Gray and Maroon [reunion photos]

By Barbara Groark


By strange coincidence, the only flowers left in my garden that the rabbits haven’t bitten down and that aren’t just done this time of year are the dusty miller (gray) and the red coleus plants (maroon). Interesting. Weird.


One piece of sad news from the reunion is that Mary Callahan of Moorestown has died. I have added her name to the “Moment of Silence” article.


I’m trying Picasa for the pictures. When you hit the link, you may be asked to sign in and make up a password, but there is no cost (more Google free stuff) and you may just get an email once in a while. You also may be asked to download the Picasa photo reader so your computer can read the pictures. So say “yes” to that, or “download now,” however you find it on your machine.


I’m sorry I did not get a photo or two at the Amendolas Sunday afternoon. Our numbers were few, and we were all too amazed at our house tour to be analytical enough to take pictures – is that the explanation? In any case, this was an area of neglect on my part. Carol and Tom were gracious hosts, and Tom has amazing collections of antique cars, radio and television sets, and other 20th century technology memorabilia on display – and is working on a really large train set, or system, in his spare time. Carol has a work area/sewing room in her basement where even more products of her fertile imagination eventually make their way upstairs. Everything is new, beautiful, and welcoming, even where it is unfinished. And Carol is blonde now, in case you run into her around town.


Here are three links to the still pics; many thanks to Dan Turygan, Marlene Altamuro Handschuh, and Mary Pippitt Cervantes for passing their photos over to round out my own:


Once at the album page, click once on the first picture, then use the Forward and Back arrow buttons, or you might click the Slideshow button on the album page (ESC button to return).


Friday and Saturday

Saturday Evening

Sunday Morning

The video did come out, though a bit dark. I’ll be getting them posted very shortly.

Between Self and Soul: A Voyage

By Barbara Groark (a poem from some time in the 1980s)

The Dream:

Through the pipe in his teeth, jaw thrust forward
Stubbs says, "We're going after Moby Dick."

I cling flat with both hands to the surfaced submarine,
black and adamantine,
through rough night seas. Waves break over,
but I stay. Behind me an old man in a white
suit and string tie with a little girl by the hand
walks on sea legs toward me through the wind.
I worry for their safety. The wind whips them over-
board. I say, "That doesn't happen."

I awake.

The Waking:
Several years later: Thar she blows. It's Moby Dick,
destroyer of men and boys.
All those boys at the bottom of the sea.
Thar she blows.

The captain's log,

But I am only the lookout.

Ahab is destroyed I hope. Who needs a mad captain?

Should women be in the navy and sail the seven seas?

Some may need to do hard things
their mothers didn't do for lack of knowledge
or courage or wherewithal or need.

Not every man would sail the seas.
Not every woman either. On the water, rocking
steady, boards creaking, the harpooneers watch the
water, the rowers wait, sometimes an hour. Sometimes
he gets away. All those boys at the bottom of the sea.
The captain now is Christ.

No danger of suicide
if we follow our leader.

No danger of suicide.
Moby Dick hates girls and grandfathers.
The girl is six or eight, the grandfather like Santa,
old enough to wobble, moves slowly enough
for a child’s pace. They are safe now behind a rail.
But the rest of us are with the boats and have the whale.
He's slippery and he is cruel.

A diabolic nature,

not human. His animal eyes look at you dully.

I'd been riding him, the whale, for several years.
Ahab beckoned from his back, a dead man beckoning.
I've been dead for several years now at the bottom of the sea.
I'm strange-looking, like those fish that never see the light.
There's no negotiating with him.

Safe, if you follow the leader.

There's no negotiating,
no reason in him.

Yet he has innocent prisoners.

Will they wash up whole on the shore, shaken but alive?
Will they scar like Ahab, marred, bitter, dangerous?
Will they be destroyed before we reach them?

Maybe we can only ease their deaths.
Our father will heal them. They will die to this world
and be with us in the next.

For some the next is now.

Unreason to combat unreason.
Unreason greater than their unreason.
Patience greater than their patience.
Strength greater than their seeming strength.

Patient as hell. Love with no room for fear.

That is what they most fear,
as you've noticed. It puzzles them, your confidence.

The Big World

By Barbara Groark

In a reinforcement to Dennis’s article urging classmates to put aside the everyday and unending chores for the Reunion Weekend and join us, I remember something from the time of the weeks after the 9/11/2001 events. I was working in a computer sciences firm, and we all had wound to a halt that day and were staring astounded at TVs and news sites on our computer screens. In the next few weeks an interesting phenomenon happened: we all started making more lunch dates with each other, instead of working through our lunch hours, or having working lunches. The unspoken thought was that maybe we ought to get to know our colleagues on a more personal level – we might die together someday. Why had we all become too busy? The lunches may have been needed reminders that we ourselves are not computers, or at least we are not strictly computers (computers being an imitation of some parts of the human brain).

We all eventually dropped back – almost – into our older habits, but now with more willingness to break routine occasionally. This thinking could be applied to the Reunion Weekend. Your joining us could be considered a patriotic duty.

Have you read The 9/11 Commission Report? Have you read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright? Have you read Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

I’m in the middle of The Looming Tower now and have read the other two in the past couple of years. Definitely not escapist reading, but escapism is not recommended in these times. We are constantly reminded to be in a state of alertness in airports, reminded to be aware of our cell phones in theatres and churches, told to get off the phone while driving in New Jersey or face a traffic ticket.

But the more some of us are warned to be alert, the more we wish to escape. Maybe it’s the teenager in all of us. We’ve just heard it all a million times and begin to stage little rebellions even if we agree with the general rule. Some part of us resists having to conform, and we may get overly involved in work or play or distraction.

I understand this. I know people who avoid watching the news on TV because they “can’t do anything about” the bad things that are happening; these are people who, when they see a problem, want to solve it or alleviate it as quickly as possible – you know, people our age. [“Let’s fix that thing.”] In a case like the suffering in Darfur, the problem seems too overwhelming to contemplate. So we prefer not to contemplate it. And there is a degree of health in sweeping around your own door and sticking to your knitting. We can always pray for Darfur. Couldn’t hurt. Heck, the bad guys are praying against us.

My complaint is with the “nothing ever changes anyway so why even vote” frame of mind. I’ve overheard a well-educated person I used to work with say, actually out loud: “All the stupid people vote. Why should I participate?” This seems to be a common view in technical fields. He didn’t want to get his hands dirty as a member of the elite. Voting is for people who need that sort of thing. I was too puzzled to respond as I worked out in my mind his line of thinking. It’s hard to even think that way. Doesn’t everyone breathe in and out? Doesn’t he?

But I’ve heard not so smart people saying the same things, but in their case it just seemed too much trouble to participate as a citizen of their country. The elections are a distraction from their own little worlds.

On the other hand (let’s see that’s three or four hands by now), after reading 20 or so years ago about the Haitians who got gunned down by Tonton Macoutes while waiting in line to vote in an election, I’ve been trying to maintain a policy of voting in every tiny general or school election that comes along – though I’ve missed a few lately. This makes me feel as if I’m avenging those Haitians somehow. I know this doesn’t make sense.

The big world is impinging rather more than it used to here in South Jersey. We’ve always had a little Mafia representation in Cherry Hill and Delran and Atlantic City. Now we have the Fort Dix Six, local radical Muslim immigrants who used pizza delivery to infiltrate Fort Dix and try to cause some death and destruction. They were not successful in their plans. Their trial is coming up. They are young guys whose families live in Cherry Hill. [Correction 8/4: the number of men on trial now is five, but another man was tried separately and sentenced to 20 months in March 2008.]

One of the things The Looming Tower discusses is how what we could call ‘mainstream’ Muslims are generally appalled by the thinking let alone the actions of the radical elements. Most mainstream Muslims, especially those who have a good relationship with modernity, want peace, prosperity, and the ability to educate their families. According to recent newspaper reports, they find ridiculous the old tribesmen who try to maintain the tradition of multiple wives. Closer to home, as a substitute teacher in Cherry Hill, I would see the few girls wearing a black hajib over their heads (over their long-sleeved t-shirts and jeans), covering as much of their faces as the pre-Vatican II nuns used to do, and think how nice it was that the idea of modesty was being upheld somewhere. They were quiet-mannered, not angry, just a little self-conscious and proud at the same time. You know, like a teenager.

