He wasn’t sure the two had ever met, although they were waiting for the streetcar for the same purpose: the 50th reunion of Palo Verde High School.

“My first class was at 6 a.m. and my last class was at 11:30,” McDonald explained of Palo Verde’s split schedule in the 1960s that had half the students attending in the morning, half in the afternoon. “By the time we graduated, they had us line up alphabetically and I didn’t know anyone.”

Berger and McDonald were among 65 Palo Verde High class of 1966 alumni expected to take the Sun Links tour, the kickoff of the weekend reunion Sept. 30 to Oct. 3. About 205 people of the class of 715ish — it might be a few more or less — had said they would come to the reunion dinner that Saturday at Westward Look Resort and dance the night away on the resort rooftop.

The Palo Verde class was getting a head start on Tucson’s reunion season, beating other high schools to the annual October crush of classmate get-togethers that celebrate post-high school milestones once every decade.

This is the class of ’66’s fifth reunion, but it was a first for Bill Kalt, a retired Tucson school teacher and avid history buff.

“I figured at 50, it was time,” he said.

“This is kind of amazing that so many of us are still alive,” Berger quipped, taking a step back as Kalt breezed past him and embraced Kit Estes.

“The dancing man!” Kalt exclaimed, then announced to no one in particular, “This man can dance!”

Estes blushed beneath his trim grey beard and pushed back a strand of his matching long grey hair.

“They call me the Dancing Man of Tucson,” Estes said, and he has a YouTube channel of him dancing at everywhere from Tucson dance clubs like the now shuttered Boondocks Lounge to Tucson Meet Yourself.

“You know I started dancing while I was at Palo Verde,” he told Kalt, whose small claim to class of ’66 fame is writing the local history book “Tucson Was A Railroad Town.”

Kalt didn’t remember that about Estes, who has spent the five decades after high school doing a little bit of everything: landscaping, remodeling, T-shirt making. But reunion organizer Linda Sheets remembered.

“When we were kids, if you went to the dance and you didn’t have a date or anyone to dance with, you would find Kit,” she recalled as dark clouds moved in from the south and threatened to unleash as the group was about to board the streetcar. “We always knew we’d have a dance with Kit.”

As Estes extolled the virtues of dancing, Judy Aitken had pretty much made up her mind that she was going to sneak a dance with him at the reunion dinner and dance the next night.

Aitken and her husband, Lee, a Palo Verde ’66 grad, go out dancing all the time, she said. They had a rock ’n’ roll wedding six years ago — originally from California, the 30-year Tucson resident was a widower when she met Lee in a Tucson bar — and the Retro Rockets played at their reception. The 1960s rock cover band was set to play the reunion dinner as well.

The 50th reunion was also Lee Aitken’s first. Though the Tucson Electric Power Co. retiree had never left Tucson after graduation, he said he had never really had much interest in the once-every-10-years shindigs.

But Aitken figured that at 68 it was about time.

“This is my first and probably my last,” he said, joking that their numbers would probably go down over the next 10 years as he and his classmates entered their 70s.

Some might argue that reunions in general are less necessary these days thanks to social media. With Facebook, Twitter and Snap Chat, the class of 2017 is less likely to lose track of one another than the class of 1966.

“You’d be surprised how many people our age (late 60s) do not use social media,” Sheets said, adding that the group has a website to get out news. But most of the people attending the reunion weekend learned about it through word of mouth.

“It was a lot of work,” she said. “To get over 200 was a success in my book.”

Sheets and her friend and former classmate Linda Smith Simmons aren’t waiting for the 60th reunion to get together. She said the two friends and several girls from that Palo Verde class get together for lunch once a month.

This class of 1966 lost its innocence soon after graduation as the war in Vietnam escalated and colored the lives of those who went on to college. Some did go into military service.

Notable members of the class include Greg Psaltis, a pediatric dentist (the class of ’66 president) who builds dental clinics for poor kids in Mexico; Randy Tufts, who co-discovered Kartchner Caverns and became an astrophysicist; and Phil Baechler, a track letterman who invented the Baby Jogger and then designed mobility devices for the active handicapped.