Journey back to Woodson

An update -- and an apology -- on delays

2012-01-24T17:50:00.000-08:00

Man plans, God laughs.

When I asked you to contribute to a book about our class, our generation, as we approach retirement age, I fully expected that it might take two years. I have always been a fast worker and a relatively prolific writer, and this seemed like a project that would be write up my alley.

Well, as the Yiddish proverb quoted above notes, things don't always work out the way we plan them.

Things chugged along fairly well for a while, and despite it taking longer than I thought, I reached the point where I was about two-thirds of the way through the first draft of the book.

I retired early -- albeit involuntarily -- when the Southern California job market for newspaper reporters sort of imploded.

No problem.

More time to work on the book.

Stuff happened, though. With the loss of one of our two incomes, we decided to sell our house in suburban Los Angeles.

Luckily, we beat the collapse of the market and we moved from Los Angeles to a Del Webb retirement community half an hour south of Atlanta. We love it here, but our move here has roughly conincided with some serious health problems for my wife of 19 years.

I have spent much of the last year as a caregiver, and very little of it writing. But we are past the crisis now. Nicole is improving and my life is starting to get back to normal.

I have begun working on "When I'm 64" again and I expect to finish it and submit it for publication this spring.

Thanks for your patience.

I haven't forgotten about you.

Please add your blessing to a peaceful outreach

2011-04-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

Dear Classmates,

I ask you to bless a new weekly Samyama mindfulness meditation call that began Tuesday, April 5th. While it is 2:00-3:00pm in our U.S. Eastern zone, it begins at four hourly times, 7:00 through 10:00pm, from London to Moscow, as well as across Africa. The 'stats' area of my site shows folks from a growing number of countries are looking at the Meditation tele-circle info, and I want to help them feel welcomed.

Another way you can support the nurturing and expansion of inner peace is to share this with family, friends, and colleagues you know anywhere in the global community (including locally). I am most appreciative. [You can copy-&-paste this entry into an email.]

Everyone ~ To see the April-May calendars for all Samyama Meditation tele-circles, please visit www.denaclayton.com and click on the link found on the "Meditation by telephone" page. Secure registration/payment can be made there.

The $65-a-month-to-attend-as-many-sessions-as-you-wish option has turned into an even bigger bargain. Any month $65 is paid, you are welcome to come to tele-circles on Mondays, Tuesdays, and/or Wednesdays whenever you like (different start times each day) - - attending as many as 12+ in a month.

Breathing deeply together, with gratitude,

~ Dena
www.denaclayton.com

An update -- and an apology -- on "64"

2011-01-29T20:13:00.000-08:00

I wanted to update all of you on the progress of our book, but I need to combine the update with an apology.

I had been hoping to finish "When I'm 64" by the end of the year, which is what I told Dale Morgan when I saw her in Northern Virginia in early November, but a combination of our move from California to Georgia, some health problems for my wife and the first real case of writer's block I've ever had has brought me to almost a dead stop for the last couple of months.

It's strange. I have 12 of what I expect to be 24 chapters completely finished, and a number of others partially written. I've been bouncing back and forth between three or four chapters, with a couple that are almost done, but for the moment, I don't seem to be getting anywhere.

I'll say that come Tuesday, with the beginning of a new month, I'm going to chain myself to my keyboard and just start slogging ahead. I'll follow some great advice I got once from the late Mike Royko. When there's no wind and the sails won't fill, row.

I'm not Shakespeare or Bill Faulkner. Just trying to write a nice little non-fiction book.

So bear with me and accept my apology. We'll get there.

Sad News About One of Our Classmates

2011-01-29T09:18:00.000-08:00

HARRY WAYNE KEMBLE

On Monday, January 25, 2011, son of Jean Dunham and nephew of Carol Caviston peacefully passed away. Memorial services will be Tuesday, February 1, 5 to 7 p.m. at American Legion Local Post 177, 3939 Oak St., Fairfax, VA. Memorial contributions may be made to Medi Home Health and Hospice, 9625 Superior Ct., Manassas, VA 20110.

Published in The Washington Post on January 29, 2011

Last-moment Meditation stocking stuffers? (WTW '67 classmate)

2010-12-19T09:50:00.000-08:00

* * * Peace-of-Mind Gifts * * *

Greetings Classmates,

(Many thanks to Dale Morgan for the idea of sharing this on the WTW blog.)

Still searching for unique, economic gifts you can share?

Who on your gift list can benefit from more Peace of Mind?

* Micro investment tells your recipients you care:

$7 to $15 buys a telephone meditation experience to be enjoyed easily from wherever they are.

* Quick delivery:

Receive gift certificates by email same day you pay on PayPal.

Consider, who is in need of a break from stress - - Colleagues? Family? Friends? Sweetheart? Teachers?

Click here to purchase: www.heartmomentsmeditationtelys.blogspot.com & to learn more about the benefits of this meditation.

Peace-of-Mind Gifts are a bargain for

a) what is received
+
b) reasonable price tag.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

With gratitude & good wishes this holiday season & beyond,

~ Dena Ward Clayton, M.A.
psychotherapist, cancer guide, meditation teacher,
bereavement counselor

(301) 712 - 6207

Dudley Wilson's Dad

2010-12-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

Dudley's Dad, John Carrington Wilson, passed on November 6, 2010. When Dudley passed this information on to me, I was so touched by the words Dudley used that I want to place them in this post.

'My Dad died on November 6th, the first day of the Hilo moon in the Hawaiian calendar...Hilo means to bind or weave...Hilo is also the chief navigator, famous for migratory journeys that established settlement in Hawaii...this was made possible by charting the courses in accordance to the natural elements of the sun, moon, and stars...I believe that these elements that Hilo provides helped chart my Dad's journey on the 6th...as you know, it is still a very sad but peaceful time...we brought his ashes back here and placed them to the left of the Langlang tree (very majestic and provides a bloom fragrance that is exotic and intoxicating)...upon my Mother's death, she will be placed on the right side of the Langlang tree...how wonderful and strange life is that we would be blessed to be able to do this.'

Dudley, my deepest condolences,
Dale

W.T. Woodson Trivia

2010-12-05T06:45:00.000-08:00

I got this WTW trivia from Mike Schmidle. I found it quite interesting so decided to share it with you.

The W.T. in W.T. Woodson stands for Wilbert Tucker. This is all according to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Wilbert Tucker Woodson High School, commonly known as W.T. Woodson High School, is a high school located in Fairfax County, Virginia, east of the city of Fairfax.

The school opened in 1962 and once was the largest school in the state. As of 2008, the student population is around 2,100. Woodson has the biggest campus in Fairfax County in size of area, and also houses Woodson Adult High School, a program designed to allow adults to earn their GEDs and HS diplomas. It was ranked #74 on Newsweek's Top 1000 U.S. High Schools in 2008. The school is named after Wilbert Tucker Woodson, superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools from 1929 to 1961.

Robert Elliott, the school's principal, retired in late November 2007. The new principal is Jeff Yost, former Assistant Principal.

PRINCIPALS

Mr. Emory Chelsey 1962-1965
Mr. Robert Phipps 1965-1968
Mr. William P. Ladson 1968-1972
Mr. Robert Phipps 1972-1981
Dr. James Wilson 1981-1986
Mr. Charles E. "Chuck" Billak 1986-1991
Dr. Gary Miller 1991-1999
Mr. Robert Elliot 1999-2007
Mr. Jeff Yost 2007-

RENOVATION

Woodson began the process of renovating all of its facilities in 2005 and adding several classrooms. The project was paid for in bonds that were established in 2003 by a voter referendum. The issue of whether to renovate had been debated for several years before the plan was approved. Woodson was one of the oldest schools in Fairfax County Public Schools, as the main facilities (plumbing, heating/cooling, floors, electrical) were still fundamentally the same as they were when the structure was built. The renovations nearly doubled the square footage of the school.

Thanks, Mike, for sharing this info with us.

Beatles Music on iTunes

2010-12-04T12:52:00.000-08:00

Sean Kennedy contacted me a couple of weeks ago with this interesting tidbit. He was on iTunes and noted that all of the Beatles music is now available in MP3 format. What Sean found to be the fun part was the 1964 Washington Coliseum concert the Beatles performed on February 11, 1964. Sean made this point because the Beatles portion of the concert lasts about 33 minutes, and when they play 'Twist and Shout' (about 5 minutes left in the concert), the cameras are panning the audience of screaming girls and Sean thinks our own WTW '67 Penny Viglione is caught on camera. Sean thought it might be fun to let Penny know that she's a star in the archive of the first American concert of the Beatles.

I have not yet watched, but I hope some of you take a look and see if that looks like Penny. And, Penny? Only you know the truth!

Some very sad news

2010-11-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

Tom Jones' wife, Jeannette, passed on Friday, November 12, with family by her side only 4 & 1/2 months after her first symptoms and diagnosis of cancer. Tom told me that her strength, dignity and calm through the whole process and to the very end was incredible. He said she was Jeannette to the end--strong, selfless, and loving.

I had the pleasure of knowing Jeannette and I liked her the minute I met her years ago. Jeannette was so genuine and down to earth; and I found myself talking & opening up to her as if we had gone to school together and had been best friends. Through these last 4 & 1/2 months, Jeannette was always thinking of other people. Even when she barely had any energy, Jeannette always posted what was happening to her on CaringBridge. I have been following her updates on CaringBridge and her sense of humor never faltered.

Tom and Jeannette's family are having a celebration of Jeannette's life December 11 in Richmond.

Anne Snyder & the Holiday Studio Tour

2010-11-20T14:27:00.000-08:00

Today and tomorrow are the Valley Craft Network Holiday Open House & Studio Tours I emailed everyone about a few weeks ago. Today, Fred Ullman, Bobbie Lanzer, Bobbie's lovely daughter, Marissa, and I decided to take a field trip over to Maryland and stop in on Anne Snyder's Studio and beautiful old farmhouse. We surprised her and had a wonderful visit, some tasty snacks and OMG you should see her incredible paintings! I had hoped to buy the painting Anne did of all of us kayaking on the 2008 NW trip, but Helen Roberts beat me to the punch. However, I fell in love with a painting Anne did of the harbor in Annapolis and it is now on my wall at home looking like it was made for me. Bobbie nabbed another one that was spectacular. We had a great time today and I hope some of you were also able to take this tour. If not, take a tour at:

anne@annegibsonsnyder.com or www.annegibsonsnyder.com

Our Classmate, Lee Millette, speaking at....

2010-11-15T14:30:00.000-08:00

Cathie Wilkins Ring just notified me that in the local PrWmCo newspaper this morning there was a feature article about Justice Lee Millette speaking THIS Wednesday, 11/17/10, at the Manassas NoVA campus (see below). Cathie is trying to find out if Lee will be going to the lunch with the group afterwards, and if so, which lunch spot. Cathie is hoping to go. Let her know if you plan on it, too.

VA Supreme Court Justice to speak IN MANASSAS...

Justice LeRoy F. Millette Jr. was appointed in 2008 to the Supreme Court of Virginia by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. As a Circuit Court Judge in Prince William County, Millette presided over the capital murder trial of D.C. sniper John Allen Muhammad and the marital rape trial of John Wayne Bobbitt. He will talk about those cases and explain the workings of the General District Court and his days as a trial lawyer on Wednesday, from 10 a.m. to noon at Colgan Hall, NVCC Campas, 6901 Sudley Road, Manassas.

Please use Event Parking. There will be LLI Shuttle cars for anyone wanting to use them. The forum is free and open to the public. Following the forum, there is a "Lunch Bunch" gathering at a local restaurant - Dutch Treat. For more information, e-mail llimanassas@gmail.com or call 571-606-0247.

Check out "Odd Couple" for Willis' performance

2010-11-12T17:05:00.000-08:00

Mike Willis is at it again.

Our class's resident star or stage and screen is part of the cast of "The Odd Couple" in a production that will be running for two more weeks as part of Theater J's 2010-11 season.


"Odd Couple" at Theater J

I'm excited about it because I'm in Washington this week for a fraternity reunion of the George Mason University Sig Eps, and since I won't be leaving for home until Monday morning, I picked up a ticket to go see Mike and the rest of the cast in Sunday night's performance.

Here's a link to the Washington Post review of the production.

When I get back home and get my stuff unpacked, I'll revisit by DVD of "Tin Men" again and see Mike in one of his finer film performances.

Let's get this site rolling again

2010-10-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

I really want to get this site going again, and I'm going to need some suggestions.

I can post from time to time, but since I'm not really in close contact with a lot of you, when I do that I end up writing about myself. I can tell you I'm a more interesting subject than I was in high school, but you definitely don't want to be reading about me and my family all the time.

Besides, I have other blogs for that.

I would love for the lovely and vivacious Dale Morgan -- the mother of our country -- to use this site for the e-mail info bursts we get from her from time to time, but I suppose I could just as easily cut and paste those e-mails into this site when I get them from her.

But Mike, you're way too lazy for that.

Unfortunately, there's more than a grain of truth in that. Why else would it have taken me three years to get "When I'm 64" close to the point where it's finished and ready to go out to publishers.

Anybody know a good publisher?

Or even a not-so-good one?

My big accomplishment this year has been getting my weight and my health back under control. When I attended the class reunion in the fall of 2007, I weighed about 235 pounds. Earlier this year, I had ballooned up to 280 and my blood pressure was becoming a real problem.


Me, left, in the fall of 2007, with my wife Nicole and Mike Willis.

So I decided I needed to do something if I wanted to see my baby granddaughter grow up.

I went to a fitness ranch in Texas for 11 weeks -- one good thing about being unemployed is that you can go lots of places -- and dropped nearly 65 pounds.

Then I came home and kept the diet and exercise regimen up. As of this morning, I weighed 168 pounds, which is three pounds more than I weighed as a senior in high school.


Me today -- 168 pounds

My blood pressure is back to normal and I'm feeling really good physically for the first time in more than 20 years.

That's it, though. Except for the fact that we're moving to Georgia at the end of this month, that's all I have that's interesting.

The ball's in your court.

Mike Sullivan, our other Vietnam casualty

2010-10-11T20:17:00.000-07:00

FORTUNATE SON

Mike Sullivan was no senator’s son, but he carried himself with pride, did his duty and enjoyed life for as long as he could.

When the male members of the Class of 1967 graduated from Woodson, most of them had two choices.

College – or Vietnam.

In a class of more than 800 people, many of whom scattered to the four winds after graduation, no one really knows exactly how many members of the Woodson Class of ’67 served in that controversial Asian war.

We know Mike Scott and Mike Willis served and returned, and we know Mike Beall died in an Army training accident at age 18 while preparing to go to Indochina.

Then there are the two names on the Wall.

Many of us knew Jon Rumble, who had made his mark despite spending only his senior year among us. He had played the male lead in the senior class play and had made many friends.


Mike Sullivan

We didn’t know Mike Sullivan as well. Other than his senior picture, the only other shot of Mike in the 1967 yearbook is as one of the students who participated in Distributive Education, going to classes in the morning and leaving at noon to go to work.

If there’s one thing many of us have learned over the last 41 years, it’s how few people we actually knew in our class of 804 seniors in a school of 3,300 students. If we didn’t share classes with someone, the only way we knew them was either from after-school activities or from our own neighborhoods.

Kids who spent only half a day at school – kids who weren’t in band or clubs or on athletic teams – weren’t as well known. So while plenty of us in the Class of 1967 remembered Jon, not as many knew Mike all that well.

One who did was Randy McDaniel, who grew up right across Route 236 from Sullivan.

"We played a lot of sports together at the YMCA," McDaniel said. "His dad worked for the government and my sister carpooled with him. She told me that at one point while we were in high school, his dad actually blocked incoming phone calls because too many girls were calling for Sully too late into the evening."

Of course, that was hardly the worst problem for a teenage boy to have.

Randy went through 11 years of school with Mike, and during grade school, junior high and most of high school, both hung around with Butch Fagot, Hap Hodges and Willard Totten. They all spent a lot of time playing sports together.

"Sully was a very fast runner, although not as fast as Hap," Randy said. "He was very fun loving and extremely witty."

We know that he was 20 years old when he arrived in Vietnam and that he was married. And we know that he died there.