Here’s another story. I’m selling audiobooks for a living now, and I occasionally attend trade fairs. One was in Manhattan at the end of 2006 at the General Society Building on West 44th Street. You walk in and notice as you walk up the winding marble steps of the lobby a sculpture of a man’s arm holding a big mallet sticking out of the wall, just like on the Arm & Hammer baking soda packages. I thought to myself, “Where am I? In a 1930s meeting hall of some old Communists?” It was a surprisingly grand old building, too ornate and graceful for Communists as we usually think of them (not a lot of art and architecture appreciation). I expected to find something socialist or at least Roosevelt Democrat in its history; however, the dedication stone displayed on their website shows the year 1802 “in the twenty-seventh year of American Independence.” The society aims to advance “the cultural, educational, and social services to families of skilled craftsmen.” The place is still going on. There is a library and old classrooms where the exhibitors displayed wares and seminars were held for that weekend.

On the first morning the early crowd was light and I decided to say hello my neighbor, since she was also alone. She wore a black hajib and the rest of her clothing was black and all encompassing (more all-encompassing than the high school kids I’d seen) except for her hands and face. She was about twenty and looked nervous. We chatted about this and that for a few minutes. Her accent was American. Her exhibit was displaying about ten differently packaged Korans in English plus some children’s books. My thought was that knowledge is better than ignorance.

Back during the first Gulf War in the 1990s I had done some reading on Saudi Arabia and had read much of the Koran out of curiosity, since in that conflict some of the Muslims were enemies, while some were allies. I now know what a Wahhabi is. I know what taquiya is. I know Shia from Sunni. I found the Koran interesting as poetry, a little unfamiliar-feeling as far as organization. Some sections, such as The Ants, were humorous; some verses, such as the one that says “I made the different kinds so you could get to know each other,” are very cosmopolitan-sounding. The bitterer verses seem no worse in their context than some Biblical verses.

So I was feeling pretty cosmopolitan as I talked to this lady. We however got around to the general news of the day.

She suddenly said with great force, “Well, the main mistake they made in this country was separation of church and state. Look at the law they passed in Massachusetts. They let gays marry. This never would have happened if you didn’t have separation of church and state.”
I was once again too stunned to respond while I figured out her line of thinking. Just then the rest of her family came in – father, sister and her children - and I went back to my area. The next day we just nodded good morning.

I did finally find what I wanted to say: that this country is actually founded on separation of church and state, an idea from the Pennsylvania Quakers that was finally put into the U. S. Constitution and which stemmed from the bloody religious conflicts of Europe of the centuries preceding the founding of the United States. In fact, the West has already made all the mistakes about religion that Islamists are making now. Islam needs to go through its own Era of Enlightenment (as Hirsi Ali also recommends in Infidel) where Reason is allowed into the argument.

In fact, we could go further back to the Gospels where it is recommended to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Separation of church and state has always been a good idea for the health of religion and government. Nobody thought to try to practice it until William Penn established his colony.

So if you get some laws you don’t like, that’s just the gamble of democracy. Bad ideas may turn up in the marketplace but will eventually fade away. Good ideas will remain, or will return again.

But I didn’t say any of that. I only thought it much later.

[Could some members of the old HCHS Debate Club possibly help me with my problem? I see Bob Hohwald and Cassie Riger are coming to the reunion, but how about Pat Dranchak and Lew Hassell? Who else knows how to debate? Are there lawyers in the house? Maybe I can make an appointment for a free consultation over the Reunion Weekend.]

On the other side of my table at the book fair, however, was another family of exhibitors. The woman was petite with light hair and glasses and a friendly manner. We talked about the scarf I was wearing. We joked about this and that. She was in front of a very attractive and professional-looking display promoting books and newsletters, and giving away bookmarks, about the true facts of the visitation on earth over the past forty years of a number of space aliens, who had specific names, which I forget by now. This was presented as non-fiction. I also forget whether these aliens were for or against the human race, or were they neutral and just trying to give us some needed information? When I checked out the website of the publisher a week later I thought it very well done, informative, graphically attractive, and multi-layered. It seems the founder, this same woman of about our age, was traumatized about the death of President Kennedy in 1963 and has not been the same since, but none of that came up in our conversation.

I was stunned into silence on this one too, being too polite to laugh at the great seriousness and kind-heartedness of this woman as well as her husband and son. I couldn’t even think of a response later on.

There were some very nice people at this fair, though most of the contrarian/ libertarian/ progressive/ old hippie strain, which I had long ago moved beyond, with some outright anti-religion, though I met a nice African-American woman and her son from Camden selling Christian meditation books. The Writers Guild of America was represented. I met a female Episcopal minister who had written a soft porn novel about Mary Magdalene, whom she had re-imagined as a Celtic slave (really a queen of her people) captured in Ireland and brought to Jerusalem (or was it Rome?). The first chapter of the book, which the author was distributing, and which I read, was pretty racy what with the slave market and all. Talk about a marketplace of ideas.

That Saturday evening, instead of immediately walking over to the Port Authority parking lot to drive home, I walked east and north a few blocks for Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. The air was cold but windless. People were out walking, especially around Rockefeller Center where the giant Christmas tree was lit. I couldn’t get close to the skating rink because of the crowds, so I returned to Fifth Avenue. Amazing, moving light displays adorned the outsides of the big old expensive department stores, such as Saks, and the more modern electronics and jewelry stores and banks. You had to stand and watch the lights for a while from across the street to get the full effects over entire buildings. The street-level window displays were also astonishing for the holidays, with slowly moving and ornately dressed mannequins. The cathedral was a quiet zone on the street, with only the reflected light of Rockefeller Center lighting the entrance, as if to spotlight it. A steady stream of people of all kinds slowly climbed the stairs.

That’s really the end of the story. I was thankful to be early enough to find a seat, as the church was quickly packed with people. It was an Advent week. Decorations were not as fancy as for Christmas itself, but the glow was bright and golden. The priest in his sermon suggested we see the film “The Nativity Story” for the season. He was pretty easy-going. Music and singing was good. I only took a few seconds to figure out the unfamiliar route to and from communion. I got the idea some in the congregation were attending as a “must-see” part of their tourist agenda. On the way out I found two local ladies, tall, African-American, looking like relatives in dark long coats and gloves, to direct me to an ATM machine. It was a good end to an interesting day, a little oasis in the turmoil of our times, familiar yet with the feel of a special occasion. I would be back in our world soon enough.

Savor or Seize the Moment, Whichever You Prefer

By Dennis Murawski

Well, friends, last month was 40 years since we walked down the Holy Cross auditorium aisles to receive our diplomas. Life has been filled with all that we filled it with, or let slip by. I find it hard to believe that I am approaching a new decade, and particularly one that begins with a six.

We are at the crossroads of life now, maybe a little past the intersection, a point in time, where we can look back and dimly see the beginning of the journey or look forward with clearer sight and see the end, be it our own, or perhaps our parent’s if we are lucky enough to still have them. Maybe, we are blessed and see the beginning when we hold a new grandchild, which I will do today.

My 88-year-old mother keeps telling me to “seize the moment.” As I look back, she has not always been right, but I think she hit the nail on its head with this one. Occasionally, I will sit back and think about my life, what I have done, what I have failed to do. Both unwritten columns have numerous entries. I also keep an index card in my pocket, to jot down things I need to do. My wife, Pam, says I make too many lists.

Looking back, there is a lot of time that is filled with the stuff you need to do just to live. Work – that thing that is interfering with more and more of my life. Housework – paying bills, shopping, cutting the grass, etc. Then there is the really good stuff that makes it all worthwhile – years ago playing with your kids, family trips, watching your kids play sports, or dance in a recital. Maybe there was volunteer work, like being involved in a church youth program for nine years, or doing evenings for engaged couples. Maybe it was coaching youth soccer, then high school soccer or adult/college soccer for the summer. We all have a list of things we’ve done.

I bring this up because, for me, the most enjoyable times I’ve had on this journey are those I spend with people. Maybe it is a primordial thing, or a team player thing. Maybe I enjoy finding out about people, where they’ve been, what they have done. I enjoy the frivolity and jokes of the moment, and the deep conversations about life, what we are doing here, politics, whatever. For me, sharing moments in our lives with friends is what it’s all about.

