The Best Three Days I Had In High School
John Clark
Menlo-Atherton High School Class of 1959
On the other hand, maybe you can. This is a story of our 50th High School Reunion. It is written from a personal perspective and as such the views expressed, including any errors of fact or judgment, are my own; but perhaps it will nudge the readers’ own memories making for a worthwhile journey.
It’s Thursday, the day before the start of our 50th reunion. I am standing with my wife, Helena, in front of Menlo-Atherton High School. Classes are in session. The last time I was here, as it must be with many of my former classmates who’ve returned, was fifty years ago plus a few months. I had only been to one reunion, and that was the 20th which was held at a private residence, the hosts of which did a fine job; but it wasn’t a particularly memorable event, at least for me. A lot of us were still “climbing”.
We walk into the long, narrow administration building that has, with perhaps some minor exceptions, not really changed, and that in of itself produces a strange feeling. It’s as if Mr. Loftus might poke his balding head out from behind a closed door at any time. I think his was the first office on the left. Right on the front lines. I never had a personal encounter with our principal but there was no denying his presence.
I move to the counter on the right and mention to a member of the staff why I am in town and ask if it would be possible to walk through the campus making an excuse that I will not be able to be with our class for the official tour on Saturday. I am being a bit selfish for I want this to be a singular experience. I think someone understands. The smile that greets me when we’re issued passes tells me that just maybe there were others who have already been here for the same reason with the same made-up story.
Just as we’re leaving the building, the bell rings. Kids are filling the main hallway—now called Pride Hall—moving on to their next classes. How perfect I am thinking. Even with two generations removed, but with an obvious variance in attire, not much has changed. Bits and pieces of conversation are being bantered back and forth like a verbal text language, bodies bumping into to each other, intentionally or by accident. And then before we know it, complete stillness as the new period begins.
As we pass the glass trophy cases depicting awards and recognitions of yesterday’s “heroes”, I am reminded of the film Dead Poets Society released in 1989. Robin Williams played a serious role as an English teacher of a boy’s prep school in, of all years, 1959. In a pivotal scene in the beginning of the movie “while Whistling the 1812 Overture, he takes his class to look at the photographs of former students in a trophy case and tells them, ‘carpe diem’ (Latin for seize the day)”; and I wonder to myself, did we? And then I am thinking, the hell with it. This is not the time for rhetorical questions. There is still time left for some to capture what may have been illusive or for others to savor what they were able to catch. It’s certainly not the time for whispering “Rosebud”.
I notice something else. The main hall lockers are gone and I wonder why. But the same slope of the hallway is there about half way down, shiny and smooth tempting me to take off my shoes and slide on my stocking feet.
We turn right and down the walkway of a side building toward the open area that will lead us to the football field, and the track where I used to compete. In my freshman year I came in last in nearly every race. The word had gotten to Coach Don Dorfmeier that I was going to quit. He said I was not; and how could I say no to a man who had been shot down during WWII in Europe and ended up in a POW camp? At least that was the story. But I believed it. So I knew that was the end of that thought. Back then, as a general rule to which there were definite exceptions, we didn’t challenge authority. That would come in a decade or so in a Tsunami like wave from a younger generation. And Coach Dorfmeier? He was right. Thanks to him I eventually got better.
As I am standing on the new synthetic track surface I turn to Helena, first making sure no one is watching, and ask her to take my photograph as I crouch in a runner’s starting position glancing up and imagining the hurdles in front of me. I am thinking: this is a really dumb thing to be doing. But I also know that she won’t think so. It’s the essence of her gentleness and kindness to allow me this little fantasy of recapturing a moment in time, clownish as it is. If she is having difficulties in connecting with where I came from—naturally understandable—she does know what I became.
Helena and I are as removed from our respective cultural backgrounds as can be imagined. I had grown up with relative material abundance as most Americans had in the fifties. She, on the other hand, came of age in Czechoslovakia, a totalitarian country behind the Iron Curtain with abject scarcity of material goods but an abundance of classic culture that was, and still is, Prague. At times it mitigated the fear and censorship that permeated through their Orwellian society. On my journey back I can tell she is quite content to leave me to my inner thoughts and feelings and be an observer. Heck, maybe for her this is a field trip.
We walk toward the boys’ gym, a short distance away. I want to take a brief look inside. There before me are the same lockers, the same walls, the same smell and the same small offices for the coaches. Nothing has changed here either. Then something strange yet vaguely familiar happens to me. The nervous anxiety I had once felt so many years ago at the beginning of my high school days springs out of someplace very deep within me. I am back, alright. There is no doubt about it. But it isn’t 1959.