***

Jim Regn was one of Sullivan’s best friends, and nearly 50 years later, he still remembers the evening they met.

"We both delivered newspapers for a Washington daily," he said. "I was waiting at the driveway for Mr. Manning, the district manager, to show up and collect the subscription money collected from the customers on my paper route. He would often take one of his carriers with him for company and to meet the other kids. You would get to ride around in his panel truck and get dinner at Topps or McDonalds.

"That evening he arrived with Mike, a kid who was wearing a baseball hat I recognized as a Fairfax County Little League Eastern Division team. East and West divisions were divided by Ox Road. In those days every kid that played baseball wore his hat everywhere. By it you could tell if a kid played for a good team and on what side of the county he lived. Since I lived on the west side I didn’t think Mike and I would likely run into one another beyond the occasional newspaper connection."

A year later, Regn and Sullivan found themselves in the same home room at Sidney Lanier Intermediate. Since teachers had a tendency to seat their students in alphabetical order, the two boys often found themselves within "talking distance" for a good part of the day.

"Mike was friendly and funny; he had charisma," Regn said. "I wanted to be his friend. In English class our equal distractions developed into collaborations on ridiculous stories written more for the amusement of ourselves than completing the English assignment. Mike Schmidle must have had a similar background, because when the three of us got to Mrs. (Lorraine) Gorey’s English class at Woodson we fell right into the same practice using Dylan’s LP liner notes and John Lennon’s books for inspiration."

It took them a while to get together in high school. Regn didn’t live in Woodson’s district and spent his freshman year at archrival Fairfax High. The two boys talked on the phone to keep in touch, but didn’t see each other very often.

In the spring of 1964, though, Regn’s family moved into the Woodson school district.

"Our friendship became a fixture," he said. "We spent the summer hanging out at the YMCA pool but also doing some gainful things."

He remembers that Sullivan always seemed to have a job, and that anyone who wanted to spend time with him pretty much had to work too.

"But the way he did it was more like fun, or at least funny," he said. "Sully was a performer with a likeable, easy manner. We pumped gas and customers loved him. We would caddy at the country club and golfers wanted him to carry their clubs. We worked at Bernie’s Pony Ring at Bailey’s Crossroads and kids having Wild West birthday parties needing a sheriff or bad guy were delighted when he got right in with them playing the role. He was comfortable with kids and enjoyed making up cowboy names like Tex and Cimarron to give them as he led the ponies around the ring."

Regn remembers that it wasn’t so much about earning money as it was simply wanting to keep busy.

"The pay just added options, and he liked to be generous," Regn said. "One Saturday morning we were caddying at the Fairfax Country Club and one of the two guys he was caddying for got a hole in one. At the end of the round, the guy gave Sully a huge tip. We usually carried two bags each in the morning and two each in the afternoon. But that day, he shared the tip, giving me what I would have made working that afternoon. We snuck away early and hitchhiked to Fairfax to catch the bus to Seven Corners."

As sophomores, both boys tried out for junior varsity football. Sullivan had been one of the stars of the freshman team. His position was assured. Regn had never played on a team and was apprehensive.

"With his encouragement and wanting not to be left out, I went along and made the team," Regn said. "I even got a starting position as a lineman which, at that level wasn’t hard if you would just hit, block and tackle. But it was his show. He was a running back and receiver with speed, awareness and maturity. It really was amazing to see the plays he made. He was graceful and made it look easy and natural, like a pro."

By all accounts, Sullivan enjoyed himself and did pretty much what he wanted to do.

That included not going out for football again after his sophomore year, something Regn still wonders about more than 40 years later.

"I don’t know why he didn’t go out for varsity," Regn said. "He was sure to have made it. I’ve thought some in recent years that maybe he knew I wouldn’t have made the cut and his decision was a courtesy to me. I don’t recall ever asking him about it. We had driver’s licenses by then and we got interested in other things."

There were parties, various jobs, get-togethers at Washington restaurants and trips to the beach that wouldn’t have been possible with football practice every day. Regn thinks maybe they allowed their "less good instincts" to prioritize and arrange things so that they could have more fun. "It probably would have been better if football had been more important," he said.

For whatever reason, they didn’t play.

The last two years of high school passed quickly, and graduation brought the very real threat of being drafted front and center. Neither boy had any intention of using student deferments to dodge the draft, but they did spend a year at Northern Virginia Community College trying to figure out what they wanted to do.

"In the summer of 1968, Sully had an apartment off Duke Street in Alexandria," Regn said. "His popularity made it a busy place night and day. Sully worked full time and usually left the door unlocked for friends to stop by for food or drink. Just put back what you took when you can was the house rule. Most evenings were a perpetual open house with all sorts of people dropping by."

Some of the other tenants in the building were young soldiers stationed at various local military installations, and Sullivan and Regn were hearing first hand information from guys just back from Vietnam and the Tet offensive earlier in the year.

"Sully liked GIs and got along well with them," Regn said. "They had money and fast cars and Sully admired both. More than a few times we all went into Georgetown together and ended up crashing in the empty bunks in the 3rd Regiment barracks at Fort Myer when we couldn’t quite make it back to Duke Street."

They were keeping busy, having fun but knowing all the while that time was running out; the war and the draft were always there.

***

By August 1969, Regn was in Vietnam. Sullivan arrived three months later. The two best friends had hoped to be stationed near each other, but Sullivan was assigned to the 11th Light Infantry Brigade at Duc Pho, while Regn was 300 miles to the southwest with the 1st Cavalry Division.

Sullivan took pride in the fact that he was part of the 4th battalion, 3rd regiment of the 11th Light Infantry. That unit is known as the "Old Guard" and was originally assembled by George Washington himself during the American Revolution.

The unit’s home is Fort Myer, so Sullivan knew that once he completed his time in Vietnam, there was a good chance he would complete his service obligation only 15 miles from home.

"We kept in regular contact by Army in-country letters," Regn said. "His were always positive and decorated with drawings and funny remarks. I somehow managed to save most of them, each one stained red from sweat and the laterite soil the place was made of. We wrote about what we were doing or news we had learned from back in the world. Mostly we talked about all the things we would do when we got home."

For most of his time in country, Sullivan was excited about returning home to his wife. He had learned soon after arriving in Vietnam that she was pregnant, and his letters to Regn would ramble on with hope and plans for the future.

"He would make suggestions for my involvement as 'Uncle,'" Regn said. "His enthusiasm was infectious. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote in return, but I must have wanted in on it, as he kept them coming. After all of my careful re-readings only once is there the now sad bid for agreement that those things would actually happen."

A lot of dreams died in Vietnam. There are 58,195 names on the Wall – most of them fathers, sons, brothers, husbands – and it’s a fair bet that nearly all of them spent time in Vietnam thinking of what their lives would be like when they returned home.

Sullivan was in Vietnam only for a few months, but he made his mark. Regn says he talked to others in his company who said he was always cheerful and steady, "just the kind you want around in serious circumstances."

For the first three months of his tour he was a rifleman, often volunteering a share of the duties involving more than the usual risk.

"He was proud when he was awarded the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, which signifies meeting a required amount of contact with the enemy," Regn said. "Of any collection of veterans, there wouldn’t be but a handful of guys authorized to wear it."

When attrition hit his company and created a need, Sullivan volunteered to become a combat medic. At age 20, he was doing a job not many anywhere could or would do.

Regn says that March 11, 1970, started out like most days in Vietnam. Attack helicopters that provided transportation and fire support for Sullivan’s company had been busy engaging targets identified during the night.

The dry season was coming and the numbers of North Vietnamese and organized Viet Cong were increasing in the battalion’s area of operations. The mission was to locate and destroy enemy units while providing security for the civilian population. Evidence of enemy activity such as slick trails, bunkers and weapons and supply caches was obvious and contact was becoming more frequent.

At that time, practically every American unit in the country was under strength and Sullivan’s D Company was no exception. Before noon that day, two men were medevaced out for non-combat injuries and malaria.

It turned out that a battalion-size unit of the North Vietnamese army was using a nearby mountain as a base to gather resources from the local population and launch combat operations against American and South Vietnamese. As the day progressed, the tempo of action was picking up.

D Company discovered a bunker complex with a large amount of weapons, ammunition, medical supplies and food. They destroyed the ordinance and sent the food and medicine to the rear for distribution to the civilians around Chu Lai. While this was going on, a medevac helicopter was hit by enemy fire and crashed.

Sullivan and others were sent in to secure the downed chopper as soon as they could get clear. When they reached the crash site, they set up a night defense position to guard the crew and the chopper.

About two hours after dark, their position was hit from three directions by small arms fire, rocket propelled grenades and mortar fire. Shrapnel from one of the RPGs hit Sullivan and killed him instantly.

"The following combat action was so intense that the two medevac choppers that responded to the call for assistance were shot down," Regn said. "The pilot of a third chopper was wounded while trying to get in for an extraction and couldn’t land. The area was just too hot to get choppers in to pick up the dead and wounded.

"Sully’s friends spent five hours carrying him in a stretcher made from a poncho through the rain, down a rocky, slippery stream bed to where a helicopter could land to pick him up."

Ironically, the final entry in the brigade’s daily journal describes the action of March 11, 1970, as "light."

Jim Regn was at Landing Zone Buttons when a radioman asked him if he knew Mike Sullivan. He said Sullivan had been killed in action and Regn had escort duty to return with his body.

"On my way back to Phouc Vinh, I was hoping maybe it was a mistake, that it was another with the same name," Regn said. "I was stunned and didn’t want to believe he was dead."

When he read the orders and saw that the final destination was a funeral home on Backlick Road in Springfield, he knew it was his friend.

"At the time a request could be made by the family of the deceased for a friend also serving in country to be the escort," he said. "Sully’s family wanted me to have the honor and I’m grateful for it."

Regn didn’t catch up with Sullivan until he reached the military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Because of the distance between their units and the difficulty the Army had in locating him, Regn was a few days behind in transit.

When he arrived in Delaware, a sergeant who had recently returned from a tour in Vietnam with the First Division led him through an aircraft hanger with dozens of bodies in various stages of repair. They located the casket and carefully loaded it into the hearse for the long drive to the funeral home. They drove down into Maryland and hit Route 50 just east of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. While they crossed it, Regn found himself thinking of the many times he and Sullivan had made the trip to and from Ocean City, with or without dates, with or without money.

"It didn’t matter," Regn said. "We always made it fun."

On that final trip, it was the sergeant and Regn in the front seat and Sullivan in the back in a flag-draped coffin. He doesn’t recall seeing any acknowledgement or respect from others on the road that day as portrayed in some recent movies about the subject. That didn’t happen until the casket arrived in Arlington, back with The Old Guard.

For the last 40 years, Sullivan’s home has been Arlington National Cemetery, about 15 miles from where he grew up and attended high school. His grave is located down the hill on the west side of the Mast of the Maine Memorial. Facing his marker, looking just to the right, you can see the Custis-Lee Mansion. A glance to the left across Jackson Circle past the brown stone fence yields a view of the barracks of the 3rd Infantry Regiment.

Regn says the setting is beautiful, worthy of the life his friend led and hoped to continue.

"The elegant landscaping and quiet dignity of the place makes the incoherent din from across the river hardly noticeable," he said. "Each time I go, I’m inspired to appreciate what I know were Sully’s ambitions, things that I’ve come to believe are as important as anything else in life.

"He wanted to be a good father, a good soldier, a good friend. All of these things he did by deed or example."

Sweet Nancy, the lovely girl next door

2010-02-28T13:27:00.000-08:00

Another chapter from "When I'm 64" ...

BROWN-EYED GIRL

Nancy Abt wasn’t a flashy blonde, but she was pretty, friendly and vivacious – the classic 'girl next door’ that everyone liked and everyone remembers.

If members of Woodson’s Class of ’67 were to think back and reminisce about the classically beautiful girls in our class, Nancy Abt might not have been the first to come to mind.

Nancy Abt

She didn’t have the overwhelming, in-your-face beauty of the blondes like Karen Theurer or Janet Thornton, but Abt was pretty and witty and outgoing. She was the girl next door, and 25 years earlier, hers would have been the picture thousands of young soldiers carried with them at places like Guadalcanal, El Alamein and Normandy to remind them why they were fighting.

If that seems a little too idealized, you had to have known her. She was pleasant to everyone, and her smile literally glowed. No one who remembers her would consider her mean, stuck-up or full of herself. In fact, you’ll know all you need to know about her just by hearing how she got to school.

“We lived in a house in Somerset (behind the school) and I walked to school, most days with Stacy DeLano,” she said. “Stacy was tall and lean and smart, I was short and stout and out for a fun day. Stacy never held that against me, bless her heart.”

Short? Maybe.

Stout? Never.

Woodson was never the type of school where stout girls were included in the few juniors selected for the queen’s court at the Sweetheart Dance, and I doubt there were many schools anywhere in the fall of 1966 that picked a stout girl as Homecoming Queen.

It was quite an accomplishment for a girl who had only been at Woodson for a little more than a year.

“My father was in the Army, so we moved around a lot,” Abt said. “I remember very vividly starting at Woodson my junior year. That was also the first year Fairfax County schools were integrated. I didn’t know why there was such hoopla about it, but to my recollection it happened without incident.

“In fact I felt sorry for the black kids because they were so few. I made it my goal to befriend a very shy black girl in my typing class. Rather than try to excel in typing, I tried to make Jessie laugh. We became fast friends and when I graduated she gave me a bracelet that I still wear.”

Sons and daughters of military families – military brats, they were called – found themselves adjusting to new situations every two or three years. The ones who were outgoing enough knew how to succeed.

They got involved.

“Being that I was new at the school and didn’t know a soul, I decided to try out for intramurals and organizations in order to meet people,” Abt said. “I guess you noticed my goal wasn’t to be invited to the National Honor Society!”

The tryouts weren’t all successful.

She tried out for basketball and “got run over.”

She tried out for softball and ended up with “bruised legs and the honor of being voted water girl for the team.”

She tried out for the majorettes and ended up with “bruises everywhere and a plastered smile on my face (very important during tryouts).”

“Needless to say, I didn’t make any team,” Abt said. “But I did meet a lot of kids and had a great time just trying.”

***

In one respect, Nancy had a lot in common with many of her classmates. But in another, she was very different. In a state that had been consumed by racial problems, where many of her classmates had grown up thinking of things in terms of black and white and where racial slurs could still be heard in the halls, she didn’t get it.

“I never really figured out the race riot thing, because I didn’t even think about races and differences,” Abt said. “I do know that it was an integral part of the adjustments our generation had to make.”

It meant a lot to quite a few people, but it helped that many of us hadn’t grown up in Virginia, and 11 years after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, there were plenty of people like Abt who didn’t think it should be a big deal.

It helped that two of the black students – Walter Hawkins and Tyrone Brandon – were part of the first Woodson basketball team ever to make it to the state tournament in Charlottesville. And that in the fall of ’66, Jimmy Jukes was a powerful, talented running back on the Cavaliers’ first really successful football team.

Mostly, though, it was people like Nancy Abt who kept the transition peaceful by refusing to think of it as a big deal. They were, to mangle a saying of the time, part of the solution by not being part of the problem.

Stacy DeLano started at Woodson at the same time as Abt. She had spent her first two years of high school in Thailand and was worried about fitting in.

“I was terribly anxious to make a good impression on the couple thousand students at WTW,” she said. “I’m sure I was a lot more insecure than Nancy. She was from the very moment I met her warm, bubbly, super-friendly. She didn’t seem to be at all concerned that we might be run over by crowds of kids who couldn’t care less about us. That we might say the wrong thing, use a hideously outdated slang word (coming from overseas where American culture arrived six months late.

"I was terrified of being exposed as a fraud), wear the wrong loafers, brand name sweater, or even put our circle pins on the wrong side. Were you a virgin if you wore one in the middle … or was it on the right? Why were those things so important in fall 1965?”

For whatever reason, it turned out all right for both of them.

“Somehow, Nancy blended right in, with me trailing behind her, and made instant friends with all the ‘right’ groups,” DeLano said. “It was her infectious laugh, but more importantly, her sincerity, that appealed to so many of the kids. I remember her dimples, her thick, long, straight brown hair (I was forever ironing or putting straightening chemicals on mine to get the same effect). When she carried her books, they seemed almost to overwhelm her, she was so petite. I wanted to be just like her.”