I am so looking forward to seeing all of you. It’s been 10 years since we were together and there is so much to talk about and share. There have been so many of you I didn’t get a chance to spend time with at the previous reunions, so this will be like a smorgasbord for me. And then there are those coming for the first time. Wow – there are 40 years of life to talk about!

I know that there are still a lot of you thinking about coming. As I’ve told my soccer teams when we are losing, time is not our friend now. We have the opportunity to stop the clock for 48 hours and revel in each other, our common four years at HC, sharing our life stories and expressing our hopes for the future. Then there’s the dancing. Five or ten years from now, the dancing will be slower than right now.

So you have a choice. You can seize and savor this moment in time, or you can put it in the column of ‘things I should have done.’ Either way, Monday October 13th will arrive. You can be basking in the afterglow of a wonderful weekend, or waking up and going back to work after a weekend of yard work, shopping, cooking, or whatever most of our lives are filled with. Sure hope I see you there. The work can wait!!!

Blogger’s Note: If anyone is hesitating to join us because they would be coming alone, please notify me or any committee member to set up any ‘singles’ sharing of rooms. The Flanders offers suites only, so two, three, or four people could be comfortable sharing. - BG

Muzak, Monks, and Food Shopping

By Barbara Groark

However, if you do want to hear the pop music of our own grade school and high school years, sung by the original performers, you need go no further than the your local food store. At least that’s what’s been happening in my neighborhood starting a few months ago. The company that puts out Muzak is no longer using the much-disparaged easy-listening versions of older popular songs – in recent years it’s been Laura Nyro, Billy Joel, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane given the Muzak treatment if I remember correctly, however vaguely. The company now serves up original recordings for shoppers and elevator riders, and the era of current choice is the late fifties and first half of the sixties. I don’t know if the stores are making a mistake.

The other day I was minding my own business picking out some bread or cereal or lettuce or milk, and I almost started doing the Slop as “Carol” by Chuck Berry came on (not “Oh Carol” by Neil Sedaka). I controlled myself, but it was a bit distracting. Then it was the Beatles “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which is not a great sing-along for me, and is kind of noisy if you’re trying to read Nutrition Facts. But then “Just One Look” came on with that opening piano, and I almost (almost) compulsively got into girl-group stance to start singing along. This song is really good for singing along. I tried to remember who the artist was – it kind of sounds like Tina Turner, or at least the Ikettes, but I really couldn’t remember. I wrote down the song name on my shopping list.

Well, thank heavens for YouTube. It turns out that I never knew the woman’s name in the first place, only every word to the song. She was an obscure one-hit wonder of a singer named Doris Troy, and here she is, or was. (Warning: Don’t play this link until you are in a place of relative privacy, with enough dance room for a cha-cha.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvpLeRa4phk


Before YouTube, what did we do to find out important historical information such as this? Well, we had arguments in bars and at family reunions, and when nothing came of that went to the people who are the archivists and historians of our age, such as Jerry Blavat (who currently has a one-hour educational oldies radio show on WXPN-FM in Philly on Saturday evenings at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time if you’re interested [ http://xpn.org/xpn-programs/geator and I think you can listen on the Internet if you are from way out of town.]).

Or go to Dave Marsh’s book The Heart of Rock and Soul: 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (New York: DaCapo Press, 1999). I resorted to this valuable book at one point after hearing a band in a bar playing a pretty nice version of “Some Kind of Wonderful” (not the Drifters song), and my cousin-in-law reminisced about the song as recorded by Grand Funk Railroad. Not blaming him a bit for being a few years younger than I, I pointed out that I thought the original was by another group, a black R&B group whose name wouldn’t come to me. We put the issue aside (no money involved). But I got to the reference section of a bookstore later on and found the above-mentioned song-critique encyclopedia and looked up the title in the index (“Kind of”, not “Kinda”).

Item 594, the Soul Brothers Six. Atlantic, 1967. As it says on page 390, “As for the Soul Brothers Six, who knows what became of them? They seem to have been from Philadelphia; judging from what I can hear, they may have been that town’s answer to Dyke and the Blazers.” [“Bugaloo Down Broadway”]

I was glad to be vindicated, and I sent my cousin-in-law a memo (no email at the time). And I went back to the store and actually bought the book, which has proved valuable since then. And who knew that Dyke and the Blazers even needed an answer?

If you’d like to refresh your memory, here is a version by neither GFR nor SB6, and I think it sounds better than both of them, being by a men’s a cappella group:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHRLrYWPVwo&feature=related


Have you been to any grade school or high school choir concerts lately? It seems that the music teachers and choir directors have been digging into the girl and boy doo-wop and R&B repertoire for the past few years and getting the kids to learn some of our era songs, like those guys in that video. Since one of my nieces is a singer, I’ve heard concert versions of “My Girl” by Mary Wells, “The Lollipop Song” (I forget by whom), as well as “Over the Rainbow,” which by the way has been again recorded by one of today’s singers, and the kids like it all over again. Sounds like they are trying to have fun with the older music, and please some of the parents and grandparents in the audience (and possibly annoy others).

It seem like adult choirs and barbershop quartets are also making a comeback among the really rebellious, and the barbershop guys are incorporating doo-wop and R&B sounds among their older standards. I can vouch for this, since I saw a barbershop singing competition a few years ago, rebelliously, at the Wildwood Convention Center (Wildwood, now advertised as the Doo-Wop Capital of the World). That was fun to hear.

And if we recall our history even more, class, we can see why, for example, communism never really took hold in this country. We already had a voice of the people on the radio every day. While other people had Hitler or Mussolini haranguing them, the Allies had Bing Crosby and Duke Ellington. While other people had Khruschev, we had Elvis. Are music and dancing the opiate of the masses? Or did they help us win wars? Or are they just excellent anger management tools? (All of the above?)

Anyway, there was a time in the 1970s, following the political assassinations, when that old American music was disparaged and apparently voluntarily suppressed. Even the blacks stopped dancing. Something was obviously wrong. Only the gays, like the monks of medieval Europe, seemed to be keeping the knowledge alive till the Renaissance came. Are we seeing that time now?

Here’s another obscure hit that’s made a return; two versions. I give them both because I don’t think Alicia gets the better of Brenda, though she does a good job. And the sound, not great, on the Brenda version is unrestored to digital. [Ibid., page 599, Item 946, Tamla 1964: “…more reminiscent of the pop-soul set pieces Burt Bacharach and Hal David were constructing for Dionne Warwick in those years. Which also marks Holloway as the first really adult Motown artist….”] Again, I would be in a non-public area before opening the links:

Here’s Brenda Holloway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SzeReQR-kw

Here’s Alicia Keys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfycwdZoseM&feature=related

In other news, from some time in the nineties, one of my sisters and her husband, whose son was touring with the Philadelphia Boys Choir, traveled to South Africa in the period after apartheid ended. Her report when she got back included the kinds of music the South Africans were playing on the radio: old Elvis music and other old American rock and roll and R&B. Who would have guessed this would be their choice? They apparently found the songs to be appropriate accompaniment to the big social upheavals that were, and still are, happening in that country.

OK I have work to do. I can’t be browsing around YouTube all day and night!

But another interesting thing that is happening with this music is that it is really big, and I mean really really big all over again in England nowadays, as confirmed by my hairdresser, whose husband is British and goes back home a few time a year. There are some radio guys there who call themselves Northern Soul who are promoting the old R&B music and creating dances that look like a combination line dance, break dance, and just a mushy shuffle, but anyhow it’s not mosh pit metal. These are the guys dancing in back of Duffy on this song, which has a sound a little like “Sally Go Round the Roses” and a little like “Nowhere to Run Nowhere to Hide.” I give it about a 95. It has a good beat that makes you want to dance, or at least join the background girls in the “yeah, yeahs.” See if you agree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2orthS3TQ

And finally, something completely ridiculous. This is the Northern Soul guys again, from England, apparently YouTube-savvy, combining an old Motown song with an unrelated dance clip by the Nicholas Brothers, the old vaudeville-type dance team whose heyday was the 1930s and -40s.

I sense a great disturbance in the Force.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_UudmXWuMg&feature=related

And I still haven’t finished my food shopping.

And Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and grandfathers out there.