The year is 1955, the beginning of our high school days. Sadly James Dean is killed in a car accident only a few weeks into the school year. “Rebel Without a Cause”, one of only three major films he stars in, is released a month later. Mr. Roberts is a hit and we eventually adopt it. President Eisenhower sends the first of U.S. “advisors” to South Vietnam. Claudette Colvin, a fifteen year-old African American girl refuses to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, is carried off and arrested. Rosa Parks, the better known, does the same later in the year and is also arrested thus giving birth to the civil rights movement. The Salk polio vaccine receives full approval of the FDA and mom’s approval to go back in the pool. The Soviet Union detonates its first thermo-nuclear bomb thereby kicking off a rush for some to build back yard family bomb shelters.
At the same time America is in the midst of an extraordinary economy. Bill Bryson in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, reminisces of growing up in the fifties—and a great read by the way—captures it well:
“I can’t imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.....Americans owned 80% of the world’s electrical goods, controlled two-thirds of the world’s productive capacity, produced over 40% of its electricity, 60% of its oil and 66% of its steel. The 5% of people on Earth who were Americans had more wealth than the other 95% combined…..(and) the Average American ate 50% more than the average European (and there wasn’t an obesity problem).” There’s another writer who put it this way: “There is a feeling that life is very good and that it will only get better.”
But nearly all of these events I pay only passing attention to; there are other things on my mind like girls, sports, books and, probably most important, music. There is a phenomenon taking place that is far more important to all of us: “Rock Around the Clock” is the first “Rock ‘n’ Roll” single to reach Number One on the charts. Performed by Bill Haley and His Comets, about as un-rock and roll looking group as you could imagine, launches—to the chagrin of our parents—the Rock ‘n’ Roll era; and heard on the R&B radio station KDIA in Oakland—that same station some of us are told not to listen to and not just because of the music it played—are these hits: “Ain’t That a Shame” by Fats Domino, “Bo Diddley” by the man himself; “Maybelline” (my favorite) by Chuck Berry and “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard.
Elvis Presley is just getting started in 1955. His first hit is in early ’56 with “Heartbreak Hotel” followed by “Blue Suede Shoes”. I prefer them white, even with scuff marks. Elvis follows up with “I Want You, I Need You, I love You”, “Hound Dog / Don’t Be Cruel”, “Love Me Tender”; and they just keep coming. And the best part is you can buy a 45 record for less than a dollar.
Our music, and it was ours, was a sign of our own empowerment—at least that’s the word that would be used to describe it today—and we were only beginning to recognize it. There was something else about our music. It turned out to have “legs” as evidenced by its use in scores of films over the decades.
So there I am on a late Sunday morning in the early fall of ‘55 just as summer is coming to a close, pedaling on my three speed BSA “British Racing Green” bike down Middlefield Road along the pedestrian path with trees still green and leafy on the roadside and the redbrick wall of Lindenwood on my left. I want to see for myself, and by myself, what I am going to be embarking upon in a few days. I am figuring that if I actually look at the place, without anybody else seeing me of course, it might take away some of the anxiety and apprehension I am feeling.
If only I had known that probably everyone was feeling the same way—which by the way came out rather freely along with other feelings at the reunion—how much easier it would have been.
Slowly we become of age and in small groups we bond and grow to depend on one another. For many, family life is supportive and loving. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show and Leave it to Beaver depict “perfect” families and amplify and reaffirm that kind of belief. But in real life it can be a tough act to follow. For some who have problems at home these shows either serve to reinforce their plight or must be a welcomed escape. For certain there are families with dysfunctional behaviors: domestic abuse and alcoholism among them. Adolescence can be painful and the emotional pain that many experience is a burden to simply carry as best as one can with the help of a close friend, a sympathetic teacher or school counselor. It can be the best of times or, at other times, the worse; but whatever it is, we know we’re in it together.