And in the fall of our senior year, there were probably hundreds of girls at Woodson who wished they were her when Abt was voted Homecoming Queen. Where memory fails, the yearbook exists to remind us how lovely she looked that night, photographed with her dazzling smile.

“Nancy Abt was the perfect Homecoming Queen,” DeLano said. “I’m not being facetious.”

More than forty years later, her own memories of the experience are rather vague. She remembers being surprised – and honored – to have been selected, and she seems to recall that she hadn’t even had a date for the dance.

“It was the furthest thing from my mind since I was fairly new to the school, in comparison to the other girls in our class,” Abt said. “I was disappointed that I had to give the crown back. I was told the class didn’t have the money to buy a new one for each year. Truly, my memory is quite vague on specifics there. Thank goodness for yearbook pictures.”

One thing Abt remembers about high school is that she wasn’t much of a student. She says she has no particular memories of good or bad teachers, although she did form a lifelong friendship with her guidance counselor, Tucker Winn, who talked her into going to college.

“If it weren’t for Tucker and her insightful view of me, I don’t quite know where I would have ended up,” Abt said. “With her help, I did get accepted at Virginia Tech, graduated with a degree (no small feat) and made a smooth journey into adulthood. Tucker was very much a part of my life until her demise.

“My goals were uncomplicated ones – get a degree, work a short while, get married and have a family.”

If you’re beginning to think she was a throwback to the ‘40s or ‘50s, you might not be far wrong. DeLano remembers her friend was being different from most of the other people she knew.

“Nancy was extremely close to her parents,” she said. “That was probably rare for those days. She was also a real straight arrow. She seemed to be able to balance being popular with being respected, and she never offended anyone.”

Abt considered herself “too self-absorbed” to be affected much by world events during her high school years, although as part of a military family she was certainly aware of what was happening in Vietnam.

Other than a few of the more daring members of our class, the drug scene touched very few of us until at least our college years.

“I didn’t feel it had much bearing at the time in our school,” Abt said. “I do remember going to Georgetown on dates and trying to order beer while underage. That was about as risky as I got and what fun it was!”

She also remembers that age-old teen ritual of getting her driver’s license. “Errol Aboe tried to increase my expertise by teaching me how to drive a manual in his VW bug going down Braddock Road,” she said. “Something sure smelled like it was burning! It turned out to be a short lesson in shifting and I was delegated back to the family car, known as The Tank.”

***

Growing up wasn’t something Abt welcomed. Even when she was 17, she viewed her parents as being forever old. The thought of being a parent herself – and eventually even a grandparent – was somewhere out beyond reality.

After college, she married and she and her husband settled in Alexandria, where he had his own consulting firm. They raised two daughters – Kristin and Keri – and at some point, she came to a realization.

“As I approached 60, I began to compare my children’s milestones with my own,” she said. “I realized that they correlated precisely. What an eye opener that was. All of a sudden I began to realize that my parents weren’t that old back then. In fact, they were relatively young.

“Now I am a grandmother of two and I still compare the ages/stages bit. It fascinates me how young I am.”

As with many baby boomers, Nancy Abt said she resisted “growing up.” Then in her mid fifties, “life jumped up and smacked me in the face.” Things happened and she realized she either had to stand up and deal with them or have her children parent her.

“I lost the two people who were most near and dear to me, my parents,” she said. “I had never lost anyone before that meant so much. I had cared for my parents during their years of ill health and was there with them to the end. It is still hard to deal with their absence.

“They built a home that attached to ours by way of a garage. I saw them every day for over 12 years. At the same time that my parents’ health became terminal, my husband became suddenly gravely ill. It all seemed too much to bear and I leaned on my children tremendously until I figured out that it was time to grow up.”

Her husband had mylodysblastic syndrome, but received a bone marrow transplant from his younger daughter and has been in remission now for four years.

“He is doing famously,” Nancy said. “And we are both enjoying our two grandsons immensely. Yes, I have grown up finally and I’m enjoying it.”

Growing up entailed some strange twists and turns. By her own admission, Nancy wanted a cushy life as a suburban wife – “girlfriends, shopping, bridge and kids.” But when Jim sold his consulting firm and retired, he decided he wanted to buy a farm and move there.

If you think it sounds a little bit like “Green Acres” – darling I love you but give me the Georgetown shops – you don’t know Nancy Abt. Remember, this was the girl who got run over trying out for basketball, who wound up with bruised legs trying out for softball and got bruised legs and that plastered smile when she decided she wanted to be a majorette.

She was game.

“I had no idea what I was getting into,” she said. “So I said sure.”

They loaded up the truck and they moved to the Virginia hunt country, where they settled with their two girls – 11 and 10 at the time – on a rundown farm. Nancy and her husband raised their daughters and put together a cow/calf operation of Angus beef. Until he got sick, her husband was also breeding quarter horses.

Currently they have about 160 head of cattle, although they have scaled back their horse operation from 13 to six. The horses are strictly for pleasure now, and they ride them all around the farm.

Self-deprecating as ever, Nancy says she no longer rides because “I realize the horse is too smart for me.”

Her daughters are grown now, although both remain close to their parents. Kristin is married to a bovine veterinarian she met while at Virginia Tech. They live in the Shenandoah Valley, about an hour away, and visit on weekends to help manage the farm.

Keri lives in Reston and works for a major corporation. She too visits and helps out some weekends.

“On these cold, windy, dreary days, you will find my husband and me in the tractor, unrolling hay for the cows,” Nancy said. “We’ll be tagging newborn calves, feeding the horses and mending fences. Who would have thought it?”

Living in the country and keeping track of 160 cows and six horses makes it difficult to keep track of high school classmates, and Nancy cherishes the help she has received from a couple of close friends.

“Stacy DeLano, bless her heart, took it upon herself to get in touch with me when she began working at Randolph Macon in Lynchburg.” She said. “She has visited on occasion and kept me abreast of some goings on. And dear Dale Morgan is the glue that has kept things all together for our class. How does she do it?

“It truly has been great reading about friends from high school and remembering friends from there, that at the time, I thought I would never forget, or never want to lose touch. It’s all part of the fantasy of life, I guess.”

First experiences are the most intense

2010-02-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

I wonder why the things that happen to us when we're young seem to stay with us so much longer.

I have lived in Southern California -- the world capital of female beauty -- for 20 years, and I have met some incredibly lovely women, including world-famous ones like Jane Seymour and Annette Bening.

But I still think the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life was Karen Theurer, who I first saw when I was 15.

Strange, isn't it?

I worked 16 years as a sportswriter, and I attended some amazing events. I saw Villanova upset Georgetown at Kentucky's Rupp Arena for the NCAA championship in 1985, I saw John Elway lead innumerable comebacks for the Denver Broncos and I saw Fernando Valenzuela pitch a no-hitter at Dodger Stadium.

But I never cared as much about who won and who lost as when I attended football and basketball games at Woodson in 1965 and 1966.

So much of what happens to us in adolescence goes such a long way toward shaping the lives we have. I saw that with my own kids, who were much better adjusted than I ever was, and who survived high school with flying colors and have gone on to become successful adults at an earlier age than I ever did.

Let's face it. We were maelstroms of emotion in high school, and all too often we saw enemies were none existed, slights where none were intended.

All I can remember is that everything mattered so much. Even when it didn't matter at all.

I never dated anyone in our class when I was at Woodson. I dated younger girls, older girls and one my own age from another school. I was tyhe epitome of Albert Brooks' classic quote from "Broadcast News."

"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"

Of course it wasn't.

It still isn't, which is why it was a good thing I shed that part of my persona sometime in the '80s. It's odd, though. For all the intense emotions -- both good and bad -- I have gone through, falling in and out of love, going in and out of marriage, I don't think I ever cared as much or felt as intensely alive as when I was 17 and dating Cheryl Newman.

I can't explain it. I doubt if I ever will be able to explain it.

Another chapter to whet your appetite

2009-06-09T15:00:00.000-07:00

Note: Here's another chapter, another of the stories that made our class special.

KEEP ME IN YOUR HEART

Tony Barile lost teammates, friends and a cousin in the 1970 Marshall University football tragedy that he avoided because of an injury -- and a trip to Woodstock.

If you want a perfect example of that old saying about the size of the fight in the dog mattering more than the size of the dog in the fight, look at Tony Barile.

He was only 5-foot-8 and 158 pounds, but he lettered in four sports at Woodson. He was a standout running back for the school’s first winning football team, and he was the starting point guard for a basketball team that went all the way to the state quarterfinals his junior year.

He also played third base for the baseball team as a sophomore and ran the 440 and the mile relay in track as a senior.

"My size never really bothered me until I got to college," Barile said. "I was the same size from junior high on, and the first time anybody ever referred to it was when I was a junior on the basketball team."

Walter Hawkins, a transfer who played center on that team, called Barile "Midget Pizza."

Midget or otherwise, Barile could play. In what turned out to be the last game of the season, at state against top-seeded Patrick Henry High of Danville, he sparked the Cavaliers to a halftime lead that disappeared in the third quarter when Coach Paul "Red" Jenkins sat Barile down for too long.

He could play.

Of course, when colleges came looking for recruits, 5-8 and 158 spoke a lot louder. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, offered him a full scholarship to play football. He accepted, never realizing he would become part of one of the most tragic stories in the history of American sports.

By now most people know the story. On November 14, 1970, after losing a close game to East Carolina University, players, coaches and fans of Marshall’s football team boarded a DC-9 with a crew of five for the return flight from Kinston, N.C., to Huntington.

It was only supposed to be a 52-minute flight, and players and friends who hadn’t made the trip had beer on ice waiting for their friends to return.

The flight never landed. The crew scrubbed the landing and began an effort to go around and try again, but the plane crashed to the west of the airport, killing all 75 people aboard. It was the worst air disaster in American sports history.

Barile, a senior reserve on the team, hadn’t made the trip. Two weeks before the game, a teammate had speared him in practice and lacerated one of his kidneys. He spent three days in the hospital, his kidney packed in ice as doctors waited to see if they would have to remove it.

He was fortunate that he didn’t lose the kidney, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to play anymore for the rest of the season. He started letting his beard grow, and when he was eating dinner at the training table, the head coach came up and confronted him.

"He told me to cut my beard, that I was still a representative of the team," Barile said. "I told him I knew my football career was over and I wasn’t cutting it. There was total silence at the table. The coach looked at me like he wanted to punch me and then he turned and walked away."

Five years earlier, that might never have happened. Barile grew up in an era when if the coach said jump, the only question the athlete ever asked was "How high?" But college sports – particularly football – had gotten really nasty at many schools in the 1960s. Books like Gary Shaw’s "Meat on the Hoof" and Dave Meggysey’s "Out of Their League," published in 1970 and 1971, exposed how players were treated in college and professional football.

Marshall wasn’t much different. In fact, during Barile’s four years at the school, the Thundering Herd was put on probation for numerous violations and was also expelled from its conference. Prior to the 1969 season, the school fired the coach responsible for much of that and promoted Rick Tolley to head coach.

"He was a sadistic madman," Barile said. "He used to have an ambulance at all our practices because someone inevitably would get hurt. Sometimes we would finish practice and then he would make us start all over again."

It was family that had brought Barile to Huntington. He had an aunt living there, and her husband was a major university booster.

"I went there and I loved the campus," he said. "It wasn’t too big or too small. My cousin Frank Loria said he could have gotten me a scholarship to Virginia Tech, but he had been a two-time All-American there and I didn’t want to follow in his shadow."

Loria actually came to Marshall for Barile’s junior year as an assistant coach under Tolley.

"He was my size, but he was really tough and loved contact," Barile said. "He taught me that toughness, hard work, determination and heart went a long way."

After the training table confrontation, Loria talked to Barile privately.

"He told me if I cut the beard, to come see him on Friday and he would get me on the plane for the trip," Barile said. "I didn’t say anything. I just didn’t show up."

***

It wasn’t the way he had envisioned his football career ending, sitting in his dorm room on Saturday night with a couple of teammates who hadn’t made the trip either. The game was over and they were waiting for their friends to return when somebody came running into the room.

"He told us to turn on the television," Barile said. "There was a plane crash at the airport."

The first thing they heard was one of the news anchors saying they thought it was the Marshall plane. In the background, they heard someone say three words.

"They’re all dead."

Then the station went blank. To Barile, it seemed as if time had stopped.

"Everybody ran out of the room," he said. "I was just sitting there, not knowing what to do."

Most of the other people in the dorm went to the airport, but Barile knew there was no way he could go. It was beginning to sink in that not only his roommate and his teammates had been killed, but that his cousin had died in the crash as well.

He drove up to a park that overlooks Huntington. It was one of those dismal autumn nights when the rain that was falling was so fine it was like a mist creating halos around all the lights below. As he looked down, he could hear the sirens from all the police cars and fire trucks racing to the airport.

"I was devastated," he said. "I sat there in the rain for hours, and when I finally got back to the dorm, there was no one there. They had all gone to the airport. I left and went to my aunt’s house."

He returned to the dorm the next day to find pandemonium. Parents and family members of the players who had died, as well as players from previous years, were looking for the right rooms.

"Guys who had been my teammates would see me, grab and hug me and start crying," Barile said. "They didn’t know I hadn’t been on the trip and they were stunned to see me."

He found himself directing parents and friends to the rooms of the departed players, and many of those rooms had large football pictures on the walls. Memories of happier times. The toughest was when he showed one player’s fiancée his room.

"There was a big picture of him on the wall, along with other guys, hugging after a touchdown," he said. "The girl just collapsed into my arms. That same scene went on and on; I was the one who had to show everyone to the rooms."

When it was over – at least when he thought it was over – he returned to his own room. For the first time, he looked at the wall and his roommate’s face was looking down at him.

"He was a good-looking, 6-foot-5 receiver," Barile said. "I got him stoned for the first time in that room. I remember us sitting there and laughing so hard I thought we were going to throw up."

***

The next week was particularly brutal. Searchers spent six days trying to identify each of the bodies so that they could be properly buried. One of the ones they had trouble identifying was Loria, and members of Barile’s family asked him to go down there and see if he could help.

He told them he couldn’t do it.

"All those boys were my friends," he said. "Those bodies were charred like burned pieces of wood."

Searchers finally identified Loria from dental records. Six other victims never were satisfactorily identified, and a number of the coffins that were buried held only pieces of bodies.

It’s difficult for people who have never played competitive sports to understand the closeness that develops between members of a team. Especially for Marshall, which had gone through some terrible seasons and had started to improve significantly in 1970, one could have said that closeness was something akin to people who had survived some sort of disaster.

It was why Roger Childers, a linebacker who had suffered a head injury and undergone brain surgery, had decided to stay with the team as its student manager. Of course, his dedication put him on that plane.

Twenty-two members of the varsity team weren’t on the flight, either because of injuries or the fact that they weren’t on the traveling squad. One player just missed the flight.

They buried their teammates in a mass funeral at the basketball field house. Barile sat in the audience throughout the heart-breaking ceremony, looking at the basketball team standing behind the caskets as pall bearers.

"At the end of the ceremony I started to walk up to the front," he said. "I saw this one basketball player who was a good friend of mine. He was crying. For all I had gone through for six days, I didn’t cry or break down, but when I saw him, I broke down and started bawling."

***

Most people who know the Marshall story now probably learned it from the 2006 movie, "We Are Marshall," which starred Matthew McConaughey as the coach who rebuilt the program after the crash.

It was definitely inspirational, but it wasn’t the story of the team that died.

"My brother Joe wrote a screenplay," Barile said. "We talked about it before the other movie; it was more about the team that died in the crash and my own personal experience. I thought the movie they made was actually kind of sappy. If they would have incorporated more about the team that crashed, I think people would have had a greater sense of the real loss."

Unfortunately, Hollywood doesn’t make that kind of movie anymore. If it’s about sports, it has to be inspirational, even when it comes to changing the truth of what happened. That’s why all sorts of false drama was built into "Remember the Titans," despite the fact that the football team in the story didn’t actually play one close game all season.

And it’s why "We Are Marshall" had to be the story of how a university came together and came back from tragedy, instead of the story of all that was lost when the plane went down on November 14, 1970.

