THE GREAT AND BLESSED FIFTY-YEAR
HIGH SCHOOL REUNION
or
If You Have A High School Diploma This Could
Happen To You

Provided of course you drink pure water, avoid fast food and first and second hand tobacco smoke along with other hazards and are still moving about on the planet fifty years after getting that diploma, yes, you too could reunite with people who were, once upon a time teenagers.

My wife handed me the phone saying, "It's some woman with a southern accent. Wants to speak to Billy." My wife gave me puzzled look and cocked her head in that cute patronizing way she has while awaiting a confession of some sort.

"Probably not about a donation," I told her. The only people who ever called me "Billy" were girls in high school, I was thinking. Well, sure enough, it was a call announcing a fifty-year high school reunion of our school in Virginia. Elvis and Chuck Berry started singing in the echo chambers of my head, and I saw my high school under a clear blue 1950's sky. I was also picturing the person on the other end of the phone line, Juanita, with her flaming red hair and sassy good looks.
"We've even planned a Saturday tour of our old school," she was saying.

"Wow, maybe we can see some of the original clay tablets we used to write on," I offered hopefully.

Juanita changed the subject. Her voice got huskier. "I had such a crush on you," she said.

"Now you tell me."

While I was on the phone, the reunion seemed like a promising trip down memory lane. And for what it was worth, it was a chance to re-visit the fifties -- a time before the planetary shift, back when Lady's Chatterley's Lover was still banned, when The Pill was waiting FDA approval and our major worry was The Bomb. But after I hung up, I pictured the long lines for loopy airport security, lost luggage, and flight delays. Then there were the mingy airline seats along with the miniature fifty-cent bottles of bulk wine selling for $6 each! (I'm in the wine business; I know these things.) After the flight, I would have to find comfortable lodging for a few nights. At my age, comfort trumps just about everything else. And where would I find nourishment? I mean real nourishment. Is a reunion with people you never expected to ever see again worth it?

Of course it is. Here is a chance to relive a time of innocence and optimism, a time of vigorous good health and churning hormones. Hopefully my classmates would have good stories to tell. Hopefully the sixties had liberated them as it had me. I wanted to hear that my old girlfriends had danced on tabletops and performed strip teases and that they had burned their bras when that time came. I had mined my schoolmates for fiction material for coming-of-age short stories. I hoped the reality of their lives was even better than anything I could imagine.

And this was no ordinary reunion because fifty years ago we had a brand spanking new school building with an entire cast of fresh-faced teachers, classrooms with virgin desks (the carved hearts would come later), unsullied restrooms, un-dented lockers, a bright clean cafeteria that smelled of hot vegetable soup and not over-ripe bananas and stale cooking oils. And then there was a new mix of students all transferred in from other schools and excited about this one. I pictured the American flag flying high in the clear blue sky outside and the school's pristine entrance foyer. I was having a nostalgia moment. So I wrote the reunion date down on my calendar -- in ink. If the grapes at my winery were in by mid October, we could make the trip and thanks to global warming the grapes should be ripening early.

I had never been to any school reunion and didn't know my schoolmates were celebrating periodic reunions for earlier time markers. But this one was more than a celebration of fifty years for one class. The first four classes of a school that opened its door in the fall of 1956 were invited. These were the matrix makers, the students who set the mold for the school. We chose a Knight in shinning armor as the school symbol. We selected the school colors, red and black (power colors) and the school song. I don't remember the song but a girl I was dating (more on her later) was appointed to go around to each classroom to perform the selection of songs we would vote on. I suppose, too, we helped the faculty and administration discover what rules should be applied and what behavior would be expected and tolerated.

