CARROLLTON - A few weeks before her high school reunion, Kitty Gray Ehresmann brought out her yearbook for her 17-year-old niece, who flipped awestruck through its yellowed pages. "Everybody looks so happy!" the girl remarked, poring across 40-year-old photos of knee-high skirts, shining shoes and beaming grins.

Reunited last month in the old movie theater of their once-sleepy suburb, R.L. Turner High School's Class of 1970 seems wholly foreign to the school that stands today among strip malls, apartment blocks and the burgeoning immigrant communities of southern Carrollton and Farmers Branch.

How carefree those teens looked in the yearbook's silvered photos - as if they had never known the pregnancies, dropouts and broken families that trouble children today.

"We were very happy," Ehresmann told her niece. "We were all very happy back then."

But she knew better.

Kitty's senior year

Kitty Gray's yearbook photo takes up a single corner of a single page.

A chipper girl with short hair, her friends called her "Miss Kitty," after the Gunsmoke character.

"Meow, meow," they would chime when her name was called from the morning roster.

Kitty was in no clubs to speak of her senior year. She was never voted most beautiful or most likely to succeed. But she was happy enough - just another senior among hundreds that year.

Or so she felt until Christmas break, when she returned from vacation with her mother and two brothers to find a "For Sale" sign in front of her house. Her father had put it there.

That winter, Kitty learned many things - first of her parents' impending divorce, then of her father's long affairs. Gradually, she also learned how ill her mother was.

Sick since that summer, Kitty's mother only got worse after her husband left. An elementary school teacher, she would return to the family's cramped apartment each evening to collapse on the bed. Unable to keep down the food Kitty and her brothers tried to give her, she would drop to 80 pounds that year.

Kitty skipped a week of school after her parents' divorce - her very first rebellion - but never spoke of her problems in the halls of R.L. Turner.

Of her friends who met her at the Jack-In-The-Box parking lot on weekends or cruised with her down Forest Lane, none seemed to suspect her life had collapsed.

"Nobody asked," she says.

Ms. Turner High

Everyone remembers Lydia Cowan.

Head cheerleader and "Miss Turner High School," she signed autographs for freshmen that year - the culmination of a lifetime of popularity contests.

The yearbook is full of her photos - a gorgeous girl whose constant smile masked growing dread.

In one photo, Lydia beams in front of the gymnasium door at the Valentine's Day dance. She remembers the night well.

She arrived alone to the dance. When her boyfriend - a domineering alcoholic whom she had alternately loved and hated since she was 12 - finally showed up, he was more drunk than usual.

He reeked of liquor as he strode past, growling that she must not dance with other boys. Then he stumbled onto the stage, tore the microphone from the singer and began to sing a drunken tune.

Lydia watched, mortified, as security guards hauled him out of the gym.

She was by that time four months pregnant with his child.

Officially, there were no pregnant girls at R.L. Turner in 1970 - only girls who came to class one day and disappeared the next.

Lydia left in March, long before the baby started to show.

For those who asked, she'd say she was going to live with her father. This was an improbability: Floyd Hughes Cowan had been estranged from the family since he was arrested for armed robbery in 1965.

Lydia was instead hidden in a Fort Worth adoption agency to await delivery.

To this day, she says, none of her classmates have asked why she never went back to school.

Sue the Scout

Sue Doty wore a Girl Scout uniform to class, made perfect grades and surprised no one when she was named valedictorian.

While not nearly as popular, Sue rivaled Lydia Cowan for yearbook accolades: science club president, most intelligent, most likely to succeed.

But although Sue did everything her teachers asked, she rarely believed a word they said.

"People always said, 'You were the brain,' " she remembers. "I never thought of myself that way. I just went to school and hated it."

Sue, who smuggled a copy of Catcher in the Rye through the halls that year, secretly saw high school as a world of "little petty people enforcing little petty rules."

So when the principal asked for her valedictory speech, she penned something trite - and long since forgotten - and dutifully handed it to him.

She would never read a word of it.

Sue delivered her real speech to a packed gymnasium on a rainy graduation day.

In cap and gown, she decried a school where students were "robots" and teachers "babysat" homework. She implicitly criticized the Vietnam War and explicitly condemned the "false value systems" of her era.

Some clapped. The principal glared. Sue walked out of R.L. Turner, never to return.

Life after high school

The day after graduation, Kitty's grandparents packed up her family and moved to a Texas border town where they thought her mother might get well. She never did.

Kitty moved back north in 1985, a year before her mother died of complications from what was eventually diagnosed as Crohn's disease.

Sue Doty left North Texas for good after high school and largely fulfilled the yearbook's prediction: "most likely to succeed." She got degrees in psychology and biochemistry before her medical license, and now she teaches family medicine in San Antonio.

Lydia Cowan gave birth to her daughter on July 13, 1970. She signed the adoption papers as her boyfriend stormed out of the room.

In her freshman year of college, she had a nervous breakdown. She eventually recovered, got her master's degree and started a marketing company with her husband.

Nineteen years ago, she reunited with her first-born daughter, and today, she says, the two are close.

40 years later

Forty years after high school, they still looked like a yearbook picture.

Their hair whitened, their faces wrinkled - none could doubt that the 100-some alumni who gathered at the reunion were the same kids who grinned from the photos of their annual.

That night, Kitty Gray Ehresmann finally told a few old classmates what her senior year was really like. They were shocked to hear it - as was she when several told her of their own teenage traumas.

"There were things going on with a lot of families," Ehresmann says. "But nobody really talked about it, because that's just how it was in the late '60s and early '70s."

In 2010, they talked. In the dim of their old movie theater, their troubled youth now memories, they laughed and drank and danced late into the night.

They all looked so happy.

The Dallas Morning News - November 5, 2010