Dorothy and Frederick Irving, Class of ’39, were among the 250 people who attended the recent Classical High alumni dinner. The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

PROVIDENCE — By the time he was midway through Classical High School, Frederick Irving was smitten; he knew he wanted to spend his life with one of his classmates, Dorothy Petrie.

“I was in love with her but she wasn’t in love with me,” Irving said in an interview last week, as a twinkle appeared in his eye and a small, droll smile crossed his face.

At the time, Dorothy Petrie was not seriously interested in boys; she socialized, she said, with many male and female friends, focusing on her studies in Latin, German, English and chemistry.

It was the 1930s, and the Depression gripped the United States. Adolf Hitler had ambitions that would postpone the hopes and wishes of a generation of young Americans.

After their graduation from Classical in 1939, Irving and Petrie walked separate paths, he to Brown University and she to Mount Holyoke College. She became a teacher at a public elementary school.

Irving joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and became a navigator on a B-24 bomber. He was shot down over Hungary, taken prisoner by the Germans and was tortured.

A mutual friend from Classical told Petrie of Irving’s service. Thinking it her patriotic duty to “write to our boys overseas,” she corresponded with him frequently, both while he was a navigator and when he was a prisoner.

She wondered whether the antics of her third-grade class in New Jersey would interest a man who was risking his life in the military.

This was just one of the many stories that flowed last week at the Providence Marriott hotel at a $75-a-person Classical High School Alumni Association dinner to honor distinguished graduates and raise money for the school. Honored alumni spanned nearly half the 20th century, from a 1941 graduate to a 1990 grad.

Nostalgia mixed with pride in their school, which they still view as the crown jewel of the Providence public school system. The school has traditionally prepared people from humble backgrounds to attend some of the nation’s best colleges.

Cocktails were poured, friendships were revived and old stories told.

Diversity wasn’t a word in vogue in the 1930s, but Frederick Irving remembered Classical as a school that nurtured ambitious students regardless of their economic status. “It was the proverbial melting pot. There were lots of kids from immigrant families, first- and second-generation Americans” and a sprinkling of black students.

Among the more than 250 alums who thronged the cocktail hour and dinner were leaders of the state’s political, business, legal and educational establishment and others who have had distinguished careers beyond Rhode Island’s borders. In attendance were Bruce Sundlun, a former governor; Bruce M. Selya, 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals senior judge; Dr. Edward Iannuccilli, retired chairman of the board of trustees at Rhode Island Hospital; Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, the children’s advocacy organization; Vernon Alden, retired president of Ohio University; Providence real estate investor James Winoker, and Kendra King, director of urban studies at Oglethorpe University.

Classical was the school that molded the lives of generations of students. Perhaps the most distinguished was the late John Pastore, the first Italian-American elected to the U.S. Senate. Pastore was raised in a tenement on then-impoverished Federal Hill at the dawn of the 20th century.

Classical was Pastore’s first taste of the world beyond the Italian-American immigrant enclave. “Most of his teachers were of Yankee stock,” wrote Ruth Morgenthau, Pastore’s biographer. “They taught him a world filled with ancient heroes and ‘man-ennobling’ sport, a world much different from the realities of Federal Hill, replete at the time with squalor and political radicalism.”

Brown admitted Pastore, but he couldn’t afford to attend. Instead, he took a job dealing with consumer complaints at Narragansett Electric. He eventually went to a night law school and embarked on a political career that took him to the highest realms of the U.S. government before he retired in 1976.

Frederick Irving said many Classical grads of the World War II era joined the military. He came home in 1944 after troops led by Gen. George S. Patton liberated the German POW camp where he had been held.

When Petrie got word from their mutual Classical friend that Irving was alive and well, she arranged to meet him for a drink at the Biltmore hotel, the Jazz Age icon in downtown Providence. At 10:30 p.m. on a June evening in 1945, Irving walked up the stairs to the hotel’s cocktail lounge, then located on the second floor.

“At the Biltmore, when he appeared at the top of those stairs, I did know that this was the man with whom I wanted to spend my life,” she said in an interview over tea with her husband last week at the Marriott.

That night, Dorothy and Fred had a drink and spent the rest of the evening walking Providence’s streets.

“We found ourselves in front of Classical, where at 15, I had been so unready to think seriously about a man in my life; now at 23, I was ready. We embraced before those tall iron gates.”

They were married shortly after. Frederick Irving got a master’s degree at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and joined the U.S. State Department as a foreign service officer.

His motivation was at once simple and majestic: he said he had seen enough of war’s horrors and wanted to spend his life “trying to make sure there wouldn’t be another war.”

Over a distinguished career both at Foggy Bottom and overseas, Dorothy and Frederick Irving shared their lives, their careers and raised three children along the way.

Now 86, the Irvings are the subject of a self-published book written by Dorothy, titled This Too is Diplomacy.

The book recounts their time together in such postings as Austria, Iceland and Jamaica, where Fred Irving served as ambassador and Dorothy was what he calls his “unpaid equal.” She learned the language in Iceland, which endeared her husband to the locals, and she helped him heal wounds in Jamaica, where he succeeded as ambassador a man Frederick Irving describes as a wealthy Republican campaign fundraiser with racist views.

Now retired, the Irvings live in Belmont, Mass. They keep busy as volunteers, traveling with family members and staying on top of foreign affairs. The Iraq war, Frederick Irving says, “is a big mistake.”

A bumper sticker on his car reads, “Try Diplomacy, It Doesn’t Kill Anybody.”

If they could do it all over, they would, said this couple who finish each other’s sentences. Although Dorothy allows that she might have paid a bit more attention to Fred back in high school.

smackay@projo.com