NORTH BEND — Coos Bay students returned to classrooms Tuesday, but for some gray-haired alumni of an elementary school from a different era, the new school year didn’t start until Saturday in North Bend.

For the past several years, graduates from the former Empire School have dusted off their scrapbooks, cooked up some food and returned to the Bay Area to reminisce.

This Saturday afternoon’s gathering brought together the largest number of alumni,  92, since the reunions started 13 years ago, said Myrna Cagley, Class of 1950.

Classmates from towns as near as Roseburg and as far away as Olympia, Wash., came to join the school’s former students still living in the Bay Area, as they gathered in Simpson Park. They included Ivene Johannesen Pittam, 93, who doesn’t remember exactly when she graduated from Empire School, which went through eighth grade, but remembers it was before the crash of 1929.

She recalled going to swim with her classmates at the Empire Falls, which created a pool a few blocks north of the intersection of Schoneman Street and Newmark Avenue. The falls are gone, but memories of the neighborhood school remain.

One of the younger graduates, Pauline Schall passed through the Empire School halls in the 1950s. She spent only four years in the school, also known as Market Street School. Her third- and fourth-grade classes were taught in an old naval building near the Empire Boat ramp. By the time Schall reached seventh grade, an influx of new students prompted the school district to build a new school. She recalls she was in the inaugural class that went to Michigan Avenue School, now known as Sunset Middle School.

Anyone who graduated from Empire School is invited to join the festivities each year, Cagley said. She has kept a list of all the guests from past years and makes sure to send out a notice when she sets the date and location.

The number of alumni hasn’t increased since 1969, she said, the year the district burned the building to the ground to make way for its bus barn. But the alumni have kept photos of the building, copies of which are pasted onto poster boards and displayed at the potluck picnic each year.

The event is a nice chance to catch up with people, said Emma Smith, a classmate of Cagley’s.

“The hardest thing is recognizing everyone,” she said.

The first reunion took place in 1996 at Sunset Beach, Cagley said. She didn’t have any plans to make the event into a yearly thing until a few years later when a friend called to report a classmate’s death. The friend told Cagley it would be nice to get everyone together more often. So the reunions have become an annual event, the first Saturday after schools start each fall.

Aside from making sure they have a space to gather and mailing out invitations, Cagley said it doesn’t take much effort to organize it. And she’s more than happy to keep it up, especially in light of the good attendance.

“As long as they want me to, I’ll do it,” said Cagley.