Crank Dat Kerouac

By Dan Turygan

Greetings and best wishes to all of the former wearers of the maroon and gray who graduated in ’68. It seems kind of ironic that I’m writing this little article because I wasn’t in the mainstream, nor was I fond of my four years there. I had wanted to be a “Florence Flash” instead, but my parents had other ideas and dictated that it was either HC or reform school. Some choice, huh? The trip to Delran was longer than I liked, and till I had wheels it was a bummer. In fact even then it was a bummer due to the temperament of the car I had! I never kept a diary of my years there, and to be quite honest I only revisited HC once for my brother’s back-to-school night. In fact I never saw any of my old classmates till our 20th and 30th reunions and realized what a decent bunch of classmates I was blessed with. My classmates not only remembered me but also were friendly to me.

Now 40 years have gone by – almost a half a century and I’m trying to remember the setting of the school I spent four years in. I must admit the memory is fuzzy and I’ve had to review my yearbooks from time to time. I remember that at the time we were freshmen (1964), some development was taking place amongst the farmland along Route 130, and it seemed to me both welcome and exciting. Willingboro was still called Levittown when we started and it was promoted as the model of the wave of development. Towns named Pennsauken, Moorestown, Maple Shade, and Cinnaminson were totally unknown to me since I was from the upper end of Burlington County. I was impressed when I saw the Mister Donut shop, and I loved the girl on the swing at Bayard’s Chocolate House when she waved to me. I didn’t realize she was being paid to wave to everyone at the time. Holiday Lakes was still around and still a popular summer fun place for the Willingboro crowd.

Who can forget the junkyard at the entrance of the school? Down the road (130), there was an Amoco gas station (Hankins) and all his Model A’s. Millside Farms was nearby, and I always daydreamed looking at its barns, silos, cows, and the Divco trucks. We all visited the Cowtail Bar and stared at the two headed calf stuffed on the wall there. Some of us also had Millside Farms deliver their milk to our homes each morning. By the time we graduated in 1968, Millside Farms, Bond Bread, Freihoffer’s Bread, Dugan’s Bakery, and Abbott’s Dairy had ended home deliveries. We now all went to supermarkets like Food Fair, A&P, Acme, ShopRite, etc. Of course if you really wanted to eat in style we walked or cruised to one of new McDonald’s near our school. There were some Burger Chefs around with the 15-cent hamburger, and Burger King was in its early stages. 7/11 was the new convenience chain, and we all tried the Slurpee. To kids nursed on local mainstay, “A Toast,” this was novel stuff. We also could now go the convenience store and buy ice cream whenever we wanted it rather than wait for Mr. Softee, Good Humor, and Freezer Fresh trucks to come to our neighborhood. (Note: Mr. Softee is still around but lately seems to be a victim of being robbed often in various neighborhoods. Such are the times!) Wawa was still a little dairy farm in Pennsylvania and not the giant it is today.

Since I came from a rural small town atmosphere with “Mom and Pop” stores (penny candy and Topps baseball cards sold here) and a drugstore soda fountain, this was really the big time! There was even shopping centers along Route 130! These things all showed that we were now moving into a new look for the suburbs. I think a lot of us were excited by all the modern stuff in what is then referred to as the “Space Age.”

Sounds of ‘68

Music really started to change drastically during our years at HC. Johnny Be Goode, Runaround Sue, Elvis, Johnny Angel and Teen Angel were now under siege from a thing called the British Invasion. I remember Michelle Bell bringing a news clipping to our class about a group called the Beatles, and the boys wondered who they were while the girls were all swooning over them. Philly disc jockeys were still hanging on to the Philly area stuff like DooWop, Bobby Rydell, the Dovells, and Frankie Avalon. Jerry Blavat, AKA the Geator (WCAM), was trying to hold his own as British Invasion took place. WIBG (Hy Lit and Joe Niagara) and WFIL/Philly 56 (George Michael, Jim Nettleton, and Dangerous Dan Donovan) ruled the AM (yes, AM) airwaves. The Beatles, Dave Clark 5, Rolling Stones, Petula Clark, Seekers, Herman’s Hermits, and the Monkees grooved us those underclass years. This was followed by the redone 1967 Beatles and Sgt. Pepper’s. Poor Elvis was still stuck till 1968 doing those terrible movies.