Music, Sinatra, and e-Networking

By Barbara Groark

Some time in the 1970s, when disco came in, I started listening to jazz and classical music, even though what felt like home to me was more the Beatles, Motown, Laura Nyro, Bonnie Raitt, and the Roches. Having decided to reconcile with my father’s generation, if not my father himself, I later started listening to Sinatra and other music of the 1940s and -50s. And guess what – I liked it. Maybe it’s because it was always music for grownups, and I’m finally a grownup, or so I hope. I like old Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn records, and this is what has pulled me through the rap, head-banger, and general incoherency - or female bombastic anthem for every song – eras in music. Some of the new kids today, from the Puppini Sisters to Amy Winehouse, are even mining old song collections.

And when you listen to love song followed by love song followed by another love song, you realize why there was a Baby Boom in the first place. Something Christmas-y happens when you listen to that optimistic and confident and sometimes hokey old music. [By the way, Dennis Murawski just became a new grandfather.]

With opera and classical I’m just a visitor, but there is some power in those crazy stories and liftoff is achieved with some of that sound. I visit country and bluegrass music once in a while, too – went to see the Dixie Chicks one time as well as the people from the O Brother, Where Art Thou film soundtrack. And I like some of Beck and some of the new guys and girls.

But if the Chairman of the Board were alive today, he might appreciate the following:

http://americancomedynetwork.com/animation.html?bit_id=25239

That’s a link from my uncle, who keeps sending “spam” email a few times a week, and occasionally they are funny.

Not that this isn’t an awkward transition, but on the same subject of Internet social networks, such as MySpace, Facebook, and others, let alone YouTube, some of which I have been investigating for business reasons, here is an article by Karen Heller, a columnist in the Philadelphia Inquirer, who sometimes sounds like someone I went to school with. By the way, I have a niece who has something like 2,352 MySpace “friends.” I don’t have any, except you guys of course, and several others.

[The article is called “Beware strangers asking to be friends.”]

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/19309699.html

Three Amigos

Blogger’s Note: For some reason I’m remembering a conversation with Michael Devlin from some time in senior year maybe. He said “Hi, how are you?” and I thought a minute and said who knows what, and he said, “When people ask you how you are, you’re just supposed to say ‘Fine.’ You’re not supposed to tell them how your really are.” “Fine!” I might have responded emphatically today. I stood corrected, but still didn’t always follow the rule.

Anyway, another famous Michael, Michael LaRocco (who now capitalizes the R in his family name, after living in the South for years and listening to constant mispronunciations – until he started using the cap R), has sent in some pictures and a description of a day of challenge and adventure in New York City with some of our other classmates. I hope other pictures and articles of his and maybe yours too will follow.—BG [Click on photos to see larger version.]

By Michael LaRocco

OK, mates, brace yourselves. I know it’s a little hard to see with the helmets and sunglasses, but here is what we look like now. I am talking about my buddies, the distinguished Branko Galunic (neatly trimmed beard), the ever-athletic John Markert (rear-view mirror on his helmet) and me (smiling through it all), proud finishers (and survivors) of New York City’s 2008 Five Boro Bike Tour (“the largest recreational cycling event in America”), which happened on May 4. We three amigos did it, 42 miles worth of the Big Apple, along with about 30,000 other riders, including my second-oldest daughter, Michelle, 25, who took the pictures.

Since we three look about equally ridiculous, the resulting jokes should be spread around evenly (hey, do I know the audience or what?) Then again, perhaps you won't even recognize us, which might be a good thing!


We three first did the event in 2006. Branko and John had both done it before, but I had never even heard about it until they mentioned it (kinda like life-long New Yorkers who never visited the Statue of Liberty). Anyway, in '06, our group totaled five: Branko's two sons Nicky and Jamie both joined the old guys. Two finer young fellows you'll not find, perfect gentlemen, bright, creative, responsible, and tall. How the generations seem to keep outgrowing the one before!

In 2007, work kept Branko away, so it was John, me, and my cyclist daughter Michelle, for the first time (work had kept her away the year before).

Sunday May 4, 2008, in New York started out cool as we gathered at Herald Square (our rendezvous point) around 9 a.m. The early arrivers passed the time in conversation with small groups of European tourists emerging from the mid-town hotels. They watched in awe as an unbroken wave of 2-wheeled humanity whirred past, especially amazed since they remembered the spot snarled with auto traffic not 9 hours earlier. As the last of us arrived, we prepared to roll. We were near the middle of the herd as we joined it around 10 a.m. among the skyscrapers along the Avenue of the Americas. Rockefeller Center saw things slow a bit, allowing us the first photo op just after Radio City (as you can see by the picture among the skyscrapers).

The congestion quickly opened up as we left Midtown by crossing 59th Street and began zipping past the lush green meadows of Central Park. The obligatory short spin through the Bronx was equally quick, and we were literally "on a roll" pedaling back downtown on the FDR Drive along the East River. The sun broke out just after we crossed the Queensboro Bridge, and by 11 a.m., the clothing layers were coming off as we made our way through Queens. In the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge (the "Willy-B" in traffic-radio parlance) the gentrified brownstones beckoned, as did the artsy lofts of DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) and the trendy moonstruck walk-ups of Brooklyn Heights.

The best was saved for last, as we ascended a 1.5-mile grade, to 275 feet above sea level, to the apex of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. With New York harbor and the open ocean below, we made a thrilling, rapid (40 mph) descent to a landing in Staten Island. It's as close as any mere mortal since the Wright brothers can feel of the exuberance of flight.

But neither the touring enjoyment nor the kinetic excitement could beat the pleasure derived from conversation-in-motion with my pals. It's amazing how much catching up you can do on two wheels. The years melted away with the miles as we chatted about our families, our careers, politics, popular music, health, food, our memories of days past, and our plans for the future. We even talked about our HCHS classmates! But fear not, because it was mostly remembrance and not gossip on our minds. Thanks to Barbara Groark, who tenderly brought us all up to date in the “Moment of Silence” blog on those joining us but in spirit this October, we sadly but fondly reminisced.

Our spin on two wheels taught us to count our blessings.

Hodgepodge Blog

By Barbara Groark

I’ve talked so much about the girls, I thought I’d mention the boys who came out of Sacred Heart School, Riverton, and went to Holy Cross, and they are Fran Eschemen and Frank Evers, a couple of unassuming guys, and also John Haller, who is among the deceased. At one of the reunions, Kathy Williams came up to me and pointed out Fran, an unrecognizable tall, thin guy, who had just bought a favorite local bakery, Klipple’s, at River Road and Riverton Road, and which is now an coffee bar near the River Line trains. I don’t know if Fran still runs it. In grade school and high school (and he and I did not speak that whole time), Fran always looked like a forty-year-old businessman, along the lines of the prosperous little guy with the white mustache in the Monopoly game. And he turned into this other taller, thinner person. What an appearance change a lot of men make after high school, like growing five or eight inches! Or in other cases losing one’s hair, which some men find embarrassing but which some women find very appealing. I worked with a girl once who would only date bald men, and she finally married one and lived happily ever after.

I remember John Haller surprisingly ran for class president in our senior year, and I remember listening to a speech he gave and thinking, surprisingly, “I may vote for him,” and I think I did. I’d known him since grade school, and one of his younger sisters and one of my younger sisters were friends. When he ran for president, there was a new aspect of his personality that came out, one that stayed pretty hidden most of the time, and it was self-assured and confidence-inspiring. If I remember correctly, Harry Lukis beat him out, and I forget who were the rest of the officers.

OK, I got the 1968 yearbook. There were two groups: the Student Council Officers pictured are Daniel O’Connor, Susan Bronesky, Patricia Brant, and Harry Lukis. I guess they ruled the whole school, because there were then officers for each class, the Senior Class Officers being Thomas Albrecht, Sharon Stewart, Donald Osmundson, and Molly Walsh. They all must have ruled justly, because I can’t remember ever feeling too oppressed by their governance. I don’t even know what they were responsible for, they ruled so seemlessly.

Are any of these people in politics today, or is anyone else? Write and let us know. I recently found out Dan Turygan had spent a few years in local politics out in Pemberton Township, Burlington County - another guy who went through big changes after high school.

