40 Year High School Reunion

The following is the essay I read at the reunion of the Wawasee High School Class of 1971 on August 6, 2011.

At graduation, some of us could have accurately said to each other, “See you in the next century.” Hard to believe, but here we are, 40 years later, dripping with nostalgia, and at our age, we’re lucky if that’s all that’s dripping. But here we are, still standing…or sitting down…or possibly lying down as the evening progresses.

We’ve seen a lot of changes in the world during our lifetimes. We came into a world shaped by a World War—the second and last World War, though there have been plenty of wars since then—Korea, the Cold War, Viet Nam, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so forth.

But WWII was the big one, and it changed our parents forever, though they might not have talked about it much. It gave them the satisfaction of fighting the good fight, of pulling together as a nation. Having lived through the worst of times, they saw the best of times ahead for them, and for us, their children. They liked Ike. They loved Lucy.

We were children of the 50s. You didn’t carry a phone with you then. You rented a phone—a single sturdy black phone—a phone with a dial—from Ma Bell, and it sat on its own piece of furniture in the living room. Even though dial phones have been extinct for decades, you still push the redial button to call someone back.

We grew up with television, with Miss Francis and Ding Dong School, with Captain Kangaroo, and Howdy Doody. With Disney in black and white and later the Wonderful World of Color, with Davy Crocket and coonskin caps, with Ed Sullivan and Elvis, but only from the waist up.

And we listened to the radio—AM stations, because that’s where the good music was. WOWO in Ft. Wayne, WLS and WCFL in Chicago. The only time we listened to FM was to hear Milo Clase broadcast the county basketball tourney on WRSW out of Warsaw.

We lived through the turbulent 60s, bombarded by ads for everything. Coke—the pause that refreshes, the real thing. I’d like to teach the world to sing. The Flintstones told us that Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. You don’t believe me? You can see the commercials with Fred and Barney puffing away on YouTube. By the way, it wasn’t until our graduation year of 1971 that cigarette ads were banned from TV.

And still we listened to music—on transistor radios, on 45s and LPs, and eventually on those awesome 8 track tapes, and the even more amazing cassettes.

24/7 news was unknown when we were kids. We got our TV news once a day from Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley. Local news came from real reporters like Harry Kevokian on channel 22, who was more concerned about current events than how his hair looked.

In our youth, computers filled rooms and cost millions of dollars. To have computers in your home, your car, or on your lap was unthinkable. We suffered through chemistry class with slide rules. Then in 1971 the microprocessor was invented and pocket calculators could be had for a few hundred dollars. There were no ebooks or iphones or email when we were in school. Only birds tweeted and Amazon was a river or a really big woman. Back then, text was a noun, something you produced with a typewriter, and the only thing you used your thumbs for was the space bar. You didn't delete your mistakes, you erased them, or covered them up with white fluid. Now text is also a verb, something we do with our thumbs, on devices that fit in our purses and pockets.

We remember where we were when JFK was shot, and how our little world seemed less secure after it happened. The summer of love came and went in 1967. We might have read about hippies in LIFE magazine and dreamed of wearing flowers in our hair, but we had to bale hay or work at other summer jobs. A guy needed money to buy V-neck sweaters he could tuck into his pants when fall came. Like many of our fashion statements, tucking one’s sweater into his pants seems laughable now. The girls, of course, could not wear pants to school. But we all have fond memories of mini skirts.

Change accelerated during our high school years. The assassinations continued in 1968 with Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. In 1969, we watched men walk on the moon. In 1970, students died at Kent State. Protests and riots became commonplace. We felt the rumblings of change from afar on our farms, in our small towns, on our lake shores and creek banks, but there were crops to be harvested, football two-a-days to suffer through, and homecoming floats to be made, and life went on.

And here we are, four decades later—children of the fifties, geezers of the twenty-first century. It's been quite a ride. Thank you and enjoy the evening.

Spiro and Me

Spiro T. Agnew by William Frederick Behrends

It should be obvious to even the casual reader of Lugubrious Drollery that the author has a tendency to play for laughs, often with rather sorry results. This trait goes way back. One example from my high school days came to mind recently. For reasons that escape me now, the local paper published personal profiles of at least some of the seniors. It was a small class, and they may have featured everyone during the school year. As I recall, there was no interview involved, but rather a form to be filled out with vital facts about interests and extracurricular activities, and so forth. I was, for the most part, truthful until I got to the question about favorite book. In general, I have trouble answering questions about favorites. Color? Don't really care. Food? Key lime pie, perhaps, but then again, what about sweet potatoes, or Jarlsberg cheese, or M&Ms? You have no idea what an effort it was for me to come up with even that short list.