Ed Weber in my homeroom was into music big time. He brought in clippings of music events like Otis Redding’s plane crash and talked for hours about a new album the Beatles were working on called Sgt. Pepper’s. When it was released, it took us and the music world by storm and nothing was the same after that. We actually listened more to the lyrics than danced to them. Was the rumor true about playing the record backwards to hear messages? Was Paul dead? Was John telling us to trip on LSD with Lucy in the Sky? By 1967 many groups with exotic names were on the charts including the Human Beinz, Cyrcle, Mott the Hoople, Deep Purple, Outsiders, Troggs, Music Explosion, John Friend and His Playboy Band, Mamas and Papas, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Lovin’ Spoonful, the Byrds, etc., while the old guard (DooWop) was overwhelmed by Brits. Motown still held its own with Temps, Four Tops, and the Supremes. Then there was Donovan, the Association, Jefferson Airplane, and Iron Butterfly, the McCoys, Sam the Sham, Question Mark and the Mysterians - all entering the scene while Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys went their separate ways. Some of the new music groups really promoted the use of drugs openly although I can’t remember anyone doing the stuff in school. Was “Along Comes Mary” about marijuana? Was Sunshine Superman Donovan telling us in “Mellow Yellow” to smoke banana peels?

A few of us smoked cigarettes to be cool, but that’s as far as we went because if we got caught with the smokes we faced expulsion and shame. To be a man it was understood only Marlboro, Lucky Strike, and Camels (all unfiltered) were the brands to carry. It was only much later we learned that all but one of the Marlboro men died from lung cancer.

By the summer following graduation we were hearing something called Psychedelic Music with Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” and who can forget the Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s “Fire”? The latter actually performed with a fiery football helmet atop his head! Some of us of later would get inspired to visit the west coast by “California Dreamin’” (Mamas and Papas) and “San Francisco” by Scott Mackenzie. Others would (after hearing Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”) want to follow Captain America and Billy on Harleys and Hondas. Some wanted to get the old VW van and do a “Going up the Country” preached by Canned Heat. In those four years we not only saw a drastic transformation of music but the most prolific times for bands and the many garage bands /one-time wonders.

Now we drive our kids (and dare I say grandchildren) nuts with our music as they do us (if you can call it music). It’s funny though that the music has lasted and continues to thrive, despite rap.

Haircuts, Movies, TV, Sports, Books

Culture-wise our group was actually going from standards and norms we had from the fifties to now the bold new world of the sixties. The boys were also going into a transformation from the common and acceptable flattop/crew to the Beatle mop top. Girls were finding out they didn’t always need to wear skirts but could wear jeans too and eventually stopped putting their hair in a huge hairsprayed top. I think sometime in this period pantyhose was invented but not too sure exactly when. We didn’t wear the Nehru jackets or Carnaby fashion, but the times “they were a changing.” We still had to wear those uniforms, but a few of us, once we got into the parking lot, shed those ties and blazers. We were happy to wear the tee shirts and didn’t need nor heard of silk-screening or stenciling.

Most of us came from traditional families, and some of us wanted to continue that tradition, loved their small town environment, and were quite happy and content to plan their future in those parameters. Proms, phone chats, movies, sock hops, football games, pep rallies, etc., were pretty good activities for a social life. Others of us were reading Jack Kerouac novels and wanted to literally hit the road and the west coast. Some of the boys were still greasers and actually used Vaseline on their hair and had the “ducktail.” I can’t remember how strict the grooming standards were about that. None of us went the total revolt scene by growing beards, although I’m sure we had some beatniks in hiding. Remember this was early on. By 1967 and ‘68 “beatnik “ and his bongo drums kind of disappeared from the American vocabulary, while “hippy” now emerged along with a word “groovy,” which some suspect came from the 45rpm needle in the groove and playing perfect.