Unlike other high schools in Virginia, my school was not named after a famous historical figure or influential politician or a town or city but after a hole in the ground, actually a gurgling spring inside a cave. The cave wasn't much of a cave just a dark deep hollow in the side of a mound of earth that looked the right size for a bear's den. But a spring suggests a Source, an origin from which life-giving water flows, a fountainhead. A spring in a cave has symbolic clout and real rural credibility. No city school would be named after a spring. I pictured native Americans lapping from the spring after a busy day chipping arrowheads, and many years later, travelers in horse drawn carriages stopping to slake their thirst and water the horses, then still later open top vehicles stopping at the spring with men in goggles, dusters, bow ties and women in frilly white dresses enjoying a few refreshing gulps before continuing on their motoring journey.

But by the time my school was constructed, the spring was too contaminated for human use and had been closed to the public. A tall steel fence was erected around the entire area and nobody thought much about the cave or the spring. Few newcomers to the area knew it was there. I passed by it everyday on the way to school and always wanted to taste the water and get a closer look at the spring but all I could see through the fencing was that dark hole in the side of the hump of earth.

The school was built near the foot of a mountain among many mountains toward the south end of the Shenandoah Valley a few miles southwest of Roanoke, Virginia, a city that seemed to have been discovered in the 1950's and grew so fast that for a while it was called the "Magic City." That was before the city fathers decided to call even more attention to the area and erected a huge star on a small mountain near downtown so that Roanoke was redubbed -- the "Star City of the South." In those days sprawl was in; sprawl was huge. Building new houses and paving over the rich valley farmland was considered to be positively progressive.

Four other older high schools already served the Roanoke area (all named after famous Virginians) and they were becoming overcrowded. Consequently, a new school was needed for the fastest growing part of the Roanoke Valley, the southwestern area where developers (my step-father included) were putting up houses as fast as the banks would release the construction loans.
This fifty-year reunion was, as I said, for the first four graduating classes of the school: '57, '58 (my class) '59 and '60. These were the years leading up to the Great Flux. The late fifties saw the passing of the Ozzie & Harriet evenings, Norman Rockwell scenes. Your Hit Parade was (thankfully) on its last song. Changes were in the wind and rocking was on the airwaves. In 1958 the US army was opening its big arms to Elvis, Coco Puffs were hitting the grocery store shelves, Khrushchev was elbowing his way up to become premier of Russia, the first Pizza Hut started cooking, the Dodgers were packing up to leave Brooklyn for Los Angeles, the US sent up its first satellite - Explorer I, Wham-O introduced the hula hoop, Castro's army was attacking Havana, Visa and American Express cards were introduced, the first trans-Atlantic jet service was flying (BOAC London-New York), the first Toyotas appeared in the US market while Ford brought out the Edsel (a Ford cost $1,967 to $3,929 and gas for it was 24¢ a gallon), and the Supreme Court ruled that Little Rock's schools must integrate. In 1958 the Kingston Trio's first album appears and "Tom Dooley" becomes a top hit popularizing folk music and setting the stage for a folk music awakening, the Peace Symbol design comes out and I graduate from high school and head for Colorado.

There were about twenty students in the senior class of the school that first year. I was in the junior class. If I remember correctly we only had fourteen students. (I've never owned a yearbook to refer to.) Nearly all the students in the junior and senior classes transferred in from a small school (Bent Mountain High) that was located near an entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway. I had the feeling they were all closely related.
I transferred to my school from a high school in Salem Virginia, Andrew Lewis High School and, yes, it is named after a famous historical figure, the Indian fighter of that name who had married into a well-to-do Salem family and is buried not far from the school. Lewis was also a Brigadier General in the Revolutionary Army and member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, so clearly a school should be named after him even though most students couldn't tell you who he was or what he did.

I wasn't supposed to go to Cave Spring. (Okay, I went ahead and named the school. Wasn't going to do that but I've given too many clues.) They were only transferring sophomore and freshman classes from Andrew Lewis and other county schools, and I was a junior. But since I lived on the county dividing line between two school districts, I learned in late summer I could chose between the old school and the new school. Because of construction delays, Cave Spring was to open two or three weeks later than Andrew Lewis. That made for an easy decision for me - more weeks of summer vacation. And I never really cared much for Andrew Lewis anyhow. If you didn't live in the town of Salem you would always feel like an outsider there. At Cave Spring we'd all be outsiders becoming insiders.