And when it comes to books, well, there are just too many possibilities. So, for my senior profile, I invented a book out of thin air--The Life and Times of Spiro T. Agnew. I guess the local weekly paper didn't have a fact-checking staff, because this little prevarication got published.

Why did Mr. Agnew pop into my head at the crucial moment? It's hard to tell. The name just sounds funny to begin with, he was funny-looking, and he seemed a cariciture of conservatism in an age of social upheaval (1970-71). His attack on the press as "nattering nabobs of negativism" is a classic, whether he wrote it himself or not. As vice president, Agnew became an icon of all that was wrong--and there was so much--with the Nixon administation, not unlike Dick Cheney during the last 8 years. Agnew resigned from office in disgrace before his boss, Tricky Dick Nixon did, setting the stage for Gerald Ford to be named VP and then to rise to the Presidency when Nixon resigned. I must thank Agnew for adding the legal phrase nolo contendere to my vocablulary. In 1972, he pleaded no contest to charges of tax evasion, stemming from his shady activities as governor of Maryland before his terms as vice president.

I recently discovered that despite his legal troubles and subsequent disbarment, a bust of old Spiro is displayed in the Capitol. Back in 1886, the Senate passed a resolution that a marble bust of each vice president should be placed in the Capitol. Considerable foot dragging occurred when it came to commissioning a bust of Agnew, but ultimately, some 22 years after he resigned, Agnew appeared at the unveiling of his bust in 1995.

Agnew was such a cultural icon, that he appeared on a watch, a la Mickey Mouse. I didn't own a Spiro Agnew watch, but I was able to buy a T-shirt with an image of one. I still have this T-shirt and cling to it as symbol of my lost youth, even if I can't fit into it anymore.


Well, as usual, I have strayed far afield from the topic at hand. I started off discussing humor--sort of. Rather than follow the trend of some bloggers and reveal my innermost angst and psychic aberrations (cue Morris Albert singing "Feelings"), I chose to include terms I find amusing in my Blogger profile. I thought I was being fairly original. I should have known better. One of the features of the Blogger profile is that the key words entered there are hyperlinked to other Blogger profiles with the same key words. Thus, when I click on the words I listed as "interests," I find the following numbers of people who used the same words:

Shiny objects: 1000
Concrete: 307
Dust bunnies: 29
Weather Maps: 3
Hockey Pucks: 3
Dietary Fiber: 1
Tropical parasites: 1

Considering the millions and millions of pathetic losers in the blogosphere, I guess coming up with the same phrase as even 1000 other bloggers is relatively original. At least for the time being, I can claim to be unique in my interest in dietary fiber and tropical parasites. And wouldn't the world be a better place if more people joined me?


Link to U.S. Senate Art and History page about Spiro T. Agnew
Link to article about Agnew watch at "I Remember JFK"
Link to my Blogger profile

Reunion 2006

Here is a poem I read at the 35th reunion of the class of 1971 of Wawasee High School.

Reunion

Full circle we have come
to a gym such as this--
once the nexus, the heart
of small towns like ours--
a hardwood-floored temple.

In gyms such as this
we congregated
Friday nights
for the blessed rites
of basketball.

In gyms such as this
the sacrament
of vaccine
on sugar cubes
spared us
from polio's scourge,
from crutch and iron lung.

In gyms such as this
were Jonah Club Fish Fries held.
We shared fishes and loaves:
deep-fried cod
and Wonder Bread.

In gyms such as this
we gathered
for judgment,
costumed for Halloween.

In gyms such as this
we gathered
for drama, for comedy,
for music.

In a gym such as this
restless adolescents
became
robed angels, proceeding,
singing Adeste Fidelis,
mounting risers
to become
a living Christmas Tree.

Outside gyms such as this
our chariots awaited--
the cars of the fortunate sons:
swing low, sweet GTO,
Corvette, Camaro.
And the cars with character--
Mary Ellen's Dragon Wagon,
Susi's Studebaker.
And the mundane rides
of the rest of us--
Volkswagen, Falcon, Rambler.

In gyms such as this
we
sweat,
cheered,
danced,
laughed,
cried,
fought,
loved.

In a gym such as this
we gathered
for commencement--
the beginning to all
that lay ahead
and now lies behind,
beneath the dust
of three decades and a half--
an end to school,
a farewell to friends.

Friends,
full circle we have come
to a gym such as this.
Let us savor our memories.
Let us savor our remaining time.
Let us savor the night.