TV shows evolved during our years from typical TV family sitcoms like Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, and Westerns (Lone Ranger, Cheyenne, etc.) to rather unique shows like Laugh-In, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Girl from UNCLE, Star Trek, Get Smart, My Mother the Car (anyone admit to watching that one?), Route 66, My Living Doll, I Dream of Jeannie, Beverly Hillbillies, and a ground-breaking idea of having a friendly not evil brain-eating alien visit us with My Favorite Martian. Of course Sci-Fi continued to spin out Irwin Allen sequels like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the Time Tunnel, and the camp classic Lost in Space. Was I the only one who wondered about Dr. Smith and his interest in Will Robinson? Maybe that’s why the robot always blurted “Danger, Danger, Will Robinson!” We were the kids that saw the first editions of Gilligan’s Island (not the eternal reruns) and some of us remembered Bob Denver as Maynard B. Krebbs from Dobie Gillis. I certainly remember Ginger and Mary Anne. Military shows like Combat, Gomer Pyle USMC, and McHale’s Navy were also popular till the Vietnam War soured folks’ views of war. The best example I can give on how entertainment has changed is to use Batman. No one can ever forget (as try as we can) the campy Adam West/ Burt Ward Batman TV show from its theme song to the cartoons and word balloons used during the show. Looking at the Tim Burton recent Batman movies with its dark side themes, it bears a sharp contrast to the earlier, simpler, and more carefree times.

It was also during the time we were at HC that a football playoff game called the Superbowl was being discussed and done by the NFL. In baseball the relatively new Mets were still losing, while Brooklyn was still missing its former team the Dodgers. In boxing we all knew of Cassius Clay before he became Muhammed Ali.

Movies had the old regulars like John Wayne, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Mitchum, Liz Taylor, etc., take on newcomers, some which were rather unique to say the least – Russ Meyers’ Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill!, Born Losers, Billy Jack, Easy Rider, Magical Mystery Tour, The Magic Christian, Jesus Christ Superstar - movies that could occur only in the sixties. I actually loved those movies, which probably says a lot about me. Prior to these movies, the most controversial stuff from the Catholic school viewpoint was the Elvis movies with the girls in bikinis. I always wondered in all those movies about the guitars that always happened to appear when he decided to go into a song. Popular mainstream movies with equally popular songs were Valley of the Dolls, The Graduate, Doctor Zhivago, and Lawrence of Arabia. And Bonnie and Clyde not only graced the screens but their theme music also hit the airwaves.

The drive-ins and small town movie theatres were in their last days but none of us really realized it at the time.

Bookwise we were reading the standard tried and true material in school: Latin, the Bible, History, English literature (Shakespeare) were required reading, but some of us were browsing through Catch-22, Portnoy’s Complaint, “Howl”, The Dharma Bums, Steal This Book, and a few other “radical” books along with the guys reading “Playboy” and somewhere about then came “Playgirl.” Girls started also to read The Feminine Mystique and started to argue with the guidance counselor about more careers than teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. Some wanted to be lawyers, enter politics, become judges -- shocking then! I was all for women’s lib at that tender age mainly because I wanted to have more of them in my classes instead of seeing them enter home economics, secretarial, or typing classes and hoped I was lucky enough to see them at lunch.

Politics and the War

Politically we entered frosh year still numbed from our idol and leader JFK’s death. His brutal death on the TV screen was akin to our parents’ Pearl Harbor and our children’s and our own 9/11. During our four years we followed the civil rights movement and heard about Malcolm X’s brutal murder, saw the Birmingham March on TV, graduated on the heels of Dr. King’s and Bobby Kennedy’s murders. It seems we entered as frosh with violence and graduated with more of the same. Most of us having sheltered lives were shocked by the murder, beatings, and attacks on our black peers in the South. We witnessed the beginning of the long hot summer and many of us were entering college when Abbie Hoffman had his Festival of Life in Lincoln Park, Chicago. Some of us probably got involved later in college protests in this age of student activism.

Vietnam was on our minds more and more as we neared graduation as we saw it on TV nightly and wondered if we should go or say “no.” Our fathers had won the last war and were heroes. Some of us were expected to follow duty even though we couldn’t understand when and where the North had provoked us by some sneak attack. We had heard about an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin and supported LBJ’s response. After all he was our respected President and had started a thing called the Great Society and a War on Poverty. Watergate later destroyed this blind trust in the Presidency.

I strongly suspected that my homeroom teacher Mr. O’Hora was against the war by some of the stuff on our bulletin board. I remember the spy ship Pueblo being captured. Believe it or not they still have the ship as a monument in North Korea. I know the Summer of Love happened in ’67, but I don’t remember any of us doing our thing then in San Francisco or driving the minibus to Haight and Ashbury to hand out flowers. It seems all hell broke loose in the US the year we graduated (not our doing) starting with the Tet Offensive, LBJ's not choosing reelection, the political murders, the race riots, Charlie Manson, Stokely Carmichael’s “Black Power’ slogan, and the Black Panthers with their slogan “Move on over or we’ll move over you!” If we already were uncertain about our futures before graduation, this last year sure as hell wasn’t reassuring us.

