The 50-year Reunion

A half century is a long time in a human life. In 1961, I graduated from high school, a fresh faced kid living in a suburban San Francisco home with nothing in particular on his mind in terms of a career. I had some vague notions of being a musician – teaching or performing in some capacity.

Attending college was the expected course after graduation and so I enrolled in the local community college. (In those days, they called it “junior college,” which carried a kind of pejorative label with it. One went to the “jaycee” because, as in my case, you left high school without the grades to get into a regular four year college like the state college or the University of California system. The running joke was that our local community college was nothing more than a high school with ashtrays, full of kids like myself, kind of aimless but not yet ready to give up on education altogether. Looking back on it, I had two of my greatest, life changing,  teachers, one an English instructor and another who taught civics, in my time at the jaycee.

Money wasn’t much of an issue way back then because, years before, some politicians and citizens in California had the harebrained idea that college should be free of charge for students who chose to go, all the way from kindergarten through the awarding of one’s bachelor degree. The theory was that in addition to being more important to the society in general by virtue of being more highly educated, a college grad earned far more money than someone who hadn't gone to college, and over a lifetime of work, he repaid the cost of his education in the form of higher income taxes. Thus, one could even go to the to the top rated public university in the nation, the University of California, Berkeley – the jewel in the crown of an extensive system of California public higher education institutions – virtually free of charge. (Actually, one paid for one’s books and his room and board, but tuition was a virtual unknown.) Of course 6 years later, all this was to change radically, as a newly installed governor and ex-B-movie actor named Reagan decided that he’d had enough of  “communistic” protesters and ingrates going to school on California’s nickel, and convinced the voters and legislature to start charging “fees” if you wanted to go to a publicly funded college. The rest is history, but to this day, there is no such thing as “tuition” in California public universities. Only fees. Lots of fees. (My son, for example, graduated from UC-Berkeley  a year ago with a debt of  $45,000 (room, board, and “fees”) for his last 2 years there. Though still a bargain by current standards, it’s hardly like it was when I left high school.

Nevertheless, our high school class, which probably numbered around 600 or so kids on that sunny, mid-June graduation  in 1961, dispersed after the obligatory valedictories about our generation pointing the way to the future, throwing our ill-fitted mortar boards into the air and enjoying cake and ice cream afterward. The girls wore straight skirts and guys were usually uniformed in suits, starched white shirts and skinny, 1-inch neckties. Truthfully, it was a time of optimism, of innocence and a certain assurance that no matter where you were headed – to a job or to college – all would be well.  Some of us held on to our girlfriends or boyfriends for a while longer but there was no doubt new ones were in the offing as we embarked on a new life. For me, it was off to the local jaycee and music school.

Fifty years later, someone had the bright idea to organize a 50-year reunion of our high school class and as I write this piece there is all kinds internet communication going back and forth among those of us on the mailing list. We are beginning to see biographies of people who were among my graduating class, even some recent pictures of them – some totally unrecognizable and others who look not much different than they looked in 1961 (well, at least you could pick them out in a crowd!). Some of us are now dead, dead from the wars, or accidents, or from one or another illness which invariably comes with age or bad luck. A couple of our classmates even took their own lives.  But the pictures I’m seeing are of people who had lived a lifetime of work, of rearing their own kids, maybe had too much sun and whose skin is now wrinkled and thin, or whose hair, once as thick as a bristle brush, was now fine and sparse or missing altogether. Some of the guys I thought were at the top of the pecking order – I think we invented the word "clique" -  look a little bent and bruised. There are 600-odd stories each of them have to tell and which we read about in these back and forth e-mails. Some are embellished and some are pretty revealing. All of them briefly account for the half century since we were together on that June day.

One of us became a very well-known musician in a rock band of the San Francisco psychedelic craze – one whose name any 6o's rock fan would instantly recognize; another became a jazz singer in the New York City cabaret scene;  still another local girl, though not of our class and just a year younger became, for a while, a well know television actor and personality, in addition to being a local beauty queen; acquiring, along the way, the dubious encomium of  "Motion Picture Sweater Girl of 1967," awarded by the National Knitted Outerwear Foundation.  Some became quite wealthy in business and others lived considerably more mundane lives.  We are now grandparents, too, most of us, I think.

I recently was able to contact the lady who was my senior year girlfriend way back then – really, my first-ever romance. She’s still strikingly pretty even in her own seniorhood, and still possessing of a marvelously dry sense of humor inherited from her now deceased parents, whom I truly loved as if they were mine, too. We caught each other up in a joyful conversation, recounting the “whatever-happened-to’s” and traded talk of each other’s life and career, marriages (both of us having made two trips to the altar) and of course bragging about our own kids, of whom we are justly proud. She wound up widowed here in the Northwest, in Bellingham, WA, and I am here, divorced and single, in Oregon. (How ironic, I thought, for if there w as anyone who should have lived an urban life, it was Linda. Instead she helped her daughter care for two horses they kept – in Bellingham!)  All in all, it was a great conversation filled with wonderful memories and plenty of laughter. In fact, she told me her sister Carol, a couple of years our junior, was already planning a wedding - ours (Good Lord!), when she heard I had made contact with her big sister. Now that is dry humor.

I sense now, that this class of 1961, this group which has seen so much change in our society and whose, in many ways, best days are behind it, is in a kind of lifeboat of its own. We are seeking each other out perhaps to validate the half century of life we’ve enjoyed, that we’ve struggled through and with, in some cases. We are comparing their stories with our own and finding that the lives we’ve lived are good lives; that we’ve done the best we could; and that after all is said and done, we’ve managed, on one hand.

On the other, our kids, and even their kids, are facing daunting challenges we never could have imagined. When we graduated that bright June day in 1961, the world was our oyster. The fruit hung low on the tree. This is not the case 50 years later. As we, one by one, fade out; as we “shuffle off to Buffalo,” much of what we leave behind is a mess,  some of it our own making but also some of it just part of the drift of history. Our children and grandchildren will grapple with problems we don’t have to grapple with now, for our future is now our past.  They will deal with problems that until relatively recently were just not on most peoples' radar screen.

I sincerely believe that they are up to the task.  Somehow they will sort it out.

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