We look forward, though. We always look forward, and if anyone spends too much time musing about events that have already happened, we accuse them of living in the past.

***

After Barile finished up at Marshall the following spring, he married a girl from a small town on the other side of the Ohio River. He worked for her father in a small construction company and then managed a wine distributorship. The marriage didn’t last, and neither did two others.

Eventually, Barile moved back to Virginia and met his fourth wife Michele at the old State Theater. During our high school years, the State was a popular movie theater, but in this era of multiplexes, it has become a venue for live music. Acts like Little Feat, Gregg Allman and top local and regional talent have played there.

"The fourth time has been the charm for me," Barile said.

The two had a baby in the fall of 2008, and Barile is thrilled.

"I had a son in my first marriage," he said. "Miletus is in his thirties now, but I wasn’t around enough for him when he was a kid. My daughter Sofia has made my life much more rewarding. I have a lot of time to give her that I didn’t have for my son. Being older does have some benefits. You know where you are in life, and you’re better off financially and emotionally.

"I missed out on so much with my son, even though we are close now. He is a fine young man and I am very proud of him. Sofia will have my full attention and I am very excited about that."

He says he doesn’t think of those days at Marshall all that much anymore, although he has returned for an occasional game or presentation. When the Thundering Herd went 13-0 and won the Motor City Bowl, led by future National Football League stars Chad Pennington and Randy Moss, the school presented Barile with an engraved ring with his name on it, the same ring the players got.

They remembered him and honored him as a survivor of those worst days.

Another classmate – this one from Woodson’s Class of 1967 – remembered him too.

"I didn't realize that Tony was on the Marshall team," Diane Dunkley said. "I was at East Carolina in the fall of 1970, and the Marshall game was the first home game we'd won that year. There were celebrations all over town, and a lot of noise and excitement. As word came in and spread about what had happened, everything got very quiet, and the evening's celebrations ended.

"I was so glad to know that Tony wasn't on that plane."

***

Before all the marriages, before the plane crash that changed everything, there was Woodstock. "Three days of peace, love and music," the festival that grew from almost nothing into a crowd of 400,000 that shut down the New York Thruway and became the symbol of a generation.

It changed Barile’s life, and according to at least one of his friends in college, might have saved it.

"Woodstock set my life on a different course," Barile said. "I was a pretty straight-laced athlete before Woodstock."

Barile was home that summer when his younger brother Joe asked him to go with him. Their parents had told him he could only go if Tony went along.

"I love music, so it was a no-brainer for me," Barile said. “I told my brother I hoped there would be at least 50,000 people there. We left Virginia on Thursday night and drove all night to get there."

When they reached the area on Friday morning, they stopped for gas and asked for directions. The attendant pointed to a dirt road, and Barile saw a line of traffic heading in one direction. He got into line, and the traffic got slower and slower.

Eventually it stopped, and cars pulled onto the shoulder in an effort to move ahead. When the traffic on the shoulder stopped, cars moved to the other shoulder and eventually into the left lane. Four lanes of traffic moving slowly on a two-lane road.

"I remember music playing out of vans," he said. "Then people started abandoning their cars and walking. We walked for a while and the crowd got bigger and bigger. I was like walking down the streets of New York. Joe looked and me and asked me if I thought there were enough people for me."

They walked a few hundred yards more until they found an opening in the woods. Then they looked down into a bowl-shaped area and saw a massive stage, 50-foot speakers and spotlights at the top.

Everywhere they looked were tents and tepees.

"It looked like an Indian nation," Barile said. "We looked at each other and we knew this was going to be the most moving experience of our lives."

The music hadn’t started yet, so Barile and his brother got as close as possible to the front of the stage. Then, just after 5 p.m. on Friday, Richie Havens came on stage and started singing "High Flyin’ Bird."

Folks near the Bariles lit up a joint and started passing it. Eventually it made it to Tony.

"I looked at it," he said. "Then I looked around at everything and took a big hit. It was an amazing weekend – three days of love, peace and tranquility. It was like everyone was on a high the whole time and it changed me.

"I started growing my hair and my beard," he said. "Then it was time to return for fall football. I walked into training camp with long hair and a beard."

Of course the coaches didn’t like it, but Barile had changed. The kid who had never questioned a coach had realized there was more to life than football, and he wanted to experience all of it.

It probably did save his life. In 1968, if a coach had told him to cut his hair, that he was still part of the team, Tony Barile would have rushed out and grabbed his razor. But in November 1970, with his lacerated kidney, he knew football was in his past and the coach was just another guy yelling at him.

He stayed home and lived.

"I was talking with my brother Casey about that after the crash," Barile said. "He told me going to Woodstock had saved my life."

***

All that was a long, long time ago, and the boy who said no to his coach is now a man looking ahead to 64.

He still has dreams from time to time, one in particular.

"I dream that I’m in the locker room," he said. "I dream that I’m trying to get my equipment together. My teammates tell me that I’ve got to hurry, that the bus is getting ready to leave for the airport. I’m looking around for my stuff but I can’t find it.

"I’m getting desperate, because I know I’m running out of time. Then the bus leaves without me."

D-Day still important to us

2009-06-06T20:24:00.000-07:00

There are dates in all our lives that have significance -- birthdays, anniversaries, Christmases.

Then there are those that matter to all of us as a nation, and today is one of those dates. On June 6, 1944, thousands of young Americans and Englishmen came ashore at Normandy Beach in France in what was certainly the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler's Germany.

That was 65 years ago today, and President Obama was in France with other national leaders for a commemoration of the honored dead and those who survived.

I wonder how much longer D-Day will matter, how many more years we will celebrate it. I was in France the summer of the 50th anniversary and I will be there later this summer as well. The youngest veterans of World War II are now in their 80s, and it won't be too much longer before they're all gone.

We no longer celebrate the signing of the peace at Appomattox in 1865, and most Americans would have no idea on what day the Maine was blown up in Havana harbor.

Eventually, all things pass.

There will even come a time when the date Sept. 11 won't mean much to Americans.

All things pass.

Forty years now since Woodstock

2009-06-04T21:36:00.000-07:00

When you talk about our g-g-generation, one of the biggest things that ever happened was Woodstock.

Four hundred thousand people and three days of "peace, love and music" in August 1969. Who can forget it?

I remember that fall, registering for classes at George Washington University, talking with a couple of people who had been there. Even then, I knew it was going to be remembered as one of those legendary things.

Didn't make it myself. I was in New York City a day or two before the festival, and the thought crossed my mind of hitch-hiking up there and going. But I wasn't that kind of kid; I was a very immature 19 and my parents would have been horrified.

I know two members of our class who went -- Jayne Houghten and Tony Barile. I know one other -- Lee Millette -- who had wanted to go but his dad talked him out of it because he might have trouble getting back for work on Monday.

It has been 40 years now, so all the statutes of limitations are past. I'd love to hear some Woodstock stories in the comments section.

Feel free.

Alas, no Northwest Roundup this summer

2009-06-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

I'm really disappointed.

I've been hearing about these WTW Northwest Roundups ever since I went to the 40th anniversary reunion, and I always figured that someday I might be able to make it to one.

Ever since my daughter married a kid from Seattle, the odds went up that we would someday visit the Pacific Northwest. Well, Pauline and Ryan are finishing their tour in China in a month or so and they're spending their two months of home leave and vacation in Washington State.

They'll be in Seattle with Ryan's family during July and they're renting a house outside Snoqualmie in August. We're taking our vacation up there, and I was hoping we could time it so that I could catch the Northwest Roundup.

Alas, there isn't going to be one this year.

Not that I needed another reason to go. I don't get to spend nearly enough time with my wonderful daughter, who is an officer in the U.S. Foreign Service. And of course, there is little Maddie, my first and to date only grandchild.

By August she may be walking. She's already managing to do it with support, so at this point it's just a question of balance.

So I'm sure I'll enjoy myself.

Still, a roundup would have been nice.

Classmates still striving in new directions

2009-05-31T20:57:00.000-07:00

That was great news we got from the lovely and vivacious Dale Morgan, wasn't it?

Penny Viglione -- and who could ever forget her "Molly Brown" -- is opening an art gallery and wine bar on June 18 in New Bern, N.C.

What's really great about it is that for all we hear about life winding down toward retirement and our part of the baby boom generation getting ready to shuffle off the stage and make room for those damn kids (who won't get off our lawns), here's someone going out and starting a new business.

I also just received an e-mail from Katie (Reichel) Dyer about her trip to the Sahara Desert in 2005. Of course that'll be in the book, in a chapter to be called "Midnight at the Oasis."

Looks like more than one person in our class is still enjoying adventures.

We'd love to hear from more of you.

Best memories are of endless summers

2009-05-29T19:12:00.000-07:00

I was in Best Buy the other day to pick up a portable CD player for my wife, and as I waited in line to pay for it, I noticed something.

There was yet another repackaging of Beach Boys songs from the '60s, this one called "Summer Love Songs." Most of them were songs I've heard literally a thousand times over the last 47 years, but for some reason I dropped it into my basket.

I don't know why, but nothing else in my life evokes summer, the '60s and yes, high school, than the music of the Beach Boys.

We may all talk now about how much we loved the Beatles, the Stones or other groups, but I went to an awful lot of parties during high school where, when people wanted to dance slow dances, they put on songs like "Surfer Girl," "Warmth of the Sun" and a lot of others.

I don't know how many of us ever surfed in high school -- you probably did, Dudley -- but it was the California surf scene and the car culture that captured an awful lot of our imaginations.

It's funny now to remember that "American Graffiti" came out only six years after we graduated, but do you remember the almost perfect musical ending? The plane carrying Richard Dreyfuss flies off into the clouds, we learn what happened to the four main characters and then boom -- cut to the credits and the Beach Boys' wonderful "All Summer Long."

I've always thought it was THE classic summer song.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on others that take you back.

Humor -- even raunchy humor -- is rarely bad

2009-05-28T21:03:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many of you are on Facebook, but one of the things I love about it is the humor.

One of the favorite targets -- in about three or four different applications -- are those lovely desktop and wall posters that have been around for the last 20 years or so trumpeting good virtues to follow in life.

Some of them are very nice. My son got me one called "Integrity" a few years back that sat on my desk at work for three or four years. In fact, it was there longer than I was. I had to go back for it after I got canned in January 2008.

The ones on Facebook certainly don't celebrate our good qualities. In fact, they glorify our snarky side, as in this one with George W. Bush checking out a target-rich environment.

There are other ones, covering everything from video-game nerds to enormously fat people to all sorts of sexual themes. This one, for instance:

Yes, they're lewd, crude and fairly rude. And yes, most of us are 59 or 60 years old at this point.

But I always thought one of the things we lacked in our high-school days was something really funny and raunchy like the National Lampoon.

I've often been accused of being an aging frat boy. To which I plead gloriously guilty. (I was also called Wally Cleaver gone to seed sometime in the '80s, which I had more mixed feelings about.)

But I sure hope I never stop laughing at stuff like this, and I sure hope I never stop enjoying stand-up comedy or funny movies.

One of the greatest thrills of my life came in the summer of 2001 when I had the opportunity to do five minutes or so of stand-up at a sort of open-mike night for new comics. I can't say I "killed," but I got laughs.

Other than family stuff, I don't know if I ever enjoyed myself more.

So look at the pictures and laugh. If you can't laugh, mutter something about some people ought to grow up.

I've heard it before.

A look back at a very average day

2009-05-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

Emily: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?
Stage Manager: No. Saints and poets, maybe--they do some.
-- OUR TOWN, Thornton Wilder

If you came of age in the '50s and '60s, the odds are pretty good you saw a production of "Our Town" at least once. It was the story of Grover's Corners, N.H., a pretty nothing little town in which very little ever happened.

Of course that was exactly Wilder's point, that it's the little things in life -- the things we rarely notice at the time -- that in the end mean everything to us. When Emily dies in childbirth, she asks to go back and witness one day out of her life. She does, and she is overwhelmed by the simple beauty of it.

I don't know how many of us would want to do it all over again, but I would be willing to bet most of the people who visit this site would love to have the chance to spend one day just observing. Not graduation day, not the prom or the day we took the SATs.

Just one simple day, say maybe ... Sept. 16, 1966.

Since I'm the writer, I'll have to tell it through my eyes. I hope you enjoy it.

My clock radio goes on at 6:30. WEAM is playing the No. 1 song in the country ... "You Can't Hurry Love," by the Supremes. Other songs that are high on the charts that week are Donovan's "Sunshine Superman" and the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine."

One of the big summer hits -- "Summer in the City" by the Lovin' Spoonful -- is still hanging around, but the song that's coming up fast that's got everyone's attention is the Association doing "Cherish." It'll be No. 1 next week and on into October.

I've got the bathroom for a quick shower. My complexion is hanging in there -- there have been worse mornings -- but I'm still annoyed that my hair is short. My mother made me cut it for our senior pictures and it hasn't grown back yet.

The good news is that it's a Friday, and there's a big football game tonight. Woodson is playing at Annandale, which hasn't lost a game in more than four years. A few years from now, the Washington Post magazine will write a cover story about them called "Notre Dame in Peach Fuzz."

It's a daunting challenge, but we've got a pretty good team this year. I know -- I see every game as one of the tuba players in the marching band.

I dress quickly. A collared shirt, slacks, socks and loafers. We're not allowed to wear Levis or sneakers to school, and socks are a must.

I hustle down to the bus stop at the bottom of Atlanta Street in Mosby Woods. I'm 16, but I don't have my driver's license yet. Even if I did, there's no car for me to drive to school. Two friends from the neighborhood, Tom Kensler and Jim Nelson, are sophomores this year. We horse around a little waiting for the bus. Everybody's kind of psyched about the football game.

When we get to school, I go to the band room. That's where a lot of us hang out when we're not doing anything else, and I've got two periods of band this year. In addition to Symphonic Band fourth period, I'm the student director of the Concert Band second period. I had planned a free period in hopes of winning the election for student government president the previous March, but when that fell through, the band director, Mr. Buskirk, asked me if I wanted this job.

He was my favorite teacher after three years of band -- and three of private lessons -- but he had moved up to be an assistant principal during the summer, and Mr. Lawrence had taken over. He was very different from Buskirk, but it looked like he and I were going to get along.

First period was U.S./Virginia government with Mrs. Johnson, a class that should have been my favorite. All my ambitions at the time were centered around law and politics; it's amazing how things happen so differently from the way we plan them. It's not a bad class, but I feel like I know most of the stuff and wish we could go deeper into some of it.

Second period, Concert band. Actually, Mr. Grant is the director of the second band. He generally has me warm them up -- scales, etc. -- and then he takes over. I go into the office and see if Mr. Lawrence has any filing for me to do.

As I walk through the halls between second and third period, I see lockers of football players. They've been decorated by the Pep Club. Since it's a game day, the players are wearing their jerseys and the cheerleaders are in full uniform.

My third period Chemistry class has a cheerleader in it. Emily Pennington is a junior, but to me she's one of the cutest girls I know. She's got a boyfriend on the team, of course.

Chemistry is Mrs. Jones, a younger, divorced teacher. She's fairly pretty, and there are rumors that some of the more "mature" seniors have tried to ask her out. That's so far beyond my experience that I can't believe it. Of course in 1966 I'd never heard of Mary Kay Letourneau.

Fourth period is two hours long so that the school can serve lunch in four shifts. It's supposed to be divided into one hour of class, half an hour of lunch and half an hour of study hall, but for band kids, we have 90 minutes of practice on the field for that night's routine. I'm second chair out of four tubas, but the junior who sits in first chair, Pete Carlson, is out of my league.

He's going to make the All-State band this year, and he can play like I can only dream of. He's a really cocky kid -- he calls me "Fan," as in me being his fan -- but we get along very well.

Since it's a Friday, there's no meat for lunch. It was usually something like fish sticks, but on this particular Friday it's a slice of cheese pizza, which pretty much everybody likes.

Seniors with cars sneak off campus and go to McDonald's, but I never got the opportunity to do that. I never drove to school once in four years.

After lunch is fifth period, French II for me. It's my most tedious class, because I'm really not that involved in learning French. If I'd known I would fall in love and marry a Frenchwoman in 1992, things might have been different, but as it is, I mostly just sit and ogle our teacher. Miss Dubrow seems to enjoy wearing tight knit dresses that show off her figure, and I don't think I was the only guy who ever walked out of class with a book covering his excitement.