At one of the reunions, I was sitting at a table near the door chatting with, I think, Trish Brant and Marie Griffin and maybe Branko Galunic. It was about 10:30, after the meal had been served and the tables cleared. A man breezed in the door in informal clothes and sat down and asked if the food was still available and where could he get some? He was kind of dashing-looking and preoccupied with his thoughts, like a member of the Order of the Phoenix or something. We probably pointed out the food area, and when he left we looked at each other and said, “Who was that?” None of us knew. He came back to our table with his plate, and he told us who he was – Anthony Bucci! – and that he was glad food was still being served since he had paid for it, but he had just come from the hospital delivery room where his wife had given birth to a girl (?), but he had been wanting to stop by and say hello to people. I was still trying to remember who Anthony Bucci was, and at some point afterwards I had to get a yearbook, and there he was! Someone else I had not spoken to throughout high school. I hope his wife is less busy in October than she was that night.

I tell you, all most people really need for all-around improvement after high school is a good spouse and a couple of kids under their belts.

No Rollers, No Girdles

By Barbara Groark

What does feminism mean to me? Class, this is our topic for today.

There is the equal pay for equal work part. One summer job I had after high school was in the Wage and Salary section of a major corporation, and I saw for myself the separate wage scales for men and women. This is one of those things kids today find hard to believe, but I also found it offensive then. When I asked the boss about it, he shrugged his shoulders and held out both hands and said, “I didn’t make the rules.” He seemed to agree with me on the unfairness of it, but could do nothing about what the whole general culture and corporate policy had agreed to.

I guess we quieter types can thank the noisier types of the sixties and seventies for bringing some changes about, no matter what we may think of some particular issues. Also, the Catholic school system seemed to prepare us girls to live up to the same general rules as boys, even if there were natural gender differences in some areas. One of my female bosses in the seventies went somewhere each month to have something done to herself so she wouldn’t have a monthly period. Most women ignored that one as unrealistic, but recently I noticed the concept has returned to the general culture, along with the other strange rearrangements of ourselves that are possible now. I hope most people ignore them again.

But possibly more important for the world at large was the invention and mass production of the hand-held hair dryer, which helped eliminate the heavily criticized wearing of daytime and nighttime hair rollers, as well as the discarding of the girdle as a ‘proper foundation garment’ (a term from Sister Coletta’s Clothing Construction I Class).

The rollers I wore in high school to straighten my hair – soup can size and all over my head - made me look like a space alien, or a device to guide the landings of planes. I once saw in a museum a Nigerian head rest: a wooden block women would have at the neck as they lay down at night so they would not ruin the elaborate braided hairdos they had had constructed. That’s how my sisters and I rolled up our pillows at night, so they could be at our necks and below our ears and we would not have to lean the head and rollers against anything. It took some real planning to change positions.

Thank heavens for the Civil Rights Movement. It freed curly-haired people of all types. It took me a few years to go all the way to natural, but I was finally free!

My nieces are straightening their hair now again, with the brush-out and hand dryer method, which is a lot of arm work, and I tried that for a little while, but stopped. More variety of straight and curly and short and long seems to be allowed by fashion than in earlier times. A rainy day is not such a disaster as it used to be.

The girdle was an item of women’s underwear which could be seen as a transitional following the strictures of the old corset and freedom of the ‘no bra’ seventies and ‘no underwear at all’ nineties. Slips were next to be discarded, and then entered the push-up bra and thong 2000s. The last seems to be fading from favor as just too uncomfortable. I haven’t bought new underwear since 1998.

I once attended a demonstration of the Gibson Girl era of dress: 1890-1910, a time when women first started appearing as office secretaries, the corset era, when the ideal was the hourglass figure. Who cared if you couldn’t breathe? The attraction to men at that time was supposed to be the narrow waistline. Were men actually asked? The featured speaker at the demonstration came on stage in ankle boots, long dark A-line skirt, and shirtwaist blouse – white cotton with ruffled high neck and long ‘leg-o-mutton’ sleeves, tucked in at the waist, a lot like the gathered, pouf-shouldered sleeves of the 1970s. Or was that the 80s? Then she started peeling off layers: blouse, overshirt, corset, undershirt, to the long chemise – this was a summer ensemble. Then she put it all on again and explained each step. By the end, most of the audience was feeling absolutely no nostalgia for the Gilded Age. And in that era, men were wearing a lot of layers as well: shirt, undershirt, vest, tie, and jacket. Laborers were an exception, but if you were trying to get ahead, you were imitating your betters, even if you were a maid, and that meant lots of layers of clothing, which may have been meant to convey prosperity – you could afford the cloth. There were also old medical theories, later discarded, about covering your skin to avoid disease.

Younger women discarded corsets about the same time as the advent of the car and the vote for women, but the bra was not invented in France till the 1930s. So the twenties were looking a lot like the seventies, ladies’ underwear-wise.

Do you remember in high school there were several times the Guidance Office put out a directive to girls requesting they did not wear colorful, flower-power or bright, solid-colored bras because you could see the colors through our white uniform blouses, and that was a little disturbing to the male teachers, or so it was presented to us. I went to pastel in compliance. The white or beige old-fashioned standards were out of the question, too much like mom’s and grandmom’s underwear. I’m more understanding of mom and grandmom today. They had other things to do and think about besides their underwear.

Do you find even today that high school girls are competing in clothing and underwear, as revealed in gym class, with other girls rather than trying to draw the attention of boys, or especially male teachers? And don’t most boys who are allowed to be themselves not need to be hit with a bludgeon in order to think about girls?

However, despite a swing back to discomfort in underwear, since the sixties and seventies, there seems to be more of a brother/sister bond between kids in school, and people at work, and that’s an improvement from our high school time, when there was a lot more discomfort between the sexes, although other people seemed to have a little less trouble than I did. And the soccer-girl ponytail and easy up-do that have been around for twenty years or so is both easy and mildly traditional looking.

Time marches on, which is mostly a relief. I’m a little amazed to see the person in the mirror I see today. Cuts take longer to heal. I take soy milk with my morning cereal to control hot flashes. The last time I was in a lingerie department, there was something called shapewear, containing lots of Lycra, that is supposed to do all the things a girdle used to do – give you a waistline and keep the fat contained and disguised as firm muscle – but without feeling like a brick wall from the outside or from the wearer’s perspective. Seems like a lot of responsibility for some underwear, and I haven’t bothered much with it, since Lycra seems hot, summer or winter, and the effect is pretty much negligible despite the hype.

So that means the gym, doesn’t it, girls and boys, if we don’t want to end up looking like Queen Victoria or J. P. Morgan. That means running and walking and dancing. That means keeping the weight down for a more comfortable, joint-healthy future. Maybe we can thank the seventies’ feminists for contributing to the good general health and clothing comfort of boomers of both sexes today and the good things that are happening in geriatric medicine for our parents’ generation.

A Moment of Silence

By Barbara Groark

After encouraging Lew Greist to respond to the blog and finding out he was no longer with us (I thought of him as the Cary Grant of our class), I consulted the committee, and we decided it would be OK to publish the names of our classmates who are already at that big reunion in the sky and regretfully will not be attending in October:

• Bruce Anderson
• Linda Bergen
• Joanne Biancone
• Mary Callahan (added 10/13/08)
• Martin Cleary
• Richard Daddino
• John Gaschnig
• Margaret Gatti
• Lewis Greist
• John Haller
• Margaret Harty
• Suzanne Horan
• Charles Molliter
• Timothy Murphy (spring 2009)
• Richard Noval (added 6/21/08)
• Linda O’Brien

God bless us every one. I must say the Gs and Hs (my old homeroom) have taken a large number of hits. And the supposed extra stress of having a name from the second half of the alphabet does not seem to apply to our class.

If anyone would like to send a memory or thought on any one of these classmates by email or by the comment tool below, you are welcome.

Something About Religion - Part 1

By Barbara Groark

I finally broke down and ordered – and yesterday received from Amazon – Eric Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth, and registered for Oprah’s Book Club. I’m on page 56 of The Power of Now (I have some catching up to do with the Book Club – they’re all on A New Earth already), and I feel that I should expect great breakthroughs before I’m done. What will they be?

Mr. Tolle is a 'spiritual teacher' who left Roman Catholicism as a young man, but reconciled with Jesus through the Buddha, like some of my own relatives. He’s a bit abstract – I find myself longing for some metaphors while reading.

While watching one related online discussion, I confess I was reminded of Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter books – the teacher of the Divination classes who wore big round, thick glasses that made her eyes very big and who always seemed about ready to float into space. Something like Sister Rita Carmel in our old Religion class. She had the same general aura as Professor Trelawney but with a more organized and intellectual component, which brings out the worst in teenagers. Do you remember her nickname, Sister Rita Rotten-Tooth? That was pretty cold, but that era did not have the vast dental advantages we have today, such as teeth-whitening strips, which I am beginning to need.