The year is 1959 and the end of our high school days together. It’s also, sadly, “The Day the Music Died” in Clear Lake, Iowa: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and “The Big Bopper”, all gone. Even Superman is gone. Many of us are listening to the radio as California captures the Men’s Basketball Title by 71-70 over West Virginia. The Soviet Union’s Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the moon; later in the year Luna 2 crashes on it and Luna 3 shoots the first photos of the far side of the moon. The space race is on and we’re behind; but the “Mercury Seven” are announced to bring us back. The USS George Washington is the first submarine to be fitted with ballistic missiles. The stockpiles of nuclear weapons of both superpowers will eventually grow to a point where it’s only about “how high the rubble will bounce”; and if that isn’t scary enough, On the Beach is released worldwide, including Moscow, to show the insanity of the arms race. Shortly after our graduation, Khrushchev debates Nixon in Moscow, in a kitchen. Before the year is out the first two Americans are killed in action in Vietnam but practically no one takes notice, except Ho Chi Minh. The Dalai Lama flees from Tibet, Your Hit Parade has no more hits, Mickey loses his “Club” and Fidel takes Cuba.
Ben- Hur is released late in the year and the deserving Best Actor(s) are the scene stealing race horses pulling the chariots. For another dimension we enjoy The Twilight Zone or watch Clint Eastwood play Rowdy Yates on Rawhide. Bonanza is one big, happy family, but where are the women? Hawaii not only gets statehood, along with Alaska, but TV Land gets The Hawaiian Eye. The Untouchables is hot. The “Supremes” become a group and Motown is founded; and it’s not a coincidence. And at the top of the charts around that time is one of those “one hit wonders”: “Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu / Volare” which we mumble the words to, although we do get the “Volare” part, as we cruse down El Camino. There’s also Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife”; Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans”; Frankie Avalon’s “Venus”; and a few of my favorites: Lloyd Price’s “You’ve Got Personality” and “Stagger Lee” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by The Platters, the latter being maybe the best slow dance record of its time.
We were the last of “The Fifties”, to some extent America’s last time of innocence; but come what may it all worked out, for better or for worse, mostly a mixture of both. The real “Happy Days” were nearly over. How fortunate we were to have had those times, illusory as they may have been at times, for the winds of change that were about to bring in the ‘60s were a blowin’. Sometime in 1959, the exact date unknown, Jimi Hendrix buys his first electric guitar. A revolution was coming.
Some fifty years later on a clear Friday evening I am driving into the dirt parking lot of Rossotti’s, the site of our first reunion event: a casual, low key “icebreaker”. Walking slowly through this lovely old beer joint I nervously scan faces looking for someone I can recognize. There are what appear to be long time regulars mixed in with a few bikers with what probably are Stanford students and a few Silicon Valley types. But no one is recognizable.
We proceed through the creaky rear screen door and out to a picnic area. Still no one, but we’re early. Then a small group that I just know are former classmates sits down at a nearby table. It doesn’t take long for one particular fellow to turn around in my direction, take notice of me with a smile on his face that says, “I think you just might be one of us.” He looks intently at me pointing his index finger upward as if he is trying to bring down a memory from long ago and says, as if asking a question: “John.....John…..John…..Yes! John Clark.” I know right then and there two things: there is “a road back” and that the weekend will be just fine.
I look at Helena and say, “I think we’ve been invited to join them.” And so it begins. “Hi John”, Roger Patterson says to me; and I reply, “I didn’t know you even knew me.” And then we laugh. We shake hands and introductions are made all around. I can feel the warmth. It’s genuine. The smiles I see can’t be faked. And one by one or couple by couple they come trying desperately to recognize but not seeking recognition. It’s written on their faces. It doesn’t matter that we can’t always recognize someone. What matters is that we want to. Somewhere along the way the egos have pretty much vanished. It’s as if we’re just happy to be here.
Saturday night and it’s the main event at the Menlo Circus Club, an imposing and exclusive 86 year-old dowager of an enclave. But tonight “she” has let her hair down. Walking to the expansive double front doors with Helena I am remembering for some odd reason the time our track squad went to Sequoia High School to compete in a track meet. As we entered the boy’s locker room someone from the opposing team shouted out, “Well, here come the rich boys.” For them, that was a big mistake. For the most part we were not, and even those who did come from well-to-do families it was rarely flaunted. Secondly, it turned out to be a taunt that ended up working against them on that occasion.
Inside and on the entrance tables and easels are not only memorabilia from our high school days but also grade school pictures from Encinal and Hillview, the two main feeder schools that formed the bulk of our class. I think to myself: someone’s mother(s) kept these keepsakes. My mom had done the same thing for me. But because some of us lived close to Redwood City, we came from Selby Lane and later, Goodwin. We were vastly outnumbered in our freshman year; but there would be time enough to make new friends.
For many the bonds that were made over fifty years ago, some going even further back to the first grade, are in clear and unmistakable evidence. The past was not totally left behind; and we were about to make sure of that. Of the 170 or so attendees—from a class of 483—two-thirds are classmates. Some are here alone. Thor Lie, our Norwegian classmate, receives recognition for coming the farthest. I come in second.