Sixth period is Senior English, the one class I really do enjoy. Mrs. Maguire is a wonderful teacher who really conveys a sense of wonder about English literature, which is what we're studying this year. She was the best teacher I ever had at any level, including college, and my younger sister Laura -- who had her three years later at Oakton -- felt the same way.

When the last bell rings, we head to the buses to go home. Since it's Friday, my friends and I spend about an hour and a half playing football in the street. I go home for dinner and then my dad drives me over to Woodson to get on the band bus for Annandale.

It's a great game, just as we hoped it would be. The Cavaliers really throw a scare into the invincible Atoms, and we lead 14-12 in the fourth quarter. But Annandale lives up to its reputation, driving for the winning touchdown in the closing seconds and winning 19-14.

After the game, a lot of the band kids get together for a party at someone's house. Very tame -- no booze -- except for being able to slow-dance closer than the chaperones let us at school dances.

Tom Bates, a junior who lives near me, drives me home after the party. I'm in bed by 1 a.m., looking forward to sleeping in on Saturday.

***

A long post, for which I apologize, but I find there are tears in my eyes as I type this. When I was 16, all I wanted was to be older. All I wanted was for days and weeks and months to pass as quickly as they could so that I could be off to college and adulthood.

It wasn't all wonderful. There were things I wanted to happen that didn't, and things that happened that I wish hadn't.

But why didn't I know? I had seen "Our Town." I understood what it meant.

I wanted to get out of Woodson so I could live my life, as I'm sure many of you did too.

But as the late John Lennon once said, life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.

I wish I had known.

Oh yeah, and also ... we're back

2009-05-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

I should have posted this before the Tony Barile post, but I wanted to apologize for four months of inactivity on this site.

We're back, and we'll be posting a lot more regularly.

Of course, I do post almost every day at my other blog, All that Matters. Check it out.

Great stories just keep popping up

2009-05-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

"Hey, Mike. How the heck is the book going?"

I'm here to report to you that "When I'm 64" keeps getting bigger and bigger. I have been working on the book for more than a year now, and I just got word of a wonderful possibility for a chapter in the last two weeks.

Remember Tony Barile? He was one of the finest athletes in our class, a star running back on the football team and a standout point guard in the basketball team that went to the state tournament our junior year.

Well, I hadn't realized that Tony got an athletic scholarship to Marshall University. In fact, he was a senior running back on the team that was all but wiped out on Nov. 14, 1970 in the plane crash that was the worst sports tragedy in U.S. history.

Tony wasn't on the plane; he missed that trip with a lacerated kidney.

His story is going to be one of the most fascinating in the book -- if I ever get it done.

There are some of you who have promised me stories, either about yourself or about friends. I still need them. And if you have any great memories of Tony from high school, I could use those too.

Thanks.

Some chapters are very interesting

2009-01-31T22:42:00.000-08:00

Sorry I haven't been posting here lately. A lot has been happening in my life and I have been trying to chug along on "When I'm 64."

I recently finished a first draft of a chapter on Barbara Lanzer, the one member of our class who returned to Woodson as an administrator before being promoted last year.

I'm not posting her chapter yet -- she hasn't commented back on it -- and I don't know if I will, but the one very interesting thing I found in talking to people -- particularly guys -- about Barbara was that she was remembered as one of the really "hot" girls in our class.

Now I didn't know Bobbie in that way (actually I didn't know anyone in our class in that way), but I find myself wondering what "hot" meant in '66-67 compared to 10-15 years later.

I always liked the song "Good Girls Don't," by the Knack, which came out in 1979, but I have a feeling a girl didn't need to be that active in 1967 to be called "hot."

Maybe just kissing with something other than tightly pursed lips would have done it.

More soon.

Moving right along ...

2009-01-01T15:34:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to all of you; 2009 is our third year on this blog, although we started relatively late in 2007.

I'm currently working on four different chapters -- Mike McCuddin, Dale and Susi, Dale and Judy (different Dale, of course) and Bobbie Lanzer. Any thoughts, any reminiscences, are greatly appreciated.

Happy 2009.

Merry Christmas to all of you

2008-12-23T16:47:00.000-08:00

"... and so this is Christmas."

It's funny how John Lennon's anti-war song "Happy Christmas/War is Over" shows up all the time now on stations playing Christmas carols. Maybe it's because there aren't that many carols being written anymore -- the last great one was "Silver Bells" nearly 60 years ago.

I do like the Carpenters' "Merry Christmas Darling" from the early '70s, but I think whoever it was who wrote "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" should definitely get a big lump of coal in his stocking.

Do they still do that?

This Christmas is an interesting one for our family. It will be our first without my Dad, who died in March, and it is our first with little Madison, our granddaughter who was born in September. I actually have a picture of her -- it isn't on the computer yet -- of her with Santa Claus at the Glendale Galleria at the age of about 10 weeks. She's so tiny that she looks like a little doll in his arm.

But this is a nice Christmas for me in other ways. There are so many of you I never knew in high school who have become my friends in the year since our 40th reunion, either on this site, in our work together on "When I'm 64" or through Facebook.

Merry Christmas to all of you -- and a very Happy New Year from Southern California.

More chapters are on the way

2008-12-11T16:25:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to let all of you know the book is progressing nicely. I just finished the first draft of the chapter on class president Mike McCuddin, now retired from the Navy and living in the Pacific Northwest.

I'm not posting all the chapters -- y'all need some reason to actually buy the book.

Currently working on two others -- the friendship between Dale Morgan and Judy Hart Byers, and the one classmate of ours who seems to have best lived the spirit of the '60s -- Lauren Koskella Farley.

Another sneak peek at "When I'm 64"

2008-11-25T15:33:00.000-08:00

The book is really rolling along right now, and we even got a couple of wonderful unexpected questionnaires back from Lauren Koskella Farley and Gene Bacon.

We're on track right now for 29 chapters -- an introduction, a conclusion and 27 chapters about people. I've been promised questionnaires from Dale Abrahamson, Barbara Lanzer, Carla Rieker Cloninger and Nancy Abt White that are included in that total, and I still have to touch base with Bill Thomas, Scottie Gibson about his sister Paula and Susan Morales.

Here's another first look at a chapter, about Ellen Baeshore McFarland of varsity basketball and "Eight Dates a Week" fame.

Hope you enjoy it.

I’LL REMEMBER

"Inside I was a child that could not mend a broken wing; outside I looked for a way to teach my heart to sing."

If there was one thing Ellen Baeshore McFarland really loved in high school, it was playing basketball. She excelled on Woodson’s junior varsity team as a sophomore and was an outstanding player for the varsity as a junior.

But when the 1966-67 girls basketball team won all 12 of its games and was the first unbeaten team in school history, McFarland wasn’t there. It wasn’t that her interests had changed, and it wasn’t an injury or academic problems. It was far worse than any of that.

She had lost her No. 1 fan, and with it her enjoyment of the game.

"Sports were always a part of my life from the time I was very little," she said. "My father encouraged that in me. He would go outside with me and teach me how to play baseball and kickball, and whatever I was involved with, he was always behind me 100 percent. Having a wonderful father who loved me unconditionally set the stage for me having self-respect. Knowing my father loved me deeply made me feel solid in life no matter what transpired."

In fact, when McFarland won the award as the most outstanding player on the junior varsity as a sophomore, Charlie Baeshore was the first person she wanted to share it with.

"When my name was announced, I burst into tears," she said. "It wasn’t only for feeling honored to receive the award, and for feeling totally shocked, but also knowing that my father could share in my glory."

It made a huge difference to her. The security of her father’s love meant she wasn’t constantly looking for something to make up for a lack of love at home. She liked boys and she wanted to be popular, but she didn’t have to cross the lines she didn’t want to cross, the lines that some girls found themselves ignoring.

Her parents attended every game she played, and she could always single out her dad’s voice in the background, cheering her on. She hadn’t really played much basketball before high school, but she found that her physical skills – quickness, agility and aggressiveness – were well suited to the game.

Girls’ basketball was different then. Most players saw action only in half the court, with offensive players at one end and defenders at the other. McFarland and Gail Schultz MacLeod were guards, which meant they played only at the defensive end.

"I was good at stealing the ball," McFarland said. "I used to say I had a 'winning mentality and a winning streak.' I was always a little nervous when the game began, but then I would lose myself in the activity and the challenge. The real high for me on the court was letting go, living up to the challenge and knowing I was pleasing my father by doing my best."

She and her friends were close off the court as well. Eight of them started a sort of informal club they jokingly called "Eight Dates a Week." The Beatles song with a similar name (“Eight Days a Week”) was popular around that time, and Ellen and her friends were spoofing the fact that they weren’t being asked out all that often.

Their lack of dates probably says more about the shyness of teenage boys than anything else. A look at the pictures of the eight girls – McFarland, MacLeod, Whalen, Carol Pallesen, Marguerite Adams, Nancy Haberstroh, Deborah Donlon and Sandra Donlon -- in the Woodson 1967 yearbook would make it obvious to any observer that every one of the eight was at least pretty and at least half of them beautiful.

"Our group was very eclectic," MacLeod recalls. "It was a great and beautiful group of women who were much more comfortable hanging out together than dating. We all dated some, just not as continuously as the popular folks seemed to do."

McFarland herself probably gives part of the reason for it when she describes one of the members, Adams, as a “very pretty, outgoing, feminine girl” who actually did get asked on dates. In high schools then and now, it’s all about confidence. The extroverts who seem to have it all together may not be any better looking or more inwardly secure than the other kids, but their ability to appear so gives them almost the status of demigods.

The others take what they can get, and often what they have winds up being more lasting. More than forty years after high school, McFarland still has close friendships with some of her fellow "Eight Dates" members.

"The best part of being in the group was just our ability to share our hearts and know that we were loved and accepted as we were," she said. "A snotty air never penetrated this group, and even though we didn’t have many dates, we had among ourselves our own connection group. In recent years, whenever Cathy, Gail, Carol and I get together, we still laugh, accept, encourage and enjoy each other.

"We have all taken different directions in our lives, but the one constant is our concern for one another."

Early in her junior year, everything changed for Ellen McFarland. One Sunday morning, her father told her he wanted the family to go to church. That seemed odd to her, since they hadn’t been to church in years. She was in a bad mood that day and told him in no uncertain terms she didn’t want to go.

She went downstairs to listen to music and to dance, and a few minutes later her mother came downstairs and said something was wrong. Ellen ran upstairs and outside the house to see her father hunched over in pain and climbing into the Pallesen family car to go to the hospital.

She knew something was horribly wrong and she tried to bargain with God.

"I told God that if he let my father live, I would go to church every Sunday," she said. "But I knew in my heart he was gone."

Charlie Baeshore was 38 years old when he died of a massive heart attack, and as quickly as all that, everything had changed in his daughter’s life. She was 15, almost 16, and all the joy in everything she had enjoyed so much was gone.

"I was still part of the basketball team, but my desire to win had died with my cheering section," she said. "I lost interest in playing and didn’t want to be part of the team anymore. I don’t even remember if I finished the season my junior year."

A good father-daughter relationship is so crucial to a teenage girl. It has been said that young women tend to marry men who remind them of their fathers, and the approval they get from them has so much to do with the way they transition to adulthood.

For Ellen, the death of her dad – her "greatest fan" – just as she was coming into her own both as a person and as an athlete threw her entire life off track. She still had her female friends, but she shut down emotionally and drifted through her last two years of high school. When MacLeod and the rest of the basketball team reached the ultimate goal of an undefeated season as seniors, she was as far from being a part of it as she could possibly be.

"Playing, competing, winning had all lost their luster for me," she said. "So many things died for me when my father died. I don’t think it was as much about quitting as it was about me not wanting to be part of a bigger picture when the new picture seemed like a shadow of the former one."

MacLeod remembers her friend changing after her father’s death.

"Ellen had been really fun and energetic," she said. "She would dance for hours by herself in the basement of her house. But after her dad died during her junior year, I didn’t see her much. She didn’t continue with the activities like basketball where I saw her most."

McFarland refers to that point in her life and the decade or so that followed as "warming the bench in life," a time when she never really got much of a handle on who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do.

She went to college for one semester and dropped out. She was pregnant and married before her 19th birthday, a marriage she describes as a disaster from the beginning. She says her husband wasn’t loving and she wasn’t always kind. They had a baby, a son, but shortly after that her husband was off to Vietnam and she moved in with her mother.

Her husband wanted her to have her own place, so Ellen and her son Tim moved into a small apartment. She recalls actually enjoying that time, having her baby son to herself and spending a lot of time cooking and baking. She took modeling classes and was encouraged by the instructor to take it further, but confidence – and money issues – kept her from following that advice.

The happiness didn’t last. When her husband returned from the war, they moved with him to Massachusetts. They went north and the marriage went south; she left out of what she calls "sheer frustration," taking her son and returning to Virginia to live with her mother.

She admits now that was a mistake. The two of them weren’t particularly close, and her relatively young mother was more than happy to take charge of raising the son she had never had. Rather than fight her on it, rather than assert herself as a mother, McFarland took advantage of the situation to spend a lot of time going out.

"I was becoming something I didn’t like, but I felt powerless to do anything about it," she said. "I felt so alone and unequipped for the task before me. Having a small child and not being married is not being single, yet not being really married. It was something I hadn’t planned on."

She worked various jobs, mostly secretarial, but none of them gave her the satisfaction of accomplishing anything or working toward a career. She found herself caught in somewhat of a vicious cycle. She wasn’t making good choices in her life, causing more confusion and deeper depression, feelings that only resulted in her making more bad choices.

She kept hoping things would change, but they didn’t. She says she never considered herself attractive, and she hadn’t felt loved since her father died. Her feelings of aimlessness and unworthiness mounted through most of the ‘70s.

She started having a recurring dream, one in which she was standing in the middle of a field and watching airplanes come at her from all directions. Each time she had the dream, she was convinced that when they got close enough, they would hit her and kill her.

The fear started closing in on her in other areas. She was becoming more and more unhappy with her life, but she couldn’t see any solutions to her problem. She said at one point she actually saw a psychiatrist, only to come away feeling bad about the greater understanding she had of herself.

It all came to a head when he was 28. An old friend invited her to come to Reno, Nevada, for a visit. McFarland had the dream again before she left, and she was terrified at the thought of flying. When she got to Reno, the visit quickly turned into something of a disaster.

"She got really angry at me over something I said, and it deepened my sense of fear," McFarland said. "She had always been very compassionate, but this time she unkindly told me I was 'boy crazy,' and she was right. I wanted to leave early, but she talked me into staying."

Over the next few days, she realized that she was coming to loathe herself for the bad choices she had made in life. She felt trapped within herself, someone she didn’t like or even know.

On the flight back, she panicked. She tried to talk to people she didn’t know about her problem, getting nowhere. She finally prayed to "a God I didn’t know anymore if he existed" to help her make it through the rest of the flight.

More than 12 years after her father had died, years in which she had desperately been trying to hold her life together, everything was falling apart. Just as alcoholics or drug addicts often can’t address their problems until they sink as low as they possibly can, McFarland had reached the absolute depths of her despair.

"When I got home to my son, I grabbed him in my arms and burst into tears," she said. "I told him how much I loved him and how sorry I was that I hadn’t been a better mother to him. My mother looked on with total disdain and I knew we had to get out of her home."

That night, she had the dream again. It was a little different this time, though. The many planes that had looked so menacing merged into one plane that landed gently on peaceful farmland.

The very next day, she put her hand on a Bible and prayed. "God, if you exist, help me, because I’m going crazy."

Her situation was anything but uncommon. After the excesses of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s resulted in too many young men and women overindulging in sex, drugs or other aspects of a wild time, the movement toward religion served as a reaction to the counterculture. Whether they were hippies becoming "Jesus freaks" or suburban kids who just found themselves in too deep, it was very natural for them to ask if there wasn’t something more to life than the latest high or the most recent loveless encounter.

Some became "more Catholic than the Pope," as the saying goes. They turned into fundamentalists who in the ‘80s became part of what we now know as the Religious Right. Others just found peace and happiness.

