The big band wailed. Old-timers crooned "Hail Douglass" with all the heart and vigor of a half-century ago. And generations of Douglass Ducks danced, sang, laughed, hugged, prayed and remembered together.
Frederick Douglass High alumni threw the school huge bashes Friday and Saturday nights, then capped its 110th anniversary celebration yesterday with services at churches throughout the city.
All weekend, as more than 2,500 alumni marked the occasion, former principals and teachers and coaches and absent friends received tributes befitting the closest of family.
So did a custodian, years after his death. Older alumni kept talking about the ever-present Mr. Gillis, the man they called "Sir" and loved like a favorite uncle.
From sometime before the Depression -- nobody could say precisely when -- until the mid-1950s, Ellis Gillis patrolled the halls of Douglass High. He wore a suit every day and kept the place spotless. But more than that, he left an indelible mark that his charges still talk about a half-century later.
"He was the custodian, but at Douglass back then, he played as much a part in our education as the teachers," said June Thorne, who attended Douglass in the 1940s, before its move in 1954 from Calhoun and Baker streets to its present three-story brick home on Gwynns Falls Parkway in Northwest Baltimore.
"He knew everybody's name and he let you know it, too, "Mrs. Thorne added. "He would say, 'June, you know your parents don't want you to act like that. Lower your voice.' "
Enforcer, confidante, mentor and friend. Call Mr. Gillis all of these and call him a teacher, too, a few said. Call him family, said another.
Everybody did, and it proved fitting at what felt like gigantic family reunions Friday night at the Fifth Regiment Armory and a formal dinner and ceremony Saturday at the Baltimore Convention Center.
Somehow, as much as anyone else, Mr. Gillis seemed to embody all that helped shape Douglass students at the only Baltimore high school blacks could attend until 1940 and one of only two until 1954.
The Douglass honor roll is headed by the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was honored posthumously Saturday, and includes some of Baltimore's most-renowned citizens.
One is Clarence Mitchell Jr., who forever recalled the horror of covering a lynching as a reporter for the Afro-American and went on to become a civil rights leader remembered nationwide as the "101st senator."