Cars, Cars, Cars!

We were stuck for a few years in those God-awful GMC 40s buses. The worn shocks and the smell of diesel fuel greeted us and accompanied us to HC each day till we got our wheels. Once we boarded those old gray/blue Public Service buses, our day began as we scrambled for the best seats to do our homework for that day. At least I did, which might explain my grades. The ride was long and we actually had some kids as far as Pemberton make the trip.

For your own wheels and independence, there were still Model As and fat-fendered Fords for a cheap price, and that could be souped up by visiting the many junkyards in the area. You could virtually walk into the yard with your toolbox (if the owner liked you) and pull the part you wanted back then. I frequented a junkyard in Friendship often and saw a lot of classic tin. I got some good stuff at decent prices and usually brought the owner a 6-pack to get those decent prices. [If you’re actually reading this, I might interject that someone of legal age got me the beer in case you’re wondering.] Going to these yards before the DEP and the EPA were even a thought of was almost like a museum tour going past the wrecks and wondering what brought them there and the fate of their riders. I know Beverly and Mount Holly also had these common junkyards - so many of us had similar experiences. Most of the cars had character and endurance compared to the cookie cutter/throwaways of today. It was another thing which made cars fun. Automatic trannys were replacing the reliable clutch as more folks drove in ever-increasing traffic and got tired of the constant shifting. MOPAR suddenly appeared as a word with new words like muscle cars, Shaker, six pack, Road Runner, 4by4, 283, 289, hemi, 409, etc. Cars named Road Runner, Duster, Belvedere, Fury, Marlin, and Malibu, Bel Air, Barracuda, Corvair, and Falcon appeared in the HC parking lot, and on weekends a few played at a remote place in the Pine Barrens called ATCO. We all loved our cars, with the ultimate freedom and the identity it gave you - unless of course you had a car like mine that overheated constantly and stalled at red lights. When it did run, it swayed down the highway like a hound dog looking for a scent due to a worn steering box and kingpins. We witnessed the appearance of the Mustang and Camaro, while the massive lead sledded, overfinned, and overchromed dinosaurs of the fifties went out the door.

We were all in love with and dazzled by Lew Hassell's Vette. (Wasn’t it a Stingray?) ‘57 Chevies were common and relatively inexpensive - who would guess their price of $25k+ now? Kathy Reynolds had a ‘57 red Chevy. I really liked that car and wondered how her Dad was able to afford it. Well, our senior year she showed up in the parking lot with a red ‘61 Chevy CONVERTIBLE, and again I really liked that car and wondered how the hell she could afford it. I found out about six months ago that her dad had been a used car dealer who kept giving her cars after they blew up and always painted them red.

A strange little car that had good gas mileage (but who cared then at about 35 cents to 54 cents a gallon) and a small air-cooled engine appeared. The Volkswagon Beetle was fondly called “the Bug” and would later become a symbol of the sixties. Hadn’t heard yet of the Nissan (Datsun) or the Toyota. Detroit was king and everyone wanted some muscle in their cars and a tiger in their tank. Besides, as kids we experienced a lot of Japanese tin toys and transistor radios, which were cheap and cheaply made. “Made in Japan” was usually an insult. Boy, has that image changed!

We still had Esso gas, and how many of us remember the “Flying A,” Sinclair Oil’s Dino the dinosaur, and Cities Service before it became Citgo? How many parents collected those S&H Green Stamps?

Some of us got to use those muscle cars or hot rods in the “sticks” of South Jersey or on River Road. There was a large stone wall along River Road that many cars hit after going too fast around the bend. I can’t remember exactly what town it was, although I’d like to guess Beverly. That was all about to change too, when most of the country roads became surrounded by development, as did Millside Farms. No more chicken races or “pedal-to-metal motions” if you wanted to live and not get ticketed. I guess traffic was less congested then if you took Route 73 to the shore when there were actually peach tree and apple farms between Maple Shade (Shady Maple) and Marlton and the beach communities, and few red lights.

Most of us I imagine hit the boards at the Wildwoods and maybe stayed with our families in motels called the Satellite, Bel Air, Sea Scape, Carribean, Mauna Kea, and the Lollipop. It was a big thing back then to go to the “shore” and not like the mob scene today. At night we’d cruise the boards and maybe go to the Starlight Ballroom to bop, stroll, stomp, and maybe meet new friends or find that summer romance.