Some found it faster than others. McFarland doesn’t recall that first prayer bringing her any great sense of satisfaction; her moment came two days later when she attended a PTA meeting at her son’s school.

"I sat in the only empty seat beside a very loving, caring woman whose face shone with joy and tranquility," she said. "She actually listened to what I had to say. I remembered my earlier prayer and I asked her if she was a Christian."

She was, and all of a sudden McFarland could literally feel everything falling into place.

"I knew then that God had sent me a human angel," she said. "Shortly thereafter, I was given the gift of inviting God into my heart – to be born again – and I knew that something marvelous had happened."

If this were a movie, we would have reached the climax. All her hurts and pains would have melted away, and she would have spent the last thirty years being happier and happier as she readied herself to climb a stairway to heaven.

Life isn’t like that, though. While she was filled with inner peace and joy at being a "child of the King," and able to push away her sorrow whenever she read the Bible and witnessed to others, McFarland still had problems in her life.

She hated her job, her relationship with her son wasn’t great and she still felt a desperate need for a relationship with someone who would really love her for who she was.

"The one issue that just wouldn’t go away was wanting to be close to someone else," she said. "Years passed and I still had a few bad relationships. I began to realize how codependent I had been and I knew I had to learn to set boundaries in my heart. I longed to be whole and I believed it would eventually happen, but there were still more trials and challenges ahead of me."

One of those challenges was another bad marriage. At age 36, McFarland married a man from her church, even though she had friends warning her that it was a bad idea and that he only wanted to marry her to strengthen his custody case from an earlier marriage.

It turned out to be true. Once her husband’s two children moved in with them, things got ugly. He picked fights with Tim, now 17, and got nasty with Ellen as well. She realized her son would be better off living with his grandmother, which hurt a lot since the two of them had been getting closer as she matured emotionally.

After three years, her second husband said he wanted a divorce.

"I felt instant relief," she said. "I knew the relationship wasn’t working, but being divorced twice really cut deeper. One mistake like that was bad enough, but two seemed inexcusable to me. Whatever self-righteousness I may have felt in my lifetime, that second divorce showed me that even Christians make bad choices for the wrong reasons."

After that, McFarland decided she needed to examine why this kept happening to her. Other people made good choices and wound up in loving relationships, so why couldn’t she? A few years later, after one more long dating relationship that didn’t work out, she figured it out.

"The men I was choosing didn’t really love me, or didn’t know how, and I was trying to make it happen," she said. "Such a simple revelation, but I finally woke up to the reality that love is a give and take, and a gift. I needed to learn that I didn’t have to do all the giving and the hard work, and that it’s not selfish to want to be on the receiving end."

There is a happy ending to the story, although perhaps not the expected one. Forty-plus years after high school, Ellen Baeshore McFarland is at peace with herself. She lives in Clearwater, Fla., and runs her own business cooking and baking, cleaning, caring for the elderly and whatever else she can think of.

Her life isn’t without problems. She is involved in a very unpleasant court battle with her son over her late mother’s estate, and the two of them have no relationship at this point. She says the problems go back to his youth.

"I may not have been the best parent, but I am an honest person," she said. "I have asked him countless times to forgive me and he has refused."

McFarland's finances are also shaky. She lost her main source of income when the economy turned down and she has been scrambling to replace it. She recognizes that she probably will never be either well-off financially or in a position to retire, that she will "probably have to work until I am underground."

"Did I plan my life?" she asked. "Probably not the way I should have, but I didn’t have someone guiding me along during the crucial years. I made wrong choices out of need, confusion and ignorance. I guess I can also throw in stubbornness."

She chooses to see many of her problems as designed to test her faith, to prove to her that the Lord is in control and watching over her and to make her submit to His will.

"It may seem to some people that I am viewing my life through rose-colored glasses, but all this is very real to me," Ellen said. "The problems, while they may be true, don’t steal from my joy or my desire to continue on to finish the course of my life through the power of God.

"I think right now I am being tested more than ever, for I am getting down to the wire, and what I hear from my Lord and Savior is, 'Now you must totally depend on Me, and I’m going to see if your faith is as real as you claim.’"

Faith like that often makes it difficult to live in this world, and McFarland believes her reward will be in heaven. At least, she says, she finally understands who she is and what she has to offer the world. Right choices have replaced wrong ones; joy and tenderness have replaced bitterness and anger.

She dotes on her six grandchildren – three boys and three girls, living with her son’s ex-wife – and just thinking about them brings delight to her heart.

"It was a long, hard road, but I can honestly say that I have a deep sense of who I am and what I have to offer," she said. "For years I felt lost and alone, emotionally confused and depleted. But since becoming a Christian and receiving the gift of eternal life, I now have the strong sense of security I lost when my earthly father died."

She certainly hasn’t forgotten Charlie Baeshore.

He was her greatest fan at a time when life stretched out ahead of her as a marvelous journey with new joys around every bend.

He was the first person to make her feel really special, truly unique.

All that disappeared when he died and it took so many years before his daughter could look at the world in anything resembling the same way.

"I sometimes still cry and get frustrated when things don’t move fast enough," she said. "But in the depths of my heart I know my Heavenly Father loves me and is leading me and cheering me on every step of the way. His Word says He has a plan for my life, but it’s His timing and His way. I eagerly await His unveiling."

He’s her No. 1 fan – now and forever.

Everyone's story is interesting in its way

2008-11-22T10:26:00.000-08:00

Some of you have written to me or to the lovely and vivacious Dale Morgan to say that you would like to be part of "When I'm 64," but that your personal story just isn't that interesting.

All I can say is, you might be surprised.

What we need for this book isn't James Bond or even Julian Bond; what we need is archetypal stories that other people of our generation will read and say, "That's my story," or "I know someone like that."

One of our late arrivals -- but better late than ... you know -- is that of a woman from our class who lost a parent while in school and saw it derail her life and her plans. Then years later she became "born again" and it changed her life for the better.

Believe me, this is a great story.

Your story might be great too. If you're wondering, do this for me. Don't fill out the questionnaire, just send me a few paragraphs describing your life and I'll let you know whether we can go ahead with more. Odds are the answer will be yes.

Thanks.

An update ... and a request for more input

2008-11-15T20:39:00.000-08:00

I've reached the point where I'm starting to flesh out the structure of the book, and I need to mention a couple of things:

Some of you were wonderful about sending in your questionnaires months ago, and I haven't started writing your chapters yet. So please, Mike Scott, Randy Thurman, Mike Willis, Darla Garber, Mike McCuddin, Dale Morgan, Katie Dyer, Diane Dunkley, Judy Hart Byers, Bob Douthitt and Jim Hermes, don't fret. You're going to be in the book, and I will get to each of you as soon as possible.

Susan Morales, I'm going to e-mail questions to you in the next couple of days and I hope we can set up an interview time soon. Ditto for Bill Thomas, for Julie Conrad True and for Paula Gibson's brother Scotty.

Some of you have promised me questionnaires and haven't gotten around to sending them. Dale Abrahamson (and Susi Spell), Barbara Lanzer, Nancy Abt White and Stacy Delano, please, I do need all of you for the book.

There's one more category too. When I looked back at the initial reaction, Gene Bacon, Jennifer Addington and Carol Costantino all said they wanted to participate. I hope the three of you will send me questionnaires soon.

As I hope you all have seen from the drafts of chapters that I've posted here, this has the potential to be a really great book.

I hope all of you will be part of it.

Remember our friends ... and our dads

2008-11-11T22:29:00.000-08:00

Today is Veterans Day, and I'm sure most of us have been thinking about our friends and classmates who served in Vietnam.

I've been immersed in the two Vietnam chapters of our book, "When I'm 64." You can see Jon Rumble's chapter, "Forever Young," on this site. The other chapter, about Mike Sullivan and the others, has the working title "The End of the Innocence."

But this is a pretty good time to think about our fathers, too. I'm sure almost all of us had dads who served in World War II. My own father, who died earlier this year at age 82, was fighting in France when he was only 18. He was one of the lucky ones; he made it back and led a pretty great life. He didn't choose the military as a career, but he worked in the Pentagon for nearly 30 years.

I'm sure more of us didn't serve than did. Most of us had college deferments, and by the time we were done, the Vietnam War was all but over.

But on this Veterans Day, I want to salute all of you in our class -- and those in your families -- who served. You've seen the picture before, but I thought this was a good day to show it again.

God bless you.

The toughest chapter for me to write

2008-11-06T16:46:00.000-08:00

Contrary to what you might believe, I do not plan to post every chapter of "When I'm 64" on this Website before the book is published.

That, as they say, would be counterproductive.

But since I'm still hoping desperately to get a little more participation from some of you, I do plan to keep giving you tantalizing glimpses of it to whet your interest.

The following chapter has been the most difficult one in the book for me to write, and I hope you can understand why. I always included to include myself, but it was important to me to be honest. That's why I was really glad when a friend of mine who spent three years as part of our class and then moved away gave me a story of what had to be one of the three most embarrassing moments of my life.

Amazingly, I didn't even remember it.

When you laugh at me, be kind.

Here it is:

PERHAPS LOVE

“… if I should live forever and all my dreams come true, my memories of love will be of you.”

I would never call myself an unselfish person.

It took me long enough even to be able to think of myself as a good man, to find a way to define myself as someone other than a person who still wanted to accomplish something.

But these days if you were to ask me to describe myself, to tell you what matters most to me, the answer would be easy. I am a family man, the grandfather of Madison Kastner, the father of Pauline Kastner and Virgile Borderies and the man who loves Nicole Rappaport.

In fact, the woman I will love until my final breath and beyond is the person who taught me the true meaning of love, that sometimes love hurts so much you feel you can’t breathe, that sometimes it’s the only thing in the world that matters and most of all, that love is much more important to give than to receive.

If I had known that earlier, my life might have been very different.

***

Let me repeat that I would never call myself unselfish. It was always about what I wanted to accomplish, the world I wanted to gain for myself. I don’t know that I ever spent one day in my four years at Woodson satisfied with who I was or what I had. I was a perfect example of that old Groucho Marx saying about not wanting to belong to a club that would have someone like me as a member.

I was a smart kid who wanted desperately to be a jock, and when my 10th grade gym teacher, Fred Shepherd, saw me throwing perfect 50- and 60-yard spiral passes in class and said I should be playing football, it might have been a dream come true. But when I took the permission slip home and my parents refused to sign it, my heart was broken.

It didn’t matter to me that I was only 5-7 and 135 pounds. I was only 14, and I figured I’d grow. They figured I’d get killed, and they were a lot more willing to deal with my unhappiness. At least I’d know they cared.

I didn’t see it that way. We had moved to Virginia a year and a half earlier, when I was halfway through eighth grade. I had gone from the Dayton, Ohio, suburbs to a place where people actually cared on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line I had been born.

I didn’t make friends easily at that age. It didn’t help that I had skipped a grade in elementary school and was a year younger than most of the kids in my class. Being what Dave Barry called “puberty impaired” was hardly a plus either; when I look at my ninth grade picture, I see a kid who looked like he was 10 years old.

I had three good friends in ninth grade – Gary Oleson from my own neighborhood and Tracy Antley and Alan Singer from English class. All three of them were bright kids who were comfortable in their own skins. Alan’s family moved away early in our Woodson years, and Tracy’s father was transferred down to Quantico before our senior year.

Gary was the only one who graduated with us, and he was everything I should have been. He got wonderful grades – I think he was fourth in our class – and went to Princeton. He didn’t try to be anything he wasn’t, and he was outstanding at everything he did. I don’t think I ever told him how much I admired him for that.

Tracy was the first girl I ever really wanted for a girlfriend, and of course it eventually got in the way of our friendship. Tracy Antley-Olander, now a Seattle attorney, remembers those days.

“I met Mike in ninth grade,” she said. “He, Alan and I quickly formed a bond. We were all outsiders in that sea of suburban teenagers. I was short and looked 11 years old.”

Tracy had just moved to Virginia from California. She was smart and knew it, in an age before intelligent young women were really appreciated. More girls wanted to be cheerleaders than honor students, and plenty of them were still going to college to find husbands.

“I recall one day some jerk in English class told me encyclopedias didn’t get taken out,” Tracy said. “Alan and Mike were smart, too, and they were not offended by a smart girl. It was my first realization about the kind of guys I wanted as my friends.”

Eventually she realized I wanted more and she started avoiding me. She didn’t know about the problems I was having, or my struggles with the kind of person I was. She just knew I wasn’t happy, and she thought it was her fault.

If there’s one thing about old friends, it’s that sometimes they remember things you had managed to suppress. Tracy recalls that one day in the spring of our junior year – I think it was right around the time I lost the election for Student Government president – we had our final showdown.

“Mike cornered me in the Earth Sciences room over lunch and told me his feelings,” she said. “He even sang a few lines of a song – ‘What Kind of Fool Am I.’ I fled.”

It must have been the singing. I’ve never been able to carry a tune, and the thought that there was a time in my life when I actually tried to sing my feelings to someone – in a show tune, nonetheless – makes me cringe. My only salvation is that even after having the moment described to me, I still don’t remember it.

People who didn’t know me as well didn’t run into such embarrassing moments. I managed to fool some of them into thinking I was well adjusted.

“I remember you as a clear-eyed, bright student,” Georgeanne Fletcher said. “You let your hair grow long in the front and I remember how you shook it when you had a point to make. You were also quite funny.”

***

Funny? Maybe. Actually, I was what Kris Kristofferson would one day call “a walking contradiction.” I don’t think I got an “A” for the year in a single class other than band or physical education in four years, although I was a National Merit Finalist and got nearly 1,400 on my SATs. In one of the few classes I enjoyed, American History, I got B’s on my report card all four quarters and then got a perfect score on the final exam.

“I hate you,” my teacher, Janet Martin, said with a smile on her face.

She was kidding, but there was probably some truth in her words. If there’s one thing I’ve seen over the years, it’s that teachers love kids who work hard and overachieve and they aren’t all that fond of kids who don’t use their talents.

My problem was that I couldn’t allow myself to do well. I was at war with my parents, although it was a war only I was fighting. They wanted me to excel in school, so I did poorly. They wanted me to read great books and love great music, so I read trashy popular novels and listened to rock and roll.

It all sounds incredibly stupid to me now. When I look back on the wasteland of my teens and twenties, at flunking out of college three times and at a first marriage that was destined to fail before we even got engaged, I marvel at the fact that I could have been so self-destructive. It’s almost impossible for me to accept that the younger, crazier version of me stopped going to classes and skipped taking my exams in three different semesters at two different schools.

I don’t know when it was that I finally began to mature. I suppose if I were to divide my life to date into three parts, it would be somewhere near the end of the second third that I started feeling good about myself. I was working for a major newspaper covering college basketball and I was in the best shape of my life physically. When my employer went out of business, I landed a job as sports editor of a small daily newspaper in Greeley, Colorado, and for the first time in my adult life, I was living somewhere I really wanted to be.

***

All that was missing was somebody to love. I had been living alone for nearly eight years, and if there was one thing I still wanted in my life, it was a wife and children.

I think I was 34 the first time I dated a woman who had children. It was the first time I started to realize that maybe the quickest way to a family might not involve my sperm and someone else’s egg, and that I might not have to go through nine months of “we’re pregnant” and then a couple of years of raising an infant.

After what I had been through, I wasn’t sure that my genes should be passed along anyway. And if I couldn’t pick the father, maybe I could at least pick the mother.

There were some interesting ones, including the one in Colorado who wanted to call me “Daddy” and the one in Reno with three sons by three different fathers who had never been married.

I might actually have gotten married in Colorado – to a different woman – in 1988, but I couldn’t let go of a promise I had made to someone who no longer even mattered to me. My first wife was a California girl, and when we got engaged in 1974 I had promised her that someday we would live in the Golden State.

It made perfect sense to me. She was from California and loved it, and I had been born in California and had always been obsessed with getting back. All through high school I had dreamed of sand and surf, and every time I heard the Beach Boys or Jan and Dean singing about cars, waves and the girls who were so tanned, I knew that was where I belonged.

But when my marriage fell apart in the late ‘70s, the one thing that went almost unspoken between us was that she thought I would never accomplish any of my goals. Even though I never saw her or spoke with her after 1982, a part of me wanted to prove that I could do that. Every career move I made, from Virginia to North Carolina to South Carolina to St. Louis to Colorado, had been with California in mind.

