A mere one month away for 50th reunion

Richard Nixon was president

Being in August means I'm within a month of my 50-year high school reunion. As a kid I would consider participation in such an affair to be quite, shall we say, geriatric. Is that a word that has faded from our vocabulary? "Geriatric?" Remember how on the old Lawrence Welk TV show, we saw commercials for "Geritol?" So people joked about Geritol in connection with very old people. People like who would congregate for a 50-year school reunion. 

Fifty years! I remember when I was young, computing how old I was going to be for the year 2000. I'd be 45 which I felt at the time would be "up there." We are well into the 2000s now. The years beginning with "19" slip away in our collective memory. Time marches on, waits for no one. 

You know, I'm not even sure what "Geritol" was supposed to do. I don't hear about it any more. My generation considered Lawrence Welk a total symbol of the aged crowd. We often spoke in teasing terms. My generation of the boomers could be disrespectful about a lot of things. So what's the theory on that? 

We disrespected convention and older people in general, because those older people were incapable of real critical thinking when it came to the Vietnam war and war in general. By golly, we had to respect our U.S. military and U.S. government because we were this bastion of "freedom."

We don't question the need for such rigidity when we look back on WWII. Maybe we should cast a bit more of a questioning eye on that. Could justice be pursued around the world by means other than sending young men across battlefields or to do "island-hopping" in the Pacific? We are so distanced from those events now. We have achieved emotional distance. The deceased are just names we might recall. 

I never really understood Korea, the need for such carnage involving Americans. Did we even win? Look at North Korea today. If that's a problem, why cannot other nations around the globe join hands to solve it? Maybe ask Henry Kissinger about that. 

Henry Kissinger

Do you recall the story about Kissinger and the belly dancer? I brought that up in the back shop of the Morris newspaper once - our custodian with a smile said "you would remember that." Anyway, Kissinger reported that he was "observing navel maneuvers." And let's remind here that "navel" in this context has a different spelling from the U.S. Navy "naval." 

That reminds me, last week I used the expression "loath to" as in someone loath to do something. I had the nagging feeling I ought to check if "loath" should have an "e" added on the end. So easy to check nowadays with Google. Confusion does exist on this, I readily learned. Turned out the proper spelling for my use was "loath," no "e." So there. 

Not that many people would not want to criticize my writing for other reasons. 

 

Shall I attend? Hmmm

So I graduated from Morris High School 50 years ago. Is this something a person ought to dwell on? I mean, the milestone. To be reminded that we have simply survived life for so long? 

I honestly do not know if I should attend the 50th. I did not attend No. 40 and I had the excuse of dealing with my father's recent death. 

I took this photo for Morris paper in 1983

The Class of '73 went through the inevitable period where a number of our parents passed. Our parents were in "The Greatest Generation." Tom Brokaw had his name on the book. Many people suspected that the real work/research with the book was done by other people. It's just like the series of books that have Bill O'Reilly's name on them. O'Reilly has a "co-author." Many people assume the co-author is the true writer and that O;Reilly's name got affixed for the obvious marketing purposes. 

A blogger from the days when blogging was still a novelty - an average Joe blogger might actually get attention for writing something - wrote a much bandied-about post suggesting that Brokaw was really author in name only. The "in" Beltway crowd of Ivy League graduates et al. pounced and said this was a terrible thing to suggest! My they got defensive. Such defensiveness leads to suspicion. "They doth protest too much." 

OK so book publishing can be like a racket in some ways: anything to push up sales. It's like the fab music group "The Monkees" who fell into some controversy because they employed a practice that was known to be common in pop music: "studio musicians" who laid down the recordings, perhaps everything but the singing, frankly. I mean, we can recognize the voices of Mickey Dolenz and Mark Lindsay, the latter with "Paul Revere and the Raiders." 

The Monkees have done much better than the Raiders in a "retro" way. So I feel a little sorry for Lindsay. I was a Raiders fan. 

My Class of '73 began saying goodbye to our parents. A highly traumatic thing of course. To be reminded of one's mortality is a tremendous shock. 

 

Mixed feelings

I do love all my fellow MHS Class of '73 members, make no mistake. Sometimes I feel a loving bond that makes me wonder if it's a bit too much, I mean seriously. Too much "co-dependency?" Any one of us could have graduated in a different community and developed bonds with exactly the same kind of classmates. So what's so indispensable about the ones we grew up with here? 

I look back and consider it to be bizarre: after so many years of being so "tight" with my exact age peers in Morris, we went through graduation and then the very next day, those bonds were broken for all time. So many years of sitting in school classrooms, and after that we felt pressure to "go to college" in order to be accepted as respectable adults. 

Heaven help the kids who had "work" reported in the "future plans" feature of the school newspaper. The lowest caste among us? Today I think the attitudes are far more enlightened. 

In addition to future plans, we had the "class will" and "class prophecy" features in the school paper. I learned a few years ago that the school board put an end to those two features. We are in so much of a more litigious society now. The features could be abused with subtle suggestions about certain (loose?) girls. I will refrain from sharing examples. A small-breasted girl in my class - who would give a rip about that today? - had that feature addressed by insinuation. 

But the boomers could be so irreverent. We could also be careless, disrespectful and unkempt in our personal appearance. We'd like to forget these old traits now. I bring up reminders because that is a primary feature of my online writing today. Remember the past and ponder how we could have considered past habits and procedures passable/respectable. 

 

Oh, the paper checks

Life had to be different in the pre-digital age, massively. Writing out paper checks for everything! Today it feels like such a chore to write out the rare paper check. We have to do that with our city water bills. I think to myself "let's see, what year is it?" Seriously. We don't have to think often about what year it is. A strange practice for writing checks, actually. 

My Class of '73 when young circulated in a world where cigarette smoking was quite countenanced, this despite the fact I'm sure many people were annoyed. It was accepted culture: smoke floating in the air in public places - anywhere really. Ralph Smith of the old West Central Experiment Station in Morris had a "smoking permitted" sign in his office. 

So we all got smarter with a lot of things. We were pulled into the digital age whether we got comfortable with all the new stuff or not. 

And so we sit in the year 2023 and it has been 50 years since the milestone night of graduation for the MHS Class of '73. Heavens. In September the new milestone awaits: 50 years! Shall we start taking Geritol? 

Another product that I lump in with Geritol is Alka-Seltzer. A little puzzled about what it really was supposed to do. But the Alka-Seltzer TV commercials were great, funny. "I don't believe I ate that whole thing." My fellow grad Edie Martin was amused by that line. Edie was with the famous grocery store Martin family of Morris. 

Mike Eul was with the famous hardware store family, and my I do miss Eul's Hardware. Doesn't even seem like Morris anymore. Mike died not long ago, RIP.  

Did I hate school? Of course. Can I live that part of my life over again in a more positive environment? Of course not.

 

Addendum: Like Henry Kissinger I am rather enamored with belly dancers. On YouTube I discovered "Isabella" who I consider the best. So I posted a comment to one of her videos recently, and wouldn't you know she answered me! Signed "Isabella," and I was left breathless for a few moments. 

 

- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com