The traffic cloverleaf was a novel idea along with the traffic circles, which you could actually enter with relative ease and without fear.

At School

The school and its rules were kind of a bummer to most of us I guess. The girls had to wear the beanies in the Church Chapel and we still prayed in Latin at least those first few years and I personally had no idea what most of the words meant. We all were bred with a fear of the wrath of God and tried to live up to the school and its motto and rules. This was a follow-up to the Catholic elementary schools most of us came from. Our parents had spent a lot of money to get us here, and there was a sense of humiliation if we didn’t make the grade and were sent to a public school. I hated detention, the hall monitors, and wearing a uniform, particularly the tie, and I wished the girls didn’t have a dress code for my own selfish reasons. The nuns to me seemed to be shrouded phantoms rather than real people. PE to me got tough when I had my asthma attacks, but I had to suck it up and deal with running the track looking at the black, stone-covered ground, ready to barf. My biggest nemesis in PE was climbing that damn rope in gym to the rafters. In those days it was make it or be transferred out, and the only place our gym teachers could find the word “sympathy” was in the dictionary. Dodge ball was at least fun, and it was a real treat to actually see the girls in their suits doing their activities - yes, it was still segregated back then if we try to remember. I think we even had a wall in the gym dividing our groups.

I absolutely hated biology and those dissections of grasshoppers, frogs, and cats. I felt absolutely ghoulish doing my butchery work, and I can still smell the scent of that embalming fluid to this day. I picked Joey Shields as my lab partner since he had a stronger stomach than me, and he didn’t disappoint me.

My parents selected my curriculum and courses. Back then we had college prep, business, and general course groups. I wanted to take some shop classes, but I don’t even think they were offered. I got college prep and that included Latin. I staged my revolt with Latin as a dead and useless language. I told my teacher Latin was a dead language that needed to be buried. I got out of Latin but instead of going to a German class, I was sent into Spanish and Mr. Dean.

The HC staff, which got us through this, included the late Father Cartier, who died before we could graduate. I remember he had came in to observe our afternoon English class junior year and then abruptly left looking very pale. We were in shock when we heard he had died (if memory serves me right) of a heart attack.

Before we got Father Capik as our new leader, the Reverend Frank Sergel (our Vice Principal) took the helm. His way of discipline was unique. Instead of praying for us, he used to threaten us with things like cutting bait for his deep sea fishing trips or his “self defense” instruction – a one-on-one bout in the gym. This guy was on to us and on us from Day 1. With his Brooklyn accent, he struck fear into a few of our hearts with his “you have as much chance of graduating as a snowball in hell” speech. This was given to our same English class, which was a bit out of control at the time. There were complaints from other teachers and other classes about the “energy level” of our group. I think this came about the same time a rumor was running that one of the HC buses had mooned some drivers on Route 130. Father Sergel came in to “observe” our little group of hooligans, and when we were discussing Stephen Crane’s book The Open Boat and its theme of survival, that’s when he took the podium and made his speech on survival. Father Sergel gave us a very enthusiastic and descriptive lecture about action and its consequences. Lesson learned!! I later had him as an instructor and was impressed, particularly when he called on Mark Dougherty in that accent of his.

I also remember Father Russo, who had a mission to guide me to a midwestern university seminary in hopes I would see the way out of my misdeeds. In fact with my grades he made a point of saying that while this school was not Ivy League or top flight, I might “have a chance” if I worked hard. I did, but that’s another story.

Sister Edmund was an institution we will never see again -- her purple cow and her dad being a drummer boy in the Franco-Prussian War. (My God! How old was this woman?) I also left class thinking the Germans had won the First World War! She was a very nice lady, but my first impression of her wasn’t the best. She actually told us she was going to have our class roster laid to rest with her when she died, and how girls were always trying to corrupt her “boys.” Needless to say, few coeds were in this class, and the ones that started the year transferred out for the most part.

We started to see more and more secular faculty then, including Mr. Burns, Mr. Ceremsak, Mr. Dean, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Stankiewicz, with his amazingly corny but funny puns. I also remember a young assistant football coach named Frank Paris, who as we all know was beginning a very long and distinguished career in Burlco football. The lay staff added a much-needed aspect to us, since they seemed to understand us and actually could relate to us and make class enjoyable. I still write right-handed, though I’m a natural lefty - too many hits with the ruler on the knuckles from elementary school. We were intimidated by some of the nuns!
Activities like football, track, and baseball gave some of us direction. Others chose to express themselves in the band, choir, and school plays. NHS, NBL, and FTA, etc., are all still in existence and give some link /commonality to present generation of students.