In the fall of 1988, two weeks after I met a very special woman, I was offered a job in Reno, Nevada – the next state over from the Promised Land.

I suppose I looked at California as a fresh start, a chance to live in a place where I had never screwed up or had anything bad happen to me. Along with all the songs and the movies, the beauty of the beaches and mountains, it meant achieving a goal I had been working toward for 10 years.

I knew I couldn’t have both the woman and the job, and she made it even more difficult for me by saying I shouldn’t turn a job down for her after we had known each other only a few weeks. That, she said, would put way too much pressure on her.

So I left, and although I still miss Colorado, I spent 18 months in Reno and then got a job offer in the Los Angeles area. Los Angeles actually hadn’t been my preferred destination. I was much more enamored of the Bay Area, and I fully intended to live in San Francisco instead of in the Southland. But the job I was offered was in the L.A. suburbs and it was there in 1992 that I finally realized what the purpose of my life was going to be.

Two years earlier, in December 1990, I had been through a shattering experience. I was driving south through Los Angeles on Interstate 5 when a truck decided to occupy the same space I was using. The driver sideswiped me and sent me spinning toward another truck, and all I could do was wonder how many times I was going to be hit. By the time I hit the guardrail and stopped spinning, the passenger side of my car and been crushed almost as flat as if it had been in a compactor.

I walked away from it, although I had a dislocated pelvis and a bruise that covered half of my left leg. The CHP officer who wrote up the accident report said it was a miracle that I had survived the collision. That got me thinking. I was 41 years old and hadn’t accomplished very much; I needed to make a decision as to what I wanted the rest of my life to be.

A few months later I went home and finally made peace with my father. We sat up and talked till 4 a.m. one night and cleared the air of almost everything between us, everything that mattered at least. He expressed his long-time frustration that for all the things I had done in rebellion, I was my own worst victim. I had been sort of like the firing squad that lined up in a circle.

“You always hurt yourself more than you hurt anyone else,” he said.

I had moved to Southern California for a job covering professional sports for a suburban newspaper. In the summer I wrote about Dodger games, in the fall it was the Rams and Raiders and in the winter I covered UCLA basketball and the Clippers. It was pretty much a dream job, and it kept me busy.

I nearly got married in 1991, even though I wasn’t really in love. It would have been a mistake, and it helped me realize that even if I was getting older, I didn’t want to settle for less than real love. Linda was from Wales, with a 12-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son, and to be fair to her, I was more excited about being a dad than about being a husband.

I think she saw that, and she broke up with me by leaving a message on my answering machine. After that, I thought about moving back east to be closer to my family. My parents were retired, and two of my four siblings were living in the D.C. area. I started looking for jobs in the mid-Atlantic region, but nothing came up – and then everything changed.

I hit the gym in the summer of ’92 and worked really hard to get into shape. I was coming to terms with the fact that I might be alone for the rest of my life, and I didn’t feel all that bad about it. I’d come home from work, watch a movie or two on the cable and then fall asleep. I don’t know if I was happy or simply numb, but I’m not sure it matters. I had my routine and I was comfortable with it. I was writing a lot – four unpublished novels – and enjoying the fact that I could do it on a computer instead of just a typewriter.

Late that summer, I decided to dive into the dating pool again. I took out an ad in a singles magazine, and I met a woman I really liked. Then things got strange. In an effort to keep things from moving too quickly, she and I both decided to date some of the other people who had answered our ads.

I had two that interested me a little, a teacher in Pomona and a rocket scientist named Nicole in a town called La Canada Flintridge. The teacher was nice, but there was absolutely no chemistry between us at all. I met the scientist for lunch on a very busy Saturday – work in the afternoon and another date in the evening – and my whole world changed.

It was strange. We had almost nothing in common. She was an overachiever, and I … wasn’t. She had two doctorates, and I had gone through college on the 14-year plan. She owned a home and had two children – strangely, a 12-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son – and I lived alone in an apartment. She was from France, here on a work visa, and I was an All-American guy.

She was lovely, though, and even though I had no idea why, she seemed to like me. We went out a couple more times – we both enjoyed movies – and after our third date, she said something I had never heard before. I had told her up front that I was dating someone else at the same time, and that I liked this other woman too.

We were sitting in her car in the driveway after a wonderful date. We had gone downtown to the Wilshire district to see “Gas Food Lodging,” and at one point when we were crossing the street, she seemed so happy that she skipped. This woman was definitely growing on me.

But in the driveway, all of a sudden things got serious. “I know you’re dating someone else too,” Nicole said. “And I don’t think you’re going to choose me. But I want to keep trying, because I think you’re worth it.”

A month later, we were married and all of a sudden, I was a husband and a father.

I don’t know if anything was ever stranger – or more wonderful – than being a parent. After all, we were the generation that had gone to war with our own parents. When our folks told us to jump, we didn’t ask how high.

Instead we fought battle after battle over the most trivial of issues. Why on earth did the length of our hair ever matter so much? I tried to explain it to my own son, but he takes so much for granted that I never did. He and I have fought about one-tenth as many battles as I did with my own father, but that’s more about him being comfortable in his own skin as it is about my parenting skills.

I have been so damn lucky. I have friends who absolutely worked their asses off trying to do the right thing for their kids, only to have things turn out badly. I know I have had a good effect on both of my children, but I know that they were almost parent-proof and were going to turn out to be pretty special anyway. All I had to do was point them in the right direction.

Both kids made it through college with all sorts of honors, and Pauline is already a tenured officer in the U.S. Foreign Service. Virgile is taking a little time off after college and is training for an Ironman Triathlon next summer. A two-mile swim, a 115-mile bike race and a marathon run. Good lord, I pulled a hamstring just listening to him tell me about it.

Nicole and I are getting near an early retirement, probably sometime in the next couple of years. We’ve reached the point where we’re talking about where we might live, and Colorado is high on my list. I will always love California, but it costs so much to live here and the state has gotten so crowded.

It doesn’t really matter where we live, though, as long as we are together. I knew a long time ago that this woman and these two children had transformed my life into something more wonderful than I ever expected.

Love really has been about giving for me. My wife is bipolar, and life is often challenging. Don’t cry for me, though. Whatever I have given, I have gotten back tenfold from my beloved wife and my amazing children.

True, I never became president or cured cancer.

I never played quarterback for the Redskins or center field for the Dodgers.

I have yet to write the Great American Novel.

But in the only way that really mattered, all my dreams came true.

The sad story of a real showman

2008-11-04T08:44:00.000-08:00

Our Vietnam saga is progressing very well.

In fact, I wound up with so much good material on Jon Rumble that I decided to split Vietnam into two chapters. The Rumble chapter will be titled "Forever Young," and the other is yet to be decided.

In a book like this, telling someone's story without their voice to be added isn't easy, but I had wonderful contributions from three classmates -- Georgeanne Fletcher, Joe Perszyk and Mike Scott -- and one man who served with Jon in Vietnam, Don Dark.

Here's Jon's story:

FOREVER YOUNG

“…be courageous and be brave, and in my heart you’ll always stay
forever young.”

Georgeanne Fletcher says Jon Rumble was never her friend in high school.

“I didn’t know who his friends were, where he lived or anything about his family,” she said. “We never shared a class or had lunch together.”

But thanks to a request from the drama teacher, Joan Bedinger, Georgeanne got to know Jon in the spring of 1967, and more than 40 years later, she still remembers him.

“Jon had been picked for the male lead in the senior class play, ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown,’” she said. “Miss Bedinger asked me to help him learn his music. He had a good voice, but he didn’t read music and had been selected for his dramatic rather than his musical ability.”

So the two met, the serious piano player and the flamboyant young actor. At first, Georgeanne said, Rumble was quite irritating. He wanted to interpret the songs his own way, while she forced him to sing them the way they had been written.

“He wanted to direct the rehearsals, but I was having none of that,” she said. “He would stare out the window as if awaiting an admiring audience. When he saw someone he knew, he would race out in the middle of a phrase as if to impress upon me how much he was in demand.”

Eventually, it all started working. After Jon had his first rehearsals with female lead Penny Viglione, he came to appreciate what he didn’t know. Georgeanne said she learned to use his ego to her advantage.

“I started to praise his efforts, to encourage him to breathe deeper and produce a bigger sound,” she said. “Gradually his gruff manner melted and he turned a bit of his charm on me. He even startled me by calling me by my name and acknowledging my existence as a person.

“I was wary but he persisted and I actually regretted when the rehearsals ended.”

She remembers him as being so full of life. She asked her parents if they remembered Jon, and her mother said he reminded her of Paul Bunyan.

“He was a charmer,” Georgeanne said. “And with the lead in the senior musical, he was Master of the Universe.”

He was a master, but for such a short time. When he took his curtain calls that spring, Jon Mac Gillivray Rumble had less than two years to live.

***

There are no complete records of how many members of the Woodson Class of 1967 went to Vietnam. Some, like Mike Scott and Mike Willis, served and returned at the end of their tours to go on with their lives. Another classmate, Mike Beale, was drafted and was scheduled to go to Vietnam but died at age 18 in a training accident before he ever left the country.

Jon Rumble was one of two who went and never made it back.

Along with Mike Sullivan and Beale, Jon died before he was even old enough to vote. And as the rest of us grew older, raised children and had careers, the three of them live in our memories only as we knew them in high school.

Forever young.

Jon Rumble was nearly at the end of his tour when he was killed on December 26, 1968, by small arms fire in Quang Nam. He was one of the final casualties of 1968, the bloodiest year of the war, when 14,584 Americans died in a 12-month period that began with the Tet Offensive.

If there’s an irony in his death, it’s for all the people who fought to avoid having to go to Vietnam, Jon wasn’t even supposed to be there. In fact, he had to sign a waiver in order to be assigned there.

“Two members of the same family were not allowed to serve in country at the same time,” said Don Dark, Jon’s best friend in the Marine Corps and a ’67 graduate himself from Portales High in New Mexico. “I gave Jon hell about that, as I know his brother did.”

Jon’s older brother Jed was already serving in Saigon in the Army 101st Airborne Division, so there was no way he would have been sent there unless he insisted.

“There was no swaying his opinion,” Dark said. “He felt that he was there for a reason. I used every angle I could think of, including mentioning the fact we were being used as cannon fodder and patsies, but he was firm in his belief. I came to admire him for that very much. Jon was a warrior and a person of high principles.

“I became a better human being because of him.”

***

It’s funny how many lives Jon touched, even in the short time he lived. Joe Perszyk, whose family lived near the Rumbles in Mosby Woods, said Jon quickly became his best friend after his family moved from California to Virginia in the summer of ’66.

“I attribute a number of good things in my life to Jon,” Perszyk said. “He brought me out of a shell I had been in and made me look at the world and life in a whole new manner.”

Just as Georgeanne Fletcher remembers him working hard to get what he wanted, Perszyk recalls how focused his friend could become when he set his mind on achieving a goal.

“Jon used the same motivation that won him the leading role in the class play to prepare himself for the U.S. Marines,” he said. “He wanted so much to be in top shape before he went to boot camp and he worked out incessantly every day. Using free weights, doing sit-ups and push-ups and running, he was determined to be in better shape than any other recruit in his basic training group.”

He came from a military family. His father was a Navy Seabee, his grandfather had been an admiral and his older brother Jed was in the Army. Jon joined the Marines in the late summer of 1967 and came home for Christmas that year.

“It was the last time any of us saw him alive,” Perszyk said.

Jon had only been in Vietnam a short time when he volunteered for the Combined Action Program, an experimental unit designed to live and fight with local militias in villages throughout the northern areas of South Vietnam.

“The experiment was as brilliant as it was asinine,” Dark said. “The theory was that if you placed small units of seasoned combat Marines in or near hostile villages, through integration you would eventually win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. It was sort of like a highly armed Peace Corps with an attitude.

“First and foremost, we were to eliminate the Viet Cong living in said villages. Next we were to keep the VC from raiding the villages of rice, money and more importantly of new and forced volunteers. We were also to train the local militia, provide medical attention, and encourage a lifestyle of peace and harmony. In other words we were to create a utopian society in a foreign country that wouldn’t work in Bakersfield, California.”

There was one basic problem with the concept. Anyone who met the requirements of Vietnam combat duty was already jaded in his perception of the Vietnamese people, both the civilian and military. Who were the friends, who were the enemies?

“Trained to hate the enemy in a country where friend and foe were indistinguishable, the easy choice was to hate them all,” Dark said. “CAP Marines carried this baggage with them to their new assignment.”

But despite that, they did a remarkable job. Woodson classmate Mike Scott points out that they enjoyed a perfect record of never allowing a village to fall back into enemy hands. Eighty percent of the CAP Marines were wounded, 50 percent more than once. One in five of them were killed, but even so, the CAP had the highest percentage of people volunteering to return to their units in all of Vietnam.

“It was a very small and personal fight for them,” Scott said. “Jon spent his nights making sure the local Viet Cong political officer didn’t come to take the teenage sons and daughters away to be inducted in the local platoon.”

Rumble sat for hours every night in an ambush site, refusing to sleep until he was certain nothing would happen. He averaged about four hours sleep and then spent his days working with the people of the village, helping with their rice harvest and helping them build schools.

“One fact that the news never covered even once,” Scott said. “When a CAP Marine was killed in the village he was defending, the tears rolled down the faces of the villagers too. As we do, they will always hold those Marines in their hearts.”

***

Don Dark, who lives all these years later in Dana Point, California, has no doubt that if Jon had survived the war, the two of them would have been close friends for life.

“It is hard to describe how strong the bond that develops between people who have been in war together is,” Dark said. “In the environment of war even people that you wouldn’t give the time of day to during normal circumstances ends up being tighter than any friend that you had prior to that. So imagine how close you would be to a person that under any circumstance you would consider him to be a best friend. That was the nature of the friendship that Jon and I had.”

They patrolled together, they hung out together and they got high together while talking about how ridiculous the war was.

“We were hippies with an M-16 who shared a similar background,” Dark said. “We were both military brats and as such we were destined to be where we were. We joined the Marine Corps with the belief that it was our responsibility to do so even though we had misgivings.

“By the time we met, we both had the same view of the war. We knew that all the lives lost were in vain that, given the politics of the time, we were not there to win a war.”

Just before Christmas 1968, Dark was offered the opportunity to take some time off for R&R – rest and recreation. He had been in Vietnam for 11 months and he was given a week out of the field to have some fun in Sydney, Australia.

He almost hadn’t gone. He said that by that point, both he and Jon were short-timers and they were looking out for each other. He had less than three months left in his tour, and Jon was also down to fewer than 100 days.

“On my way back to the unit, I remembered Jon’s brother Jed was coming up to visit him for Christmas,” Dark said. “It was December 23rd, and by the time I got back, I was in pretty good spirits. I knew Jon would be jazzed to see his brother and I was happy I would be there to meet him.”

Only he wasn’t. He never saw his friend again. Jon had been transferred from Namo, a village north of Da Nang, down closer to the giant U.S. air base in Da Nang, a move Dark later learned was intended to keep him safe for his final month in country.

He found out later that Jon and Jed’s father, Captain Rumble, was being transferred to Vietnam in January 1969 and that both of his sons would be leaving the country.

“I learned many years later that Jed had come to Da Nang to tell him that and that he wanted to make sure Jon didn’t resist,” Dark said.

The very next day, Jon was killed by sniper fire in Quang Nam.

“The first thought that came to my mind was, ‘Jesus, it’s Christmas in the states, his poor mother,’” Dark said. “The next was to find out if Jed was OK and we were assured he was. I was numb for the next several hours. The truth is, I was numb for the next 38 years.”

The following day, the company’s gunnery sergeant came out to the field to see Dark. He had the wooden box in which Jon kept his personal belongings, and he said Jon had requested that it be given to Dark if something were to happen to him.

That was the point at which it really sunk in that Rumble was gone. Dark looked through the box and found mostly letters from family, friends and a girlfriend, as well as a pipe the two men had carved out of wood.

“That night I held my own funeral service for Jon,” Dark said. “I burned the box and its contents and smoked some weed with the pipe and then threw the pipe into the fire.”