At about the time Cave Spring opened, the General Electric Company had just completed construction on a huge facility in the Roanoke Valley and was transferring many of their engineering staff from their plant in Schenectady, New York. Most of those upstate New York people found homes in the newly developed area around Cave Spring. This influx of kids from smart Yankee families made for a good mix with us provincials.

In the fifties fathers worked and mothers were still homemakers. Cars had wide white wall tires and television offered shows for people who could afford TV sets - shows that today would be considered highbrow. Naughty four letter words were rarely used in mixed company and marijuana was only a word and weed associated with big cities and bad kids. And public schools in Virginia were still segregated! Blacks had "separate but equal" schools. So we were told. Thus was Cave Spring a mix of bright white suburban kids mixed with kids from farm families and all of them living in blessed simplicity; it was truly a time and place of innocence. The sky was blue.

And some of the teachers were not much older or wiser than their students. Most of them were taking on their first teaching jobs, so we had the task of teaching teachers how to teach though we might not have thought of it that way. A few teachers were seasoned pros. One of the best was a geometry teacher who was also the assistant principal. She actually ran the school while letting the principal be the pleasant face of administration. This teacher had an uncanny knack of knowing when my mind drifted from her presentation of geometric principles and problems to horses or girls, calling on me to provide an important piece of information regarding the equation on the blackboard. Even if I were staring at the piece of chalk in her hand, my face composed, attentive and acting as though fascinated by "x," she knew when my mind shifted. Other than her the rest of the teachers earned a C- to a B in my book. But what the school lacked academically it made up for it in sports and human drama.

On the first day of school, I met a very pretty girl with a syrup-dripping southern accent and with a look in her big brown eyes that made me feel like I was the greatest hunk of masculinity south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Within a few weeks she became my steady girlfriend, my first ever. I was deliriously smitten and my life at Cave Spring was better than I even imagined school could be. But this girl was so pretty and such a talented singer that she also gained the devotion of the school's music teacher, marching bandleader and choir director. Later in the school year, this music teacher began escorting my girlfriend to various events where she performed songs under his guidance. After a few of their road trips, I started getting hints the music teacher was making time with my girlfriend. And I was right, for one weekend the two of them took a long road trip south for a quickie marriage. South Carolina was the usual matrimonial destination in those days. She was pushing fifteen and he was must have been near thirty or maybe more. Today he would probably go to jail under the Mann Act, but since they married before her parents could get a grip and she transferred to another school district, he was even allowed to keep his job at Cave Spring. (At least they weren't cousins!) So for the rest of that year and all my senior year encounters in the school hallway with the guy who stole my girlfriend produced moments of living theater with him hugging the far wall while I snarled and bristled like a Doberman. The guy had age on me but he didn't look like he even knew how to make a fist. Assaulting the director of the glee club was just a passing notion. He was, after all, a teacher and you're not supposed to slug teachers even if they do run off with your girlfriend.

I didn't expect my former girlfriend to show up at the reunion (and she didn't) but I wanted to hear about her and I did. To my delight, I learned that she has enjoyed a long and successful marriage with her music man husband. Her teen female intuition had set her on the right track. Dump the kid and go for the man, the music man. On our last few dates she kept singing lines from that song Teresa Brewer made popular, "Got Along Without You Before I Met You Gonna Get Along Without You Now" but I didn't, at the time, pay much attention to the lyrics. I was just enjoying her voice, thinking she sounded better than Teresa Brewer. And was even cuter.

After that experience, I didn't have another steady girlfriend at Cave Spring and my senior year seemed like a social comedown. I never even bought a Yearbook. I was working part-time at a horse-training stable and gave more of my attention to girls who rode at the stable than the girls from my school. A girl on horseback does a lot more for me than a strutting majorette or bouncing cheerleader.