By the way, Religion class is now called Theology class.

I remember one time asking Sister how you could sin by the sense of smell (every sense has its importance as a data-collector and its problem areas). Every kid becomes a lawyer at some point (right, parents?) looking for loopholes in the arguments of the authorities. I thought my question would stump her, since I was stumped, but she was ready with an answer, something about memory and occasions of sin. Guess I was too young to understand that.

Sophomore year we had a priest for Religion class – someone help me on this one; name began with an ‘N’ and his hair was in a pompadour like Elvis and he was sort of short with stocky build; his picture is not in our senior year yearbook with the other faculty. He apparently did not stay through our senior year.

Anyway, I for some reason remember asking him the following: premise: Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. So if life is discovered on other planets, did Jesus die for people on other planets as well? Would he have to descend to those other planets and suffer and die again? Or did his experience on earth cover everyone and everything in the universe?

I think I got a moment of silence, an exasperated look, and maybe something about the Once And For All idea to shut me up. I would say I was half-humorous and half-serious in my question. I was just extending the argument given. Because I’m brilliant!

Have you read the Christopher Hitchens book, God Is Not Great? He’s the British-American professor who is standing up for the Atheist Movement in America and has declared a War on Religion. It’s like a trip back to high school. I got through half before I realized, as the Pope might say “There was nothing new here.” He’s just a little materialist, a Marxist, and that’s the extent of his argument, though he is somewhat entertaining with his glass of wine on YouTube. He even commiserates in his book about having to grieve over the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Berlin Wall as a low moment for atheists everywhere, so he perfectly understands believers’ grief over the embarrassments in religious groups in the last 15 years. What could be worse than embarrassment?

The introduction to his book mentions his first atheist idea: when he was 12 or 13, a very nice teacher (he grew up Church of England) presented the argument from nature for the existence of God, and there having to be therefore an original Maker of all that you see. Hitchens was not convinced, and considered all religion as essentially lame from that time on.

I remember hearing that same argument of Thomas Aquinas in eighth grade and thinking “That does not really convince me of the existence of God.” But that fact did not remove my belief at the time, though I was never overly devotional. I guess in the back of my mind there was the thought that I was only in eighth grade and was on schedule to find out more as time went by.

Not that it’s all been an unbroken line of belief since then. I drifted away from Church at college age, mostly just to see whether lightning would strike me dead, and it didn’t, so being naturally lazy I kept drifting without issuing any press releases about my newer belief system, since I didn’t have any. But after a while, I would come to some decision, mostly about what looked just too stupid, something that maybe was a trend at the time, and began to come up with my own little policies. After a while I realized that I was coming up with the same policies as the Church recommends, and since they already had done all that work over the centuries, why start my own personal religion? Why not rejoin? So I eventually – some people are flabbergasted – returned in 10 years’ time, and gradually got more compliant to the rules again, though I’m still not overly devotional. I consider the Church a bunch of fellow adults, colleagues on the same team. And they are pretty smart – they agree with me on so much. And now that I’m older I’m better at speaking up to, say, my brother-in-law Fang. Mr. Hitchens is just another brother-in-law to me.

Catholics have historically been good at allowing irreverence at times, but not outright disrespect. It’s what’s underneath that counts, as humorists should know. Right, Bill Maher?

OK, I’m trying to stay coherent in this blog, but that’s difficult with this subject. I’m trying to get back to Mr. Tolle, who seems like a nice guy, but I think I’m going to move to Mary Karr. She is a current poet and professor at a Midwestern university who wrote The Liar’s Club and other memoirs about her dysfunctional childhood. She is a recovering drug addict, and she converted as an adult to Catholicism, and is sort of a different type of theologian. She wrote an outstanding article in Poetry magazine over a year ago, and I’ve been a fan ever since.

See links to two articles below. Getting through these may take some determination, and I’ve given approximate reading times in case you have to put them off. Professor Karr kids about having no excuse for becoming Catholic, not having been a ‘cradle Catholic.’ I have even less of an excuse, since I left but then came back.

This is a shorter interview with Mary Karr from March 2006 [reading time about 5 min]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/03/27/findrelig.DTL

This is the major article by Karr from Poetry Magazine of November 2005 (reading time about 30 min)
http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=175809

1968 Brief

By Barbara Groark

Do you recall that our HCHS class did not even have a reunion until 15 years went by? That’s probably a good idea anyway. After all, very few of us are really ‘set’ yet at 5 or even 10 years after high school. Who wants a reunion after so short a time? And some of us could not bear to look back with affection even then, and many cannot or will not even now. Affection for our old selves, however, is not absolutely necessary. Aging, I find, is mostly a relief. And when we look back at high school, most of us are thinking, “Thank God that’s over.”

But the turmoil of the time was a factor. The AARP Magazine (AHHHHHHH!) for May/June 2008 has an article reviewing events of 1968, and here are some quotations from those interviewed:

• “America – it had a nervous breakdown in 1968, but that was a bump in the road. I mean, we’re still here.” – Harry Benson, 78, photographer who was next to Bobby Kennedy when he was shot
• “I like to say we were at the scene of an accident in 1968.” – Tommy Smothers, 71, comedian

Can’t add much more to that.

By the way, the cover of that magazine issue shows Jamie Lee Curtis with her new undyed hair smiling at the camera. She is currently going with my policy, hair-wise. I dyed and highlighted for about 5 years and then decided I had better things to do with my time and money, got a short cut, and have been free of silver foil ever since.

But I have good genes for the salt-and-pepper look, which has the exact same effect as highlighting, and hair-dying does not really run in my family much. I’m not judging those who dye, and I hope not to be judged by those who dye. It is not a moral issue, but a personal preference.

However, there could have been a woman on the moon by now if they’d spend a little less time on their hair.

Got Game?

By Barbara Groark

This Sunday afternoon I’m listening to the soothing sound of baseball on the radio: Phillies versus Chicago Cubs. Phillies are “looking for a streak” according to the announcer.

Hearing baseball on the radio always reminds me of my grandfather, who listened to games every day the Phillies were playing, and of our grade school days when, during World Series time in October, some boys and also a few girls had their transistor radios in school to keep up with the games during such important times. I don’t remember any great confiscations of radios taking place, so either the kids were reasonable at picking listening times or asked permission before doing so, or the teachers were tolerant, or I’m not remembering correctly. The boys were definitely baseball players – every boy knew how to throw and hit, or at least that was the story put out – but my grade school also had a girls’ intermural softball league in the spring. We’d traipse beside the river over to a field near Regina Criqui’s house. Regina’s mother was our coach, the one who taught us all how to swing a bat. But we never were taught how to throw the ball effectively, either because she did not know how or, more likely, it wasn’t considered something girls should know how to do. Remember those days? There was a similar tone when I got to high school about the girls field hockey team actually doing something called running. Regina was one of those who spoke out strongly for a girl’s right to run.

But back to the softball team from grade school: girls on the team who later went to Holy Cross were Rolande Richards, Barbara Pickard, Christine Hill, Patty Reath, Millie Maguire, Marie Griffin, and Kathy Cannon. Who am I forgetting? Nancy Obert and Nancy Mahony! Janet Sanford and Carole Seltzer! Coming to the reunion, ladies? I know Kathy Williams will be there. Eileen and Anne. Did Mervil play softball?

By the way, our team names were the names of religious orders; instead of the Cardinals or the Robins or the Blue Jays, or the Lightning, the Devils, or the Rage, we were the Dominicans, the Franciscans and the Carmelites. You have to hand it to the Catholic school systems: they know how to market their brand. However, these reminders of the religious life did not have much effect on religious vocations in our class. I don’t think there were any.

At some point in the past 20 years I played in a women’s evening softball league in Cinnaminson - slow-pitch for the slowed-down. One night after a game, I was walking to my car and passed another field where some girls were playing what looked like a serious championship game, and I stopped to watch. The girls were boisterous, the pitcher swung her arm in a cartwheel beside her head for a solid underhand throw into the catcher’s mitt, and there was sliding into bases and a lot of chatter from the bench to the people playing.