There was, as in any class, the “popular” group. They held student body elected positions, excelled academically and/or athletically, ran the extracurricular clubs and boards, were generally good looking and even may have been envied. But the point is they got things done and entertained us in the process. And here I would like to acknowledge and thank them for what they not only gave to our school so many years ago but also for those who organized our reunion:
Pat Davis Parsons, Cynthia Henderson McMillen, Stan Sayles, Roger Patterson, Rich Cottrell, Karin Schmidt Aune (with a special thanks for her work on The Memory Book), Joe Tripiano, Bonnie Bryson Brinton, Chuck Ott, Sue Leslie Smith, Jane Benidt Gleason, Ed and Becky Scripps, Fran Dickman, and Barbara Randall Preuss. The gang of fifteen, still doing it and all for us.
At the dinner party there seems to be an absence of vanity being replaced by, if not a bit guarded, transparency. It seems as if there is no point in being anything other than ourselves. There are also some reconciliations happening. One classmate shares with me a conversation he had with another in which he was reminded of how in PE class he had subjected this classmate “to a really bad time.” They ended up having a “good conversation” and amends were made. But, as my friend told me later, “these are not things that make me feel too good about who I was at the time.”
It reminded me of the time in my freshman year while taking a shower after PE I was “advised” that “you better hang on to something, Clark, or you’re going down the drain.” I was pretty darn skinny back then and it was, to say the least, embarrassing. But there was, thankfully, an upper classman who told me, “Don’t take it too hard. We’re only kidding.”
Undoubtedly there were a few slights that evening. I suppose old habits and adherence to the old pecking order, for some, just don’t change; but for the vast majority, camaraderie prevailed: real smiles, warm hugs. It was a happening. It could be seen everywhere including people walking up to each other, not immediately recognizing each other, glancing at the name tags with individual senior class photos, still not remembering who the heck the other person was, but nodding with a smile nonetheless. We were back together again but without the egos. Insecurities left far behind.
It’s a sit-down Italian cuisine dinner, buffet style with an extraordinary variety of food laid out by the Circus Club that Julia Child would have approved of: from imported and domestic cheeses and Caesar salad to nearly a dozen truly gourmet main dishes to select from, twenty-two items altogether, and wine being graciously provided by Peggy Twist Fry. (Come to think of it, maybe that kid from Sequoia was on to something.) The spread is a far cry from the Sloppy Joes served in “J” Building. The only thing missing are buses to take us for dessert to—and it’s still there—Foster Freeze next to what is sadly not there anymore, Johnny’s Smoke Shop.
The Original Amateur Hour is back with Roger Patterson as Ted Mack, but with a lot more personality. He’s masterful as our MC as are his sidekicks: Mike Fahay, Diane (“Vannie”) Van Epern Penn and Lana Legallet Wilson. They make us laugh not just at their funny skits and silly jokes but also at ourselves. And the cool guys are still cool, especially Dave Majerus, our own “Fonz”. And the girls are still pretty, especially Jane Benidt Gleason with her gorgeous eyes, Bonnie Bryson Brinton with her endearing smile and Pat Davis Parsons with her genuine warmth and grace. It would take pages to mention everyone.
A couple of slow dances, a few more hellos and its time to drift away.
But, there is more for those who want to hang on for a little bit longer and make it to Barbara Randall Preuss’s home on Sunday morning for mimosas and a continental brunch. Her garden is inviting and relaxing; but it’s beginning to feel like what our parents used to do. The time machine we’ve been in over the past few days is making whirling sounds in my head. Finally, it’s our last goodbye and time to leave it all behind and return to our present lives with a tinge of sadness for sure, but with new/old memories. Monday would come soon enough for, as Roger Patterson later put it, “reunion withdrawals”.
I am not sure if any of us were ever together with so many people that were so full of affection, if not love, for each other. It was as if we brought back with us only the best of times. For three days we left behind any regrets of ‘what might have been if only’, the grief that comes with personal tragedies and losses of loved ones, the disappointments we may have experienced in others and with perhaps ourselves. We also left behind our successes and accomplishments. The “climbing” was over.
It was if we had come back to our true selves. For me, and perhaps for others, our reunion was the best three days I had in high school. So, until we meet again, if we are to be so fortunate, it was good to come home again even if it was for only a brief time.
December 29, 2009
John Clark
Brandon, County Kerry
Ireland