Our Graduation Night

On the Manchester Center for History site, there is a narrative about my Dad’s apple orchard—BEERY’S ORCHARD.  Here is a paragraph from that story:
Producing apples is a pretty high risk business. Late spring freezes, long periods of rainy weather, plus all the diseases and insects that can attack the crop, are a constant worry during every growing season. Only twice in 45 years did I have a complete failure of the apple crop—in 1944 and 1961. In 1961, the trees bloomed and set on a full crop and had apples as big as your thumb. Then a hard freeze came on May 25 and wiped out every apple in the orchard. That was the latest a crop was damaged by a late freeze. Over the course of the years, we had varying degrees of loss from late spring freezes, from 10% to 60%. In years when the crop was less than normal, we would buy apples from Michigan and other orchards in the area. Cider was a big drawing card when selling direct from the orchard. We had to take our apples to a cider mill to get cider made. Over the years, we went to cider mills as far away as Rochester (24 miles), Athens (18 miles), Columbia City (25 miles), and Huntington (18 miles). In 1978, we bought our own cider press and saved a lot of man-hours from running to the mills. 
That night of May 25, 1961 was our graduation night.  I remember having a party at Ann Urschel’s house and how cold it was that night.  I never had any trouble remembering the apple freeze because I always knew it was our graduation night.