Overhearing some conversation, I thought I heard the words “Holy Cross.” I saw the gray uniforms on the fielded team’s side and realized: This team was the HOLY CROSS High School – Delran, New Jersey - girls softball team!!! They had a male coach! They were throwing balls like boys – or rather the most effective way after coaching and practice. I was astounded and stayed till the end of the game, which Holy Cross won in a very close ending. I forget where the opposing team was from, but it was a local public high school. It might have been Delran.

So Holy Cross now has a girls softball team. Jealousy is beside the point at this juncture. According to its website ( http://sp.holycrosshighschool.org/default.aspx ), HC also has boys and girls soccer, boys and girls lacrosse, swimming, golf, and rowing teams (plus those snappy business-casual sweaters and sweater vests rather than our old blazers). They have a dance studio.

All’s I can say is, they must have some rich alumni.

Of course, the last few years have seen financial strain and a threat to close Holy Cross by the Diocese of Trenton. It’s also seen the principal sent to jail for financial fraud. Yikes! ( http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/nj/5176477.html )

Not everything new is better. But it looks like things are calmed down now for the school, and the various sports teams are being reported regularly in our local papers, rather than criminal activities. For some reason, our school sports never used to be reported in the newspapers, even for the boys teams. Well, maybe our scores were reported in a place you had to search for in print almost as small as on the stock market pages. Now even the girls teams are reported with action photos. The boys teams are still the Lancers, but the girls are now the Lady Lancers, a better name I think than Lancerettes.

Today’s HCers still have the more traditional sports that we remember: football, cheerleading, basketball, track. And speaking of Mervil, she was captain of the cheerleaders by her junior or senior year, and I always enjoyed watching that squad perform at basketball games; very athletic, very daring, and very cheery. Are we going to see Peggy Wood, Jane Fynan, Donna Fitzgerald, Kathie Mayts, or Beth Conrad in Ocean City in October? I hope so.

I’ll have to get to the girls basketball and field hockey teams in a later blog.

OK, guys, we need some sports writers to cover the boys’ side of things. Where is Lew Greist? Jim Gillis? Harry Lukis? The Greco brothers? Weren’t Jim Murphy and Jay Aslaksen in my journalism class? Michael Devlin? How about an article? (Rolande? Betty Baird?) Or somebody I can’t think of?

And some of you may think I am being Cinnaminson/Riverton-centric. How about an article from your home town’s perspective, or your social/cultural commentary? Please write, or at least post a comment to appear publicly on the website.

Well, the Phillies lost 6-5 to the Cubs in the 10th inning. No streak today.

If you try the Holy Cross website, go to the ‘About Holy Cross’ page and click the link to view the video for something old and something new: http://sp.holycrosshighschool.org/about/about.htm .

Blog topics coming up: Got Botox? Joined the gym? Who needs Viagra? Not us.

The Great Race War Part 1 - My Own Medicine

By Barbara Groark

The character of Maid Marian in the story of Robin Hood (following the 1938 film version starring Olivia deHavilland and Errol Flynn) seems a snob when you meet her, but she’s a good girl, educated to rule, healthy, wealthy, and open to new information. She opposes Mr. Hood’s activities, especially one day when he kidnaps her for ransom, but he treats her well as his prisoner, and when he finally gives her a tour of the squalid refugee camp where the poor are forced to live as a result of public policy, she has a change of heart and mind and begins to assist Robin in trying to alleviate their condition, eventually influencing public policy, when she gets back home, against the wishes of the local authorities. She overcomes tribal prejudice and penetrates the thick walls of economic and social class distinctions without losing her own place in the social hierarchy. She gets down and pitches in without fear of contamination, without losing anything that is essentially hers. Her eyes have been opened, her compassion awakened, and she becomes even more herself, a better self.

Most people have some experiences from childhood and adolescence that correspond in some way to Maid Marian’s epiphanies and adjustments in words and actions. Things we had been worried about become not so worrisome. Childish beliefs are not so much thrown over entirely as expanded and redefined, or maybe they are just re-worded, because they are re-understood. And we get to reexamine everything when our own children come along.

I remember the first time I realized that the color in black people’s skin did not rub off. It was during one of my few hospital stays as a child. I was in the children’s ward with sharp and roving pains rolling left and right in my abdomen. Our family doctor, a Chinese American, suspected appendicitis, but the pain rolled left and right, similar to menstrual cramps, but it was too early for my period.

Two episodes of these mysterious pains had sent me to the hospital, once at the age of five and once at the age of ten. I would spend days in pajamas slowly rolling my knees from side to side. The pain would subside briefly and then return. When I was older, reading books would help distract my mind. But during both episodes, the only thing that made the pain stop was when my father laid his hand quietly on my stomach and kept it there like a heating pad. My mother and I were amazed, and also relieved whenever he had time to do this “laying on of hands.” Nothing inappropriate went on. However, he could only stay for a limited amount of time, up to an hour when I would fade into a sleep. The pain would eventually come back.

One memory of the earlier episode was of my lying flat under a light on an examining table with several doctors and my father looking down at me. The main doctor in the center of the group pressed my abdomen in several places and asked at each press if I felt any pain, to which my answer was “No” each time. Then he put on a rubber glove with some goo at the fingers and penetrated my five-year-old vagina. This was a surprising sensation for me, but there was no pain, so I remained in an analytical frame of mind. I saw my father put his head down as if he were watching me be crucified. The doctor pressed my insides on the left – no pain – and then the right, where I felt a sharp pain and said “That hurts.” The doctor, nodded and removed his hand and appeared satisfied at coming to some discovery, and I went home with my father. The pain ceased after that without further treatment.

For the second episode of this mysterious pain at age ten, I was eventually put in the hospital for a few days. The doctors had decided on an appendectomy, but then changed their minds. I got visits from an Indian doctor several times, who seemed very interested in the leftover poison ivy rash on my shins than in my abdominal area. Other doctors and nurses visited periodically, but I never received the kind of examination I got at age five, and I do not remember taking medicine of any kind.

I was in the children’s ward, which was pretty noisy at night with the tiny babies crying every few hours. There was an eleven-year-old boy in a bed to the left diagonally across from me. We never spoke and would eye each other as if we were not there, from natural pre-adolescent modesty on both our parts, and slight embarrassment at being placed with all these younger children. The different night-shift nurses, who at that time still wore the traditional white dress and cap, would get to know me since I would occasionally call by my little wired button in my bed to complain that I could not sleep. They would be kind, but said “Just go to sleep” and pat my arm over the covers, that’s all.

One night as I lay listening in the dark to the sounds of the ward, a night attendant – she was not wearing nurse’s whites – came in to check on me without my having called anyone. She was a large black woman probably of middle age, and now that I look back, I’m guessing that she was well aware I was watching her in the dim light in a slightly wary way. She checked around my bed and my night table. She asked me in a whisper how I was, and I said that I could not sleep. She did not say much more, but pulled my sheet and blanket to make them straight and pulled the edge up to my chin. Her hand was about to brush mine, and I was slightly fearful of her touch but too polite to pull back. But when her hand did brush mine, the touch left me relieved. I thought, “That feels like my grandmother’s hand,” that is, slightly rough with work, but friendly and gentle. She bustled her way out of the ward, probably laughing to herself.

I was able to go home soon after that, since the pains had gone.

The following year for Halloween, I decided to be Aunt Jemima, the black mammy advertising icon on maple syrup bottles and who now sells frozen waffles as well. Today’s image of Aunt Jemima shows her with curly, short, modern hair, a pearl earring, and a high white collar. When I was ten, her image showed a hoop earring, a scarf covering her hair, and a shawl covering her shoulders over a plain dress, reminiscent of Mammy in the movie Gone With the Wind. She was assumed to be large (you could only see her head and shoulders on the syrup bottle), so I was wearing pillows. The Riverton Five-and-Ten store (equivalent of today’s dollar stores) had the black for my face, bright red lipstick, and the plastic hoop earrings. I decided against the minstrel show look, that is, white greasepaint around the mouth and eyes. My mother helped me get old clothing from around the house, and she may have sewn up some fabric for a large gathered skirt and a cotton scrap to wrap up my head.

