William Fleming High School's graduation speaker will have a special surprise for the Roanoke seniors today.

Kenneth Garren, president of Lynchburg College, said he will announce a $1,000 annual scholarship for a freshman from William Fleming.

Garren calls it "our way of saying thank you and come to a really good school."

For Garren, 67, the speech will be a homecoming of sorts. He graduated from William Fleming 50 years ago, when the school was still on Williamson Road, in the building that now houses Breckinridge Middle School.

Janice Saunders, who graduated from Fleming a couple of years after Garren and who spent 25 years teaching at Roanoke College, called that era "an age of innocence."

"It really was a community raising children," she said of the Williamson Road area. "This was before everything broke loose in the '60s. We had not heard of Vietnam at that point. We were really protected. We almost lived in cocoons in a sense."

Schools were racially segregated then and Fleming was a white school, competing against its crosstown rivals at the former Jefferson High School.

In 1961, three years after Garren graduated, the school system opened a new building for William Fleming. In 2009, that building will be replaced by a new structure for the school. Which means that the current crop of seniors will also see future generations go to school in new buildings.

"It's not really the building so much," Garren said. "It's the people you've been with for your days in high school and the faculty and staff that helped you and that you learned from and that were there to support you."

After graduating, Garren went to National Guard basic training before returning to the area and enrolling as a commuter student at Roanoke College in midyear. Money was tight, he recalled. He fashioned a tripod to cook hot dogs for lunch over a Bunsen burner in the science labs where he spent much of his time.

Garren later went to work for NASA, picking up a master's degree in mathematics from the College of William and Mary along the way. He returned to Roanoke College for what was supposed to be a year of teaching math while he worked on his dissertation at Virginia Tech. That year stretched into more than three decades of teaching at the college and eventually becoming vice president and dean of the college.

Garren recalled that after he returned to Roanoke College as a professor, "I went back to that lab and to that table and reached under the table and that coat hanger and my tripod were still there."

In 2001, he took over as president of Lynchburg College, a job he calls "a perfect fit."

He hadn't set out to be a college president. The opportunity came up and he took it, he said. But he's found that career plans tend to get sidetracked, a point he said he will share with the Fleming graduates today.

"Take advantage of the opportunities," he said. "It may not be what you would like but take advantage of what's available to you because you'll be surprised with what you can make of it."