joynes, who works at Regent University Library, and Sidney Skjei, who’d joined the Navy, and former Elizabeth City mayor, Steve Atkinson.

In 2017, the group had grown so large that the reunion moved to the Virginia Beach steak house where they still meet. The group has reached a tipping point and the number of attendees shrinks each passing year. Recently, retired Chesapeake city attorney Ronnie Hallman sat at the table talking about which of his friends beat him at the spelling bees.

“It was a good time back then. No crime. No mufflers. Well, I mean, the mufflers they had didn’t really filter out anything — a lot of carbon dioxide,” he said with a laugh. “I guess that’s why we’re so crazy.”

The rest of the table laughed too as the food was served. The meandering talk leaped from lost, youthful looks, to lost parents and friends not yet forgotten.