I distinctly remember applying the black greasepaint to my face as I stood at the bathroom mirror. I had decided on a realistic look, complete coverage rather than the just the suggestion of coverage. By the time I was halfway through I was smiling, and by the time I had covered my eye area completely, I was not even myself anymore, an experience which is funny and scary at the same time. As Halloween costumes go, this one was very comfortable, since I had no need of a mask. The black went down my neck a bit and some at my ears, but the collar came up high and the headscarf covered most of my ears. The audience of my sisters and mother was appreciative.

I’m pretty sure it was Eileen Costello and Anne McQuaide and I who canvassed our neighborhood for candy with the rest of the troops for a few hours after nightfall. Since we weren’t tiny, we were allowed to go by ourselves, with no untoward incidents occurring. I was walking home alone for the half-block from Eileen’s house when I passed two boys in costume about my age and height walking in the opposite direction. They both said “Hi” and I said “Hi” as we passed each other, weary workers going home for the night with our pillow cases of candy. When they passed a few steps behind me I heard one say to his friend in astonishment “It’s a girl!” and they both laughed and kept going. I continued home with a satisfied air.

In high school, I read Gone With the Wind twice (and saw the movie once with about 25 girls in an expedition organized by Janet Stojak and Pat Vineis to a theatre in Philly) but of course was more interested in the romance in the story than social context by that time, and I also read The Autobiography of Malcolm X once and thought about the use of violence as an attention-getter before any justice could be served for minorities. But even Mr. X changed his views by the end of his story.

WE WON'T BE FOOLED AGAIN – Part 2

By Barbara Groark

What the poet Mary Karr calls the “Big Lie of the Drug Culture” caught many of us up in the years following 1968, but most people I know recovered within ten years and left the time-wasting and illegality behind. It was those who stayed stuck in the same old anti-authoritarian viewpoint (nothing odder than an old “angry young man” - who is not kidding about it) or were bamboozled into the more serious drugs who had trouble letting go. Again, the people in the 10 years younger than we had more trouble recovering anyway, only because they were younger when some of the big events happened, or when they started using drugs. It is some of their children who are the angriest in the aftermath of the sixties and seventies, if they are not entangled in the same syndromes themselves. With two whole parents, a kid can do almost anything. When both parents are just not there, anger is a better response than acquiescence and despair.

Here is another of my mother’s stories, one I did not hear of till some time in the 1990s. “I used to go to the food store for a few things, and it would take me three hours to get done. I’d run into women holding on to their carts and crying as they walked around picking up what they needed for supper. I’d go up to one, put my hand on her arm, and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she’d start telling me about one or two of her kids who was doing drugs and whatever else was going on at the time. Then I’d see someone else with dark circles under her eyes, and I’d talk to her for a while.” The children were just very far away from home, and some ended up dead. This was ongoing through the seventies, and it was not always the same women my mother saw in the supermarket.

These were women who loved to laugh - you know, Erma Bombeck readers, Wednesday morning bowling league members, genuine comedians themselves. [Try To Hell with All That by Caitlin Flanagan for a not uncritical but still affectionate view of the housewife flavor of those times.]

I know many of you have your own family tragedies that may be too painful to speak of. Psychologists say family patterns may be to blame, but don’t forget about the kidnappings. Some solid families had people stolen right away from them. The predators, like leopards and lions in the animal kingdom, go after the weak and the young. They don’t want a real fight on their hands.

The only thing I can think of to explain what happened is to take the really long view, like from outer space. We as a society must have been doing very well – civil rights laws, trials of Nazi criminals, even Church reform and ecumenism, expanded opportunities for women and the working class in general since the GI bill, post-World War II economic boom, new housing, more inventions. In fact, what were conservatives doing at the time? They were sending rockets to the moon, that’s what they were doing! That’s the conservatism I remember.

We all just had to be stopped! Too much justice and prosperity and human progress and wonder was happening!

Well, this blog is in danger of going off the deep end (really long views have this tendency), so I’ll make it a short one.

E Pluribus Unum

By Barbara Groark

Have you seen the television commercial for Enablex, a pharmaceutical treatment for bladder control problems? The ones with the bouncing water balloons in different colors? It has a group of ‘balloons’ representing the class reunion of 1968, who all seem to have to run to the bathroom a lot. Aren’t we about 25 or 30 years too early for this representation? Shouldn’t we all write to the advertiser complaining that the reunion year ought to be somewhere in the 1940s or early 1950s? The writers must be about 23 (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

I grew up in Cinnaminson on the Moorestown side of Route 130, versus the Delaware River side. My family moved there when I was nine and my mother was pregnant with her fifth child (there would be six). My parents grew up in West Philadelphia, married and moved to Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania, and then we moved to “the country” as my Irish Aunt Win called it, that is, South Jersey. My grade school was Sacred Heart School in Riverton, a few blocks from the river, where the nuns were from Boston and Nova Scotia and had very funny peaked hats and tried to turn us all into little princes and princesses. Before the new parish of St. Charles Borromeo (famous now for its June carnival) was started, we all took the long bus ride on Riverton Road from our bare-new-tree and new-split-level-house side of the highway through leafy Riverton, across the old tracks (now the River Line) to the school, whose original church with its dark-red-painted, wood-slat siding, was built in 1892 for the Irish girls, of which several were relatives of mine (one of the Brennan families), who were the maids in many of the big houses along the waterfront and through the town. The ride was like taking a trip back through time every day, and I occasionally still have dreams of riding along this road. The bus driver was Father Delzell, who occasionally sang to keep us all quiet. He was a very good tenor. We’d hear him again singing the litany amazingly during First Friday afternoons in church. It was interesting to see him in the bus, and then “on stage” in dramatic gold vestments.

But my first school, where I went to first and second and started third grade, was called Holy Cross School in Springfield, Pennsylvania. My first-grade class had 70 or so students, and there were four first grades. My sister Pat started school a year later, and there were 95 or so kids in her particular class, again with four classes of the grade. Our Christmas pageants and May processions were conducted with military precision, with a lot of standing and waiting with folded hands, and I can see now that this was the only way to proceed with numbers like these. The alternative was not to do any of these things, but I think the nuns really needed to get out of the classroom once in a while. I’m much more sympathetic nowadays with those teachers (especially after I taught second grade for a year in Camden).

My third-grade class in the new school, Sacred Heart, had only about 50 kids, and there were only two classes of each grade. (Marie Griffin, Eileen Costello, Janet Sanford, Christine Hill, correct me if I’m wrong on this.) I was pretty good at spelling bees, and have the Miraculous Medals to prove it. Well, I don’t really still have them, but what I’m trying to say is that these numbers were just ordinary to us. Most families had several kids in different grades, with more coming along.

In fact, in Cinnaminson alone, I can name ten families of ten or more children, all Catholic, some of whom moved through Holy Cross High School later. OK, I’ll do it: Vassallos, Rineharts, Kostiuks, Corrs, mmmmmmmm. Well, I confess that, even after consulting my sisters, I can only remember four family names. I used to have them on the tip of my fingers. Guess I’ll have to do a memory dump of more recent useless information, of which there is quite a lot, so I can get back to these important facts.

And then in Holy Cross High School there were the Moseleys and Callahans from Moorestown, with Mary and Kate (or Mary Kate, or Mary Kay, what did you finally settle on?) in our class, and I think the Zehlers were ten. (Or was it fewer, Annette?) Who else?

So perhaps birth control was inevitable after that. One father of a family of ten once said to me, “If all my kids have ten kids, I’m moving to California.”

However, if all the smart people used birth control, why do we have the Congress that we have today? How smart were they?

But how can I criticize? I have no children, a condition not unheard of in people from large families. And we were only six, only average-to-large numbers for that time.

And now that we are in the third quarter of our life span, the financial marketplace advises us to put our supposed millions into medical care, pharmaceuticals, and other services for the aged. Invest in our decrepitude. The numbers will be staggering. That’s something to think about, isn’t it?

I once sat down at a table at an event with a woman, maybe five years older than our graduating class, whose husband as a side job had just made an album of doo-wop music and was traveling around New Jersey with his group. Her view of the financial advice to our age group was, “Nursing homes? Sitting at home in rocking chairs wringing our hands? This is what they are telling us? Sorry, something livelier please - I’m not done yet!”

Me neither. Not that we’ll be training for the Olympics, but there’s no need to rush things.

Occasionally, though, I see a thought on the horizon, and I wait for it to come in closer so I can see what it is, but it just hangs out there. What’s up with that?

Here’s a poem by Billy Collins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrEPJh14mcU