By June 1968 it was time to go, and like all of those before us and after us we wanted to escape the boredom, the discipline, the small world of South Jersey and move on. I do think however there were quite a few of my classmates that regretted leaving their friends and would miss the good times at HC. I remember some of the girls in tears and giving last embraces to their friends in their caps and gowns. I personally was in a daze during the whole ceremony, which was typical of my time there.

As for some of the staff, they too wanted some of us (like me) to move on, as those final months became a blur. The day after graduation a new chapter began in our lives as we all moved out and on. Some of us went out to challenge the world and see new sights. Some went to see South Vietnam and were challenged to stay alive and didn’t want to see those new sights! Others wanted to settle down and were quite happy with themselves, their lives and the world. Many went to college to change the world and to hopefully have the good life that their parents missed due to the Great Depression.

We scattered like the proverbial autumn leaves and, like the leaves, we float where the wind takes us and drop in for an occasional visit till the next wind and hopefully not the mulcher or compost pile. I don’t know how much we changed the world but I think in our own little ways and worlds, we made it a better place in some circles. Most of us survived and met our spouses and raised families and now pass our experiences and wisdom to the next generation. Others preferred the single and independent life and are quite happy. Some are resting on their laurels and fruits of their efforts, while others still wish to keep pursuing their work and their lives’ purpose.

Just like the leaves, we were thrown into HC from various South Jersey parishes for various reasons. Our first week was tough trying to get to class, figure what classes we were supposed to be at and not falling for the sophomores’ prank of sending us to the roof to see the swimming pool. The common classes, the challenges, and the activities forged bonds that have and will last a lifetime. The teen wonders have now become the golden boys and girls as our moments get more and more cherished.

We not only went through the sixties decade but also are into the next century! We’ve lived life long enough to appreciate how precious time is. This class and its times - the reality check is that we are beginning to lose our classmates, and by the time the 50th reunion rolls around our roster will be thinner. No one gets out of this story called “life” walking away. Sadly some have already departed this life, while others we walked with have not been seen since 1968. Reunions are where we get the chance to mingle and dance, have fun again and reaffirm or establish for the first time friendships that we should have known way back when. My wish is that we all have a lot more time to cherish as we raise our glasses and toast the Class of ‘68 – one indeed that is great! HC has not and will NOT see the likes of this class again! Here’s hoping that this little article brought some fond memories back and maybe even a smile. I’ve already talked to my solicitor, who advised me to keep out a lot of more details to prevent libel suits.

The New Forty

By Barbara Groark

Hello to the Holy Cross High School (Delran, New Jersey) 1968 graduates, and welcome to the HCHS 68 Reunion blog. I’m posting this with the knowledge of the 40th Reunion Committee, though they are not censoring me too severely, and intend to post a new article about every two weeks till Reunion Weekend (October 9-11, 2008). I’m going to treat this like a newspaper column, with some serious and some silly, rambling discussions. I hope you will feel free to respond – I’ll be reviewing and posting responses – we can have a discussion thread – oooh, techno-savvy, hey? Some people may want to be a guest writer here, or start your own blog. Send me the link if you do, so I can advertise it on this page.

We’ll probably have one last post after the reunion to wrap up and maybe show some pictures, and I can post pictures here any time at your request. I hope we have a lot of responses, and I hope a lot of people whom the Committee couldn’t get to by now can be found and show up in October.

A former work colleague of mine, when asked if he saw the TV movie The Sixties a few years ago, scowled and said, “I lived through that time and I have no desire to relive anything about it.” I understood that sentiment completely. But I watched the TV show. I came away thinking they were kinder than I thought they would be. It was neither a nostalgia piece nor a screed but an awkward portrayal of how one fictional Catholic family was bombarded by the chaos of the time. It did not tie up all loose ends, but was a decent attempt at explaining a few things to the kids who weren’t born yet at the time. Now if we who endured it could start understanding it, we’d be somewhere.

