He went to school there. Now he lives there.

By Paul Leighton, The Beverly Beat on Substack.com

For people of a certain age (me), Beverly Village for Living and the Arts, the new apartment building for people over 55, will always be Briscoe. It’s where my father went to school, where I went to school, and where my two daughters went to school.

Vance Garry is also nostalgic for the place. He went there when it was the high school, a graduate of the Class of 1965. In fact, when the ‘new’ high school was getting ready to open later that year, Garry was among the students who carried books down the street to the new building.

Now, 60 years after his graduation, Garry is back — this time as a resident. He and his wife, Diana (and their dog, Millie), were among the first to move in back in November. I’d been looking for a resident who went to school there for some time now, thinking it would be a good story. With Garry I hit the jackpot.

Garry showed me around the building on Thursday and said how impressed he is with the way Harborlight Homes and Beacon Communities took such great care to preserve its historic integrity (it opened in 1923) while at the same time making it a comfortable place to live.

The really cool part is that each time he showed me something, it triggered a memory from his high school days.

The community room? That’s where the gym used to be. Garry recalled students packing the tiny bandbox for basketball games. The 1965 team was good enough to make the old Tech Tourney at Boston Garden.

Of course I had to come back with my own story, courtesy of my father. He loved to tell how he and his friends would sneak into basketball games (it was the Depression and they had no money) by sliding down the coal chute. They looked pretty guilty when they walked into the gym covered in coal dust, but the custodians always looked the other way.

I asked Garry if he remembered where his locker was. Another great part of the renovation is that they kept the old lockers, as a decorative feature. Garry wasn’t exactly sure, but he knew it was on the second floor, so he posed for a photo in the general vicinity.

The auditorium is still being renovated, so we couldn’t go in there. But it sparked another poignant memory for Garry. He was in the auditorium on Nov. 22, 1963, when his history teacher, Miss Fischer, told him that President Kennedy had been shot.

“Every time I walk into that auditorium I think of that,” he said.

At times, Garry said it’s hard to imagine that this was his high school. At another point, as we walked the hallways and up and down the stairways, he and I both said how familiar it all felt.

“It really does bring back memories,” he said. “It’s sort of a reconnect. Then and now. It’s still here.”

“It’s like the ghosts of the past,” he said later.

Outside, Garry pointed out that the field out back is being maintained as open space by the city. He said that’s where the Class of ‘65 held its graduation ceremony, because there were over 600 students in his class, too big to fit in the auditorium.

It wasn’t until the end of our conversation that Garry said his mother used to teach there. He said she had to stop teaching when she became pregnant. “That’s the way it was back then,” he said.

Diana Garry, who was in Florida visiting her mother, told me by phone that she and Vance love it at Beverly Village. They’ve used the community room to host a birthday party for their 8-year-old granddaughter and Thanksgiving for their family. Vance, who was a longtime English teacher at Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, has started a book club for residents.

“So many buildings they just tear down,” Diana said. “They’ve done a beautiful job renovating it and building something beautiful.”

Garry said he especially appreciates the careful restoration of Briscoe considering what happened to Minuteman. He went back there a few years ago only to find a shell of a building, which was being prepared to be torn down to make way for a new school

“I felt really bad because it was just memories,” he said.

At Briscoe, he still has the memories. But he also has birthday parties, Thanksgiving meals, book clubs … and a nice place to live.

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