During my senior year I got into a fist fight with some kid during English class. When we were escorted to the office, our principal took me aside for a private chat. Nobody brought guns or knives to school in those days and no blood had been shed, so he was very decent about the incident and didn't expel me. In fact, we reached a man-to-man understanding on the necessity for the fight. He was so accommodating I had a feeling that in the big mix of things he didn't consider a classroom brawl nearly as serious as a faculty member running off with a student. Keeping the band leader/choir director/music teacher on the faculty must have been awkward for him for he always went out of his way to be considerate towards me. I realized then I could (and did) get away with just about anything. Even when I accidently elbowed the principal in the head during a senior vs. faculty basketball game he said, with a big smile on his face, "That's okay Bill. It's just a sport."

So with my DVD of Grease readied for my laptop, we headed for the airport with me anticipating my next song, "Stranded On The Tarmac." Surprisingly, the flights weren't so bad and I joined the reunion with my former classmates in a reasonably good mood. The event was held at a place called Hidden Valley Country Club. I drove over to the club while it was still daylight just to just to make sure I could still find it after all these years. I remembered the country club golf course rolling thru idyllic countryside. It was horse country. A stable and riding ring had been constructed many years before there was even a clubhouse. Sadly, today that Virginia horse country is now Virginia house country. Enormous red brick houses hulked over tidy green lawns. But that's progress. Golfers had always complained about the stable smells, so it had to go. I always thought it odd that the smells of chemical fertilizer and herbicides on the golf course didn't bother the golfers. Guess it depends upon what you're used to.

On the first night of the reunion there were (later reported) 116 people in attendance - graduates along with their significant guests. When we entered the big hall, a lovely woman greeted us, taking both my hands in hers and saying my name so sweetly while giving me a smile that took me back fifty years to hallways of my Alma Mater. I realized at that moment that fifty years had washed away all my sins. A tone of forgiveness was in the air. We were there to be friends. Here I could powwow with fellow tribal elders and see if they were getting the respect we seniors deserve. All that would come as soon as I hit the bar for a few glasses of wine.

Looking over the room, I felt as though I had walked in on grandparent's day at the club. There was a lot of white hair and some bulky men but everyone had good teeth. Women seemed to have aged better than men and their smiles were broader. Maybe that's why they've aged better. I could see the girl still residing within them.

We didn't set off firecrackers or feast from an enormous cake with fifty candles; we sipped wine, picked at over-cooked food and talked about our children and grandchildren (even great-grandchildren) or our careers or creations. No one I spoke with had danced on a table. No one but me had been arrested for protesting some injustice. Most of the men I greeted had taken over a family business and had kept it on an even keel.

People showed one another photos pulled up from cell phones. One former classmate who didn't have children dialed up some pictures of her pet rooster for me to see -- an admirable bird, indeed. Technology was the chief subject we discussed beyond our personal lives. Thankfully, I heard nothing about surgeries. And no politics! I'm sure the years after high school took us in different political directions. Beyond listing the branches of the government, civics class in the fifties was about as relevant to our government as the latest diet fad is to health. The civics teacher, a retired welterweight boxer was, however, entertaining. With every class he'd start off thumping the textbook with his fist and saying, "We're gonna dig into this here Magruder's American Gov'ment book and get some answers." (I gave him a B.)
Religion didn't come up except for my mentioning, for the sake of conversation, I had heard that a Virginia preacher hoped to set a new world record of 120 hours of continuous preaching. The old world record was 96 hours and 52 minutes. (The rules thankfully allow a five-minute break each hour.)

The woman who had first called me about the reunion, Juanita, stepped quickly up to greet me, trailed by a man she identified as her husband. Juanita looked very good and I wondered why I hadn't paid more attention to her when I was in school. I did recall her hungry look and her flaming red hair and thought she looked like a good time but I was smitten with that girl I mentioned earlier or some other girl at the stable where I worked. Juanita's husband seemed pleasant and maintained a smile as though he knew I wanted to get naughty with his wife but it wouldn't happen. Juanita kept saying to my wife - "He used to be so shy." "Still am," I protested, slipping my arm around her waist and giving her a good squeeze.