Here’s some summer reading if you haven’t got to it yet: Boom by Tom Brokaw, the TV network journalist, who focuses on 1968 as the center of what people call the sixties and actually considers 1963 (JFK’s assassination) the beginning and 1974 (end of the Vietnam War) the end of that decade. This blog will consider 1960 (our grade school years, when we were learning Latin responses to the Mass) the beginning, and 1979 (the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s volcano) the end. That’s because most of what people hate about the sixties actually happened in the seventies, although it’s true we were in a rather serene island in our high school years. Brokaw reminds us of the news stories of our freshman to senior years – the Watts riots, the March on Washington, draft-card burning, rockets to the moon – and discusses the aftermath of the sixties in the 1990s and 2000s. The book presents interviews from people now in their own sixties and seventies who in some cases were the noise-makers of that time. Most by now are pretty critical of themselves in their youth, a sign of health. But how about we younger people?

This blog will use the general “talking points” of the Brokaw book as starting points but will talk about the topics from our younger perspective and often my personal perspective (hey, I’m the Decider). I believe the age we were when certain events happened had a profound effect on how we all dealt with them. For many years now, when I look back, I’m grateful I at least got a high school education before the feces hit the fan, and some friends are glad they got college completed by 1968. There is real cold anger, a sense of having been shortchanged and insulted, in our younger siblings, however, the kids who were in eighth grade at the time, or fourth grade. The big adult emotions of shock and grief were hard enough to handle for eighteen-year-olds. As for some of those just born in the 1980s, they are not even aware they are missing anything.

The Brokaw book is a good start of a really big and needed discussion, not co-opted by the extreme political and religious right, nor by just the same old people who were talking then. I’ve noticed lately the artist class is doing a lot of reviewing of our American basics in pop culture, even with just the re-doing of older songs on the radio or revivals of plays on Broadway. Maybe all that’s a sideways encouragement to the rest of us to recall ourselves, too, however high-tech we’ve become. I’ve been too appalled to speak for about thirty years. Our age group has got to start talking. Time to teach, but not in order to bring back any good old days. There’s enough to do for now and the future.

To paraphrase a line in the old song by The Who: “We won’t be fooled again!” – or at least by now we can only be fooled for a few minutes; then we catch on; there are some advantages to aging. I think we need to help our kids and grandkids to get through our current crazy decade, not by telling them to do what we did (anyway, I did much less than people thought I did, although I did inhale occasionally), but teaching them what we were taught before the feces hit the fan: how to survive the feces hitting the fan. And get on the YouTube and MySpace wild kingdoms besides.

Check out the documentary DVD The Weather Underground, also not a nostalgia piece, about some of the general noise of the sixties and seventies. Compare with the PBS special about Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law and organizer of the Peace Corps. Shriver and the Kennedy’s had idealistic college rich kids, the really smart people, preparing to be the next generation of leaders in the first half of the sixties with ideas of liberty and justice and clean drinking water and education for all; whereas the last part of the decade and into the seventies had the same class of really smart college rich kids becoming anarchists who desired to overthrow by any means – but bombing was the most fun – the government of the United States. Again, several of the surviving Weather Underground members interviewed in the DVD are not too proud of their old selves and even seem bewildered by what happened. Even they recovered themselves somewhat, even if it is while sitting in prison.

And besides that, when I look at pictures of myself from high school, especially senior year, I was not as fat as I thought I was then. I guess that’s the common “kid thinking” that we see in today’s generation, too. Some things are normal for the age group. [Question: “Puh, kids today, right?” Response: “Puh-retty much the same as kids every other day - except maybe there should be more dancing and fewer mosh pits. Hey, ballroom dancing is happening, at least for the middle-aged and the eleven-year-olds.”]

Another bit of reading I’ve been doing this past winter is to catch up with the Harry Potter series of kids’ books, just to see what Pottermania was all about, now that it’s wound down, and I’m a fan now as well. The novels are really “tales for young and old” as good kids’ books should be – don’t I recognize my old boss or colleague in the Ministry of Magic? Or some Holy Cross classmates or teachers at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? The author Rowling is all for the kids, as good as Star Wars was in its time. Though she deals in witches and wizards and Muggles, she has some hilarious social and political commentary worked in with these metaphors. I’ve concluded that every school is a Hogwarts School, though I don’t remember anyone being quite the equivalent of the evil Lord Voldemort (He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) at Holy Cross. We had Mervil Haas though. Still, she wasn’t as bad as some of the professors or bosses I’ve had since high school. But thank goodness for the Order of the Phoenix. I wish I’d known them then.