Who can resist a little history-mystery, especially when it’s based right here in Nashua?  OK, most of you can, I get it – but things like that bring out my inner geek, just as A Day With Mr. Statistics might bring out yours.

It’ll never rank a segment on History’s Mysteries, but I enjoyed being handed – and, I humbly submit, solving – lifelong family friend Martha Strohl’s recent assignment:  Find out who now lives in a particular house on Beauview Avenue where Martha and nine other girls were photographed back in 1953, when they were 10 or 11 years of age.

A no-brainer, right?  Grab an old city directory and look it up.  Too easy, though – the house number wasn’t listed.  A later directory showed the number, but that house wasn’t built until the early ‘90s.  What gives?

My next e-mail from Martha: “I’m apparently really bad at details!” she began, giving me a new number to look up.  Bingo. 

I’d barely sent her the information when she replied with the final segment of the circle.  Turned out the ’53 photo was taken on the front lawn of their friend Esther Rosenthal’s house; she was one of the 10 girls pictured.

Martha learned that from an e-mail Esther sent her, so I’m busted – I was only a small part of solving this little mystery.  And little it was, in the great scheme of mysteries, but it’s what it led to that’s the really neat part of this it’s-a-small-world-after-all equation. 

The whole address-search thing came about as the 50th reunion of the Nashua High Class of 1960 – the girls’ graduation year – approached last month; Martha and a couple of others were thinking about trying to reunite as many of the girls as they could sometime over reunion weekend for a present-day photo at the same house.

But the first seeds were planted months earlier, back in February, shortly after I wrote a tribute piece to Martha’s father, former Telegraph publisher and longtime company director Albert Spendlove upon his Feb. 1 death at age 94.

Martha and her sister Katherine were kids when they moved to Nashua in the fall of 1949.  That’s when their dad, 34 at the time, took over as Telegraph publisher. 

While they didn’t live here all that long – they moved in 1956 to Ardmore, Pa., when Al Spendlove   was named vice president of the former Philadelphia Evening and Sunday Bulletin – the family always held Nashua close to their hearts, something they reiterated frequently, especially when coming back for a visit to find yet another lane has been added to the Everett Turnpike and six more stop lights to Amherst Street.

Martha and several other friends from their formative Nashua years moved away before their senior year or went to private schools, but it’s once a classmate, always a classmate when it comes to reunions. 

Of the 10 girls pictured, five made it to the reunion, but tight schedules being what they are these days, they scrapped the plan to return to Beauview Avenue, opting instead to have reunion photographer Laurie Thiboutot shoot their “57 Years Later” photo in the portable studio she set up at Nashua Country club the night of the reunion dinner-dance.

After my tribute story appeared, Martha wrote in e-mail, “I started to hear from friends I hadn’t heard from or seen in 55 years.  Holly Stevens Hornor was the instigator, but we soon discovered so many others.”

Cool, I thought, going to the bookcase for the ’60 yearbook to refresh my memory.  They popped from the pages like I was a grade-school kid again, standing alongside Pop on the sidelines at Holman Stadium or crunched in the almost non-existent out-of-bounds floorspace in the old, pre-Chestnut Street NHS gym.

It got even better, when tireless reunion committee organizer Leslie (Parker) Krueger invited me to stop in the reunion, where I’d finally get to meet the likes of “All-American Ed” Davis, a half-century older than I’d last seen him but just as polite, friendly and fit as always. If the little nickname sounds pretentious, it’s not: “To those of us who know Ed, it was no surprise that he was elected to the All-American Football Eleven,” the caption with his photo in the ’60 yearbook states. “Ed is, without a doubt, one of the most popular boys in school, and he has remained friendly and modest (despite) the great honor he received… ”

Impossible to miss among the reunion revelers was the affable George Tebbetts, who can spin a vintage Nashua story like no other. From behind-the-scenes glimpses into the less-publicized endeavors of the larger-than-life Buzz Harvey to a Currier & Ives tale about playing pickup hockey at night then walking home through a snowstorm that rendered his entire journey perfectly silent, save for the “chi-chi-chit-chi-chi-chit” interlude from tire chains of a distant car.

“What are you doing here?” was a question I fielded frequently that night; my pat answer: “I just wanted to see what it’s like being the youngest kid at the party.”

A bit about the five “girls” in the “now photo” – Esther Rosenthal is now Esther Mechler, who Martha reports is a nationally-recognized animal rights activist living in Connecticut. The aforementioned Holly Stevens Hornor now lives in Amherst; her dad was the well-known Maine Manufacturing Company executive in the firm’s mid-20th century heyday.

Marsha Nason is now Marsha Cohen, who came all theway from Arizona for the reunion, and rounding out the group is Judy Parzych, Davis, half of the storybook pretty-cheerleader-marries-star-football-player couple; she and “All-American Ed live down in Worcester.

Reminiscing with Leslie – one of several Class of ’60 couples who later married and still are – was a blast as well. “Boy, so many memories,” she said, adding a mention, with a little “ha-ha,” that she was a cheerleader her sophomore and junior years.

In all, Leslie said, the class had 11 couples who married; three, regrettably, were separated by death. In addition to the Davises and Leslie, who married John Krueger (his yearbook nickname, “Fabian,” came from his sweaters, which resembled the star’s, he told me that night), the other classmate-couples are Steve Ames and Joan McGee; Steve Barnes and Paula April (another athlete-cheerleader union); Bob Bausha and Sue Travers; Bob Michaud and Brenda Hill; Gerry Pombrio and Doreen O’Laughlin; and Jon Vore and Estelle Papagiotas.

“One of the remaining ‘girls’ (in the 1953 photo) e-mailed me that ‘people write novels about things like this,’” Martha said.

“I’m not about to do that, but it might be a really interesting Telegraph piece.”

Now there’s a girl who takes after her dad.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Saturdays in The Telegraph. He can be reached at 673-3100, ext. 31, or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.