The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Searcy is a retired 44-year newspaperman.
He is an award-winning sports and features writer who lived in Oak Ridge as a child during World War II.
His newspaper career, which started at The Oak Ridger when he was in high school, took him to The Kingsport Times-News, The Chattanooga Times, The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was executive sports editor. He twice was named Tennessee Sportswriter of the Year and is a member of the Chattanooga, Oak Ridge and Tennessee Sports Writers Halls of Fame.
Searcy has collected Oak Ridge stories most of his adult life. “The Last Reunion” is a collection of memories from the author and his classmates.
“In the beginning we were from virtually everywhere, from big cities and little towns, from cotton mills and tobacco patches, from laboratories and big industry, from the military and academia, from England, Hungary, Poland, France — and on the run from Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy,” Searcy said. “We invaded East Tennessee at a rate of about 1,000 a week until we were a city of 75,000, fifth-largest in the state. Hardly anyone knew we were there, wherever ‘there’ was.”
He added, “We went to school there, played in its woods and its playgrounds. We dated and danced at its youth centers and formed friendships that have lasted more than six decades. We met our husbands and wives there, many of us, and after 60 years it's still home to some. We are what's left of the Class of 1952, and in the summer of 2010 we returned a final time to remember, thinking of life not as it is today, but as it was.”
The book includes unpublished interviews with Dr. Alvin Weinberg, the noted Oak Ridge physicist who revealed that Germany would have had the atomic bomb before the United States had it not been for a calculating error by Germany's top nuclear physicists; and with John Rice Irwin, founder of the Museum of Appalachia, whose family was forced off its land as part of the War Department's takeover in 1942.