On the second night, a live band played fifties music. When they played "The Great Pretender" from the Platter's oeuvre I mentioned to the people gathered at my table that the Platters manager, Buck Ram, did a quick write on the song while in a restroom. He had been asked if the group had anything other than "Only You." Ram excused himself and dashed off a classic. No one at my table seemed impressed. They went back to searching their cell phones for more pictures of grandchildren and pets.

Over and over I heard voices ringing surprise calling out names as they glanced from nametag to face. Smiles were everywhere. And hugs. Only one woman's breast job felt uncomfortable when we hugged. She had inspired a story so I was familiar enough with her to know the truth. During those two evenings, I wanted to hear about successes and see smiling faces with their lines of wisdom. And I did.
I left the reunion feeling blessed and privileged even if we are all relics of the past. Knowing what I know now, would I have lived those fifty years differently? Yep. I would not have wasted a moment of it. Was the reunion worth the trip? Absolutely.

Oh yeah, something else that happened in 1958: this is something few people remember or even knew -- a US B-47 bomber accidently dropped an atom bomb on Mars Bluff, SC. Fortunately it didn't go off.

---

UPCOMING EVENTS IN 2010

The Month of Photography LA (MOPLA) will present an exhibition of the works of 50 Southern California photographers entitled An Intimate View of Southern California with each photographer representing a different region. I have been invited to represent this "hood" with 25 photographic images taken in 2009.

Invitation and Details - cllick here

For the show, they wanted some of the images to be photojournalistic commentary on the economic conditions in 2009 but to me the Santa Ynez Valley is about beauty. Ill probably have the most idyllic and romanticized pictures in the exhibit. But this is what I want to see and show. Maybe its an age thing. Come to think of it, there is a dead tree in one of the pictures. But even that has a stark beauty.

EVENTS IN 2009

NO MORE WAITING FOR GODOT -- IT'S BACK!

"Waiting for Godot" is set for Broadway once again (April 30, 2009). The play originally appeared on Broadway in 1956 with Bert Lahr and E. G. Marshall and had a 60 performance run. There was an off-Broadway production in 1988 with Steve Martin and Robin Williams. But over the years this play has usually been staged in small theaters suited more for exploring the art of drama.

So why do I make so much over this revival? Because of the profound effect the play had on theater … and on me. After first reading the play, back in the early 1960's, I sensed a new world of theatrical and creative possibilities opening for us. I had majored in philosophy, a field overgrown with ideas often tangled in the dullest prose. But Godot presented ideas in dramatic form with brevity, succinctness and emotional impact.

I had seen good stage productions such as "South Pacific" (with the Broadway cast) and loved the spectacle of theater, the pageantry, the colors, a few ideas about racial relationships and then there were characters creating belief right there before my eyes. But plays like that gave you everything. They overwhelmed you with emotion. Trouble was, they left nothing to the imagination.

Godot with its empty stage, excepting a bare tree as the only piece of scenery, seemed limitless. The symbolism in that tree alone has given rise to much scholarly conjecture with its resemblance to a cross, a gallows, and perhaps the tree of knowledge gone bare. The beauty of the empty stage is that it allows the mind to fill in the blanks. That's before the actors come on and mark time like adults on a playground. Watching the play you feel some kind of force or energy and yet the characters go nowhere. Of course the name and the action suggest our wait for the return of the Savior (although Beckett claimed that 'Godot' was only the name of a bicycle racer).

And so, filled with fascination for this new art, I started writing plays. The two plays listed on another page of this website are the result of that moment of awakening. I never read another work by Becket that I thought much of, but he sure nailed it with Godot. Somewhere I read that "Waiting for Godot" was voted (by whom?) the most influential play of the 20th century. It gets my vote.

Now we will wait and see how it plays with the audience of today.

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