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| 1950 Allen High School Junior Senior Banquet at Sherman Hotel |
In some ways the prom
hasn’t changed a bit. Kids still dress
up, enjoy a nice dinner, go dancing and stay out much later than normal. Then again, speaking with some former
students and teachers, I would say the Allen High School prom has come a long,
long way.
For many years,
Allen High School’s prom was actually called the Junior-Senior Banquet,
according to Jill (Enloe) Dietz, who graduated in 1975. “The tradition was that
the juniors would raise money to pay for the seniors and then both classes
would attend the banquet.”
The fundraising
each year centered around a turkey dinner that was held each November. Ella Jo Adams, former AHS home economics
teacher, recalls the turkey dinner as a
big community event.
“The mothers did
most of the preparation and food service director, Lois Curtis coordinated it
all. Everyone came out because they knew it supported the senior’s banquet each
year. Of course the town’s population was probably less than 1,000 at the
time.”
Seniors Niki Keramat
and Tyler Johnston will be attending the Allen High School prom at the Allen
Event Center this Saturday. They will be joined by almost 1,000 classmates. The
couple is part of a group of 20 and will be riding in a limo to a nice
steakhouse and sushi restaurant before attending the prom around 9 p.m.
In comparison,
Honey (Bankhead) Gray and her date attended the 1974 junior-senior banquet at
the Hilton Inn Hotel in Dallas with about 75 students. There were 41 seniors
graduating that year.
“A tradition that I
remember from the banquets was the senior wills and junior prophesies,” said
Gray. “Seniors would stand up and bequeath all sorts of funny things to the
juniors. Then juniors would predict the future for seniors. It was meant to be
in good fun but could get rough at times.”
Allen’s lack of
hotels led to proms being scheduled in Dallas and later Richardson and
Plano. Sonya (Knight) Pitcock remembers
her 1997 prom being held at a downtown Dallas hotel and then everyone heading
to the Swinging D Ranch for the after prom party.
Ella Jo Adams recalled one year that the prom
was almost cancelled. “We received a call from the Fairmont Hotel that our room
for the prom had been taken over by secret service staff for President Gerald
Ford’s overnight stay at the hotel. We were eventually allowed to use a
different space at the Fairmont. We even got to see the President arrive in his
limo that evening in April of 1976.
An interesting fact
about early Allen “proms” was that underclassmen were not allowed to eat dinner
with the group. A junior who took a
sophomore to the banquet would eat dinner inside while the underclassmen sat
outside the banquet hall. They could
join the group when the dancing began. At the same time, most of Allen ISD’s
faculty and their spouses or guests attended the banquet along with the
upperclassmen. Mrs. Adams helped break down the tradition in 1967 so that all
guests could enjoy the banquet and the emphasis was more on the students.
Asked why he was
looking forward to the prom, 2012 senior Tyler Johnston said “it’s exciting
because it’s only seniors. It is our
event – our chance to get together and start saying goodbye. It will be great.”
In a way, the prom
hasn’t changed in years.