He burned the box because he figured Jon wanted to insure that the letters were not sent home to his parents with the rest of his belongings. Dark decided that if something happened to him, someone going through his belongings might find Jon’s letters and his parents might still get them.

He didn’t want to take that chance.

Joe Perszyk remembers that time from a different perspective. It was December 27th when Jon’s mother called him and asked him to come over to their house. His first thought was that one of the boys, either Jon or Jed, must have been wounded.

It’s funny sometimes how our minds reject the possibility that the worst might have happened.

“When I walked into the house through the side door that led into the kitchen, Jon’s mother was in tears,” Perszyk said. “She told me Jon had been killed. The whole world stopped for me and I was hoping it was a big mistake.”

Jed had been sent home immediately, and Perszyk went with Rumble’s parents the next day to pick up their surviving son at Dulles Airport. When Jed got into the car, he told them something they hadn’t known at that point.

He had been with Jon when he was killed.

Jed Rumble had been on leave from the 101st Airborne when a firefight broke out near where he and Jon were located. They went with a couple of Vietnamese to check it out. When they came to a hut, Jed went inside while Jon went around the back to see if there was anyone there.

“After a short period of time, one of the Vietnamese men came into the hut and told Jed that the Marine had been shot,” Perszyk said. “A sniper had shot Jon in the head, through his helmet. He was dead when his brother got to him.”

He was 19 years old.

“I don’t remember when I first heard that he had been killed,” Georgeanne Fletcher said. “I had been skeptical of the war from the beginning and I wondered what he was doing over there. Did he think that war would be another great adventure? Another stage to perform on? I had been irritated with Jon in high school and I felt furious with him because he died.”

Perszyk says that isn’t the case, that Vietnam had been anything but a great adventure for his friend. Rumble had been enthusiastic when he enlisted, but in his letters it was apparent that the enthusiasm had faded badly and he was very much in doubt about what it all meant.

In fact, Joe Perszyk still has a picture of his friend, sitting cross-legged on the ground with his right hand in the air.

“He was forming a peace sign with his fingers,” he said.

***

It says a lot for Jon Rumble’s personal magnetism that people – both close friends and some who barely knew him – still think of him 40 years later.

The first time Georgeanne visited the Wall in Washington, D.C., she found his name and touched the letters.

Then she cried.

“Not the usual silent tears,” she said. “I sobbed. I think of Jon when I listen to the music of the Doors. He’s the image in “The End,” he’s the “actor all alone” in “Riders on the Storm.” I thought of him in “Les Miserables,” the young man killed in the revolution. ‘There are storms we cannot weather.’”

Joe Perszyk couldn’t even bring himself to visit the Wall and look for Rumble’s name until 2002.

He hasn’t been back.

“There was a group of us who hung out together that included Jon,” he said. “We remain friends to this day. The memories are still very real and the pain of Jon’s death comes back from time to time.”

Mike Scott says he believed Jon loved what he was doing and that his death meant something.

“Most of us will die quietly in our beds,” he said. “He died upstaging us all.”

***

A few years ago, Don Dark got an e-mail from Maggie Rumble, Jon’s younger sister. He still isn’t sure how she found him, but the letter started a correspondence between the two of them that resulted in a meeting between Dark and the Rumbles over the Thanksgiving 2006 holiday in Las Vegas.

“As the day drew closer, I became more and more apprehensive to the point that I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off,” Dark said. “I don’t know why I reacted the way I did, I guess that the guilt I felt for so many years was coming full circle and in some ways that guilt was comforting and familiar and defined my war.”

They had dinner together at the Flamingo -- Don, his wife and son, and Maggie, her mother and brother Jed, his wife and son, were there. Captain Rumble had died in a plane crash not long after Jon’s death.

“With tears running down my cheeks I raised my glass for a toast to Jon and unsurprisingly, everyone at the table had the same reaction,” Dark said.

After the dinner, Dark and Jed Rumble had a private conversation.

“Although we hadn’t met before that evening, Jed was Jon’s older brother, and since I thought of Jon as my brother, that made his brother my older brother,” Dark said. “I immediately blurted out my sense of guilt about not being there to protect him. Jed told me that there was nothing that I could have done to change the inevitable.”

Jed told Dark that his brother had told him on Christmas day that he was not going to make it home. It wasn’t the first time Dark had heard this; he and Jon discussed the same thing many times.

“I guess I didn’t take it seriously because countless times I had said the same thing and at the time truly believed it,” Dark said. “Jed told me with sincerity that I could read in his eyes, so I believe it to have been something that Jon knew all along.”

He still misses him, more than 40 years later.

“Jon was a great person,” he said. “The world is not a better place without him.”

***

In the end, Jon Rumble was a showman, and the last memory of him that most of the Class of ’67 has is a good one. Georgeanne Fletcher, now Georgeanne Honeycutt, still remembers the last time she saw him, on the stage picking up his diploma on June 5, 1967.

“Jon’s antics at graduation are one of the most vivid of my memories of that event,” she said. “He had boasted and made a big deal that he might not graduate. When he received his diploma, I was seated and had a full view of him as he crossed the stage. He made a grand gesture of relief.

“A few weeks earlier, it might have irritated me, but I joined the laughter and applause as he exited.”

Exit – stage right.

Forever young.

Just a teaser this time ... need your help

2008-10-29T20:43:00.000-07:00

Prior to this, I've given you only completed chapters in my epic struggle to chronicle the Class of 1967.

But this one is different It isn't an introductory chapter, a conclusion or even a story about one class member. Yes, there is one story that dominates this chapter, but this is about more than just Jon Rumble.

This chapter is about what Vietnam meant to us. It's only half-written, because I still need more participation from you folks. Mostly I need people who knew Mike Sullivan, but that isn't all.

I want to hear from some of you -- even those who never went -- what Vietnam meant in your life.

So here is nothing more than the introduction to our chapter on Vietnam.

Here is "Forever Young."

FOREVER YOUNG

"... be courageous and be brave, and in my heart you’ll always stay forever young."

Mike Scott thought he was aware of what was going on in the world.

His father took the first load of the Bell helicopters known as Hueys to Vietnam on his ship, the Iwo Jima. His brother walked ashore in Da Nang with the 9th Marine Expeditionary Force in 1965 and his neighbor, Bob Downing, came home severely wounded from a Claymore mine.

Mike himself was beginning to write and perform folk music, mostly about the civil rights movement. He figured he was a pretty talented artist and that he would someday work for General Motors designing cars.

He was 17, so of course "I knew the score about everything. I knew we were not sheltered at Woodson. We were so on top of everything. We could sit in the bars in Georgetown and look so cool drinking beer."

Then he went to Vietnam.

"And I knew," he said. "I had never known anything."

***

There are no complete records of how many members of the Woodson Class of 1967 went to Vietnam between 1967 and 1973. Some, like Mike Scott and Mike Willis, served and returned at the end of their tours to go on with their lives.

Two never made it back.

Jon Rumble was nearly at the end of his tour when he was killed on December 26, 1968, by small arms fire in Quang Nam. Mike Sullivan didn’t even arrive in Vietnam until almost a year later, and he had only been in country for four months when an explosive device on the ground killed him on March 11, 1970, in Quang Ngai.

Jon was 19 when he died, Mike 20.

They didn’t even live long enough to vote for or against the people who made the decisions that kept our country in Vietnam for so many years and cost us so many lives. As the rest of us moved on to middle age and past, as we lived through the final 30 years of the 20th century, they remain in our memories as they were in high school.

A look at the tragedy of our generation

2008-10-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

We're starting to work on the chapter about Vietnam.

As most of you know, we lost two members of our class -- Jon Rumble and Mike Sullivan -- in Vietnam, both in 1968. There were other members of our class who served there and then returned home.

The chapter will mostly be about Jon and Mike, who are "Forever Young" in our memories, and I need reminiscences about them. Mostly I need help with Mike; I knew Jon a little and am in touch with someone who served with him in Vietnam and was very close to him.

Some of the memories people have of Jon almost make him seem larger than life. Georgeanne Fletcher Honeycutt wrote me earlier with her memories of him.

"I vividly remember Jon Rumble accepting his diploma. He was such a presence. I hadn't known him well, but I was asked to help him with the music for the Unsinkable Molly Brown. He was a bit annoying with a great ego.

"I could translate the notes on the page into the song which he was to sing. He resisted, often wishing to make his own interpretations of the score. He finally trusted that I could read music. And, he won me over. I started to like him. He stopped being an attention-getting popular guy and I relinquished my role as the smart know it all musical girl. It was surprising that a friendship was possible.

"I smiled when he made a great gesture of relief and relished the cheers when he received his diploma. Within a year he was killed in Vietnam. I always find his name when I visit the wall. I've had so many years to receive attention. Jon's time on the stage was brief. But, when he was there he owned it."

Those of us who knew Jon have to smile when we hear that. I don't think it was any accident that his senior picture, his yearbook picture, shows him in a Madras jacket. At an age when most kids would do anything not to stand out or look different, he reveled in it.

As I said, I didn't know Mike Sullivan. But I know some of you did, and I need some stories. It would be wrong to make the Vietnam chapter just about Jon. So please help me. You can post them here as comments or you can e-mail them privately to me at m_rappaport@earthlink.net. Whichever you prefer.

I really want to do right by these guys in our book.

A short update on the project

2008-10-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

"When I'm 64" is moving along very nicely, as I hope some of you agree.

I have essentially finished five chapters, the introductory one I posted in September and four others about individuals. Chapters about Rande Barker, Dudley Wilson, Lee Millette and your humble author are all but finished, although in some cases I have sent out requests for some personal reminiscences.

There are eight other people who have sent in their complete questionnaires, and I will be working on their chapters forthwith -- Bob Douthitt, Mike McCuddin, Katie Dyer, Dale Morgan, Darla Garber, Judy Hart, Diane Dunkley and Jim Hermes.

I have one person -- Mike Willis -- who has sent me half his questionnaire.

There are three other people still promising to contribute -- Dale Abrahamson, Susi Spell and Susan Morales.

There are numerous people who have offered to contribute to a chapter on Jon Rumble, Mike Sullivan and the Vietnam experience.

Paula Gibson's younger brother has offered to help with a chapter about the drug scene.

That's 16 chapters -- Dale and Judy are sharing a chapter, as are Dale and Susi -- and I'm still looking for 25 or so. I know there are more of you with terrific stories, and I'm hoping to hear from you. I am going to post the original questionnaire here on the Website, and I hope some of you will take the opportunity to fill it out and get into the book.

As for now, thanks for all the help and encouragement.

I'm still

Another sneak peek at "When I'm 64"

2008-10-22T14:50:00.001-07:00

Hey, y'all.

We've got a first draft finished of the first of the chapters about people, and I thought I would post it to give you an idea of how things are progressing.

Hope y'all enjoy it. I'd love to see comments.

I WANNA LEARN A LOVE SONG

"She said, I wanna learn a love song, full of happy things …"

Sometimes the smallest, most inconsequential events can change our lives. That’s what Rande Probst learned in February 1973 when she went out looking for her lost dog.

She was working as a flight attendant for American Airlines and living with her husband Stephen on the campus of the University of North Texas in Denton. She had flown into Dallas-Fort Worth on a red-eye flight and was anxious to get to bed. But her dog Wolfgang was missing and her husband didn’t want to get out of bed and look for him.

So Rande went searching around the neighborhood and wandered into a stranger’s backyard directly behind her own house.

"I had no idea who lived there," she said. "But a sleepy-looking hippie guy heard me and came outside."

John Barretto was dressed in the campus uniform of the day – cutoff jeans, a tank top and sandals – and had midnight-black hair pulled back in a ponytail.

"He looked interesting," she said. "But really, I was an American Airlines flight attendant and he was a student. We talked briefly and then I turned to leave. Before I thought it through, I said 'Come over sometime and meet my husband.’"

Barretto did, and Rande was surprised to see that something strange was happening. Her husband and the "hippie guy" were talking together and smoking together, but she and the visitor couldn’t take their eyes off each other.

She didn’t realize then that Barretto would become her best friend and ultimately the love of her life, although it would take a long time and a lot of false starts before she actually learned her love song.

***

Rande Barker was one of the real beauties of Woodson’s Class of 1967, a majorette and a member of the queen’s court for the Christmas dance in 1966. Everybody noticed the blondes, but her dark-haired, green-eyed loveliness was every bit as special.

She wasn’t happy, though. Her parents were extremely strict, as a lot of military families were, and their over-protective attitude kept her from having much of a social life.

"I'm sure everyone thought of me as part of the popular group because of Baton Corps," she said. "But that wasn’t the way it was at all. I wanted to have a social life and I wanted to be popular."

There was another problem too. Rande was having a difficult time in school and she didn’t know why. Reading was difficult for her, a symptom of a problem she never knew she had until years after graduating.

Rande had dyslexia.

Fortunately, she had one close friend. Joan Ansheles was also a member of the Baton Corps, and she and Rande hit it off quickly. The two girls both lived in the upscale housing development known as Mantua, and Rande began spending a lot of time at her friend’s house after school.

"She lived only a few blocks away," Joan said. "We could walk to each other’s houses where we spent a lot of time together. I thought our bustling house with seven children was a big part of her attraction to my family and the main reason she spent more time at my house than we did at hers.

"I only learned in the last few years that her home life was very difficult and that the love I got from my family was what she desperately wanted most from her own."

To Rande, the Ansheles family looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with children running all over the house laughing and enjoying themselves.

"I longed to be in her family," Rande said. "I would stay there until I was called home to dinner and I would drag my feet all the way home."

Things weren’t happy at home. Her father usually was working late and her mother was compensating by drinking. No one asked about her day, and dinner was either Rande and her sister eating together or Rande taking her plate to her room and eating alone.

"Every day, Rande walked to my house in the morning so we could go to the bus stop together," Joan said. "She came to my house after school just to hang out, for regular dinners with the family, to get dressed for performances at football games, for sleepovers, to play guitar and sing '500 Miles,' especially for my little sisters."

It was the life she didn’t have at home or at school, and it meant everything to her.

"They made me feel I had worth and a reason to be on this earth," Rande said.

But high school ends, and even the best friendships often fade into the background when friends head in different directions. Joan Ansheles went on to college and a future filled with optimism, but Rande Barker was lost.

"I always thought I was stupid," Rande said. "I never had the confidence to apply to any colleges, so right out of high school I was looking for something to do."

Back in the days after the Class of 1967 graduated from high school and made its way into the world, one of the jobs for women that carried some glamour with it was working for an airline. Flight attendants – mostly called stewardesses then – were young and pretty, and the opportunity to see the world compensated somewhat for extremely low pay.

Rande Barker went to work for American Airlines in 1968. She was 19, and she moved to Dallas, corporate headquarters for American. She was enough of a child of the '50s, her parents' child, to think that the next step in her life should be to get married and have children.

"My best friend that I flew with was married and I wanted to be married too," she said. "Swell reason. He was a sports-car driving, woman-chasing, north Dallas snob who liked the fact that I was gone a lot and he could do what he wanted. I never really knew love with him. I was a fool."

Maybe, but she was faithful. Despite the wild image flight attendants had in those days – "Thank you, Hugh Hefner," Rande says wryly – she didn’t seek entertainment outside her marriage.

"Until I went looking for my dog," she said.

Funny, but it all started with one of those Hollywood "meet cutes," the ones you see in movies starring Meg Ryan.

Barretto says he didn’t know what to make of it.

"Who was this woman wandering around in the back yard, yelling out her dog’s name at the top of her lungs?" he asked. "I looked out the back door and saw a little girl with a big leash frantically trying to retrieve her pet. My own dog and I watched amused as her dog explored the territory but really never did stray far from his owner."

What else could he do but go outside and talk to her?

"I don’t remember who struck up the conversation but I was impressed immediately," Barretto said. "It's not that Rande was looking particularly fine that morning, actually she was not at her best, but it was her sharp humor and quick wit that struck me. We talked for a while, ignoring the dog and he wandered back, as if his mission was completed and he was ready to go home.

"At that point the conversation ended as quickly and naturally as it started, she turned to go but before leaving she extended a casual invitation to come over and visit with her and her husband. I think it was a dinner invitation."

***

John Barretto was a photographer working for a modeling agency, and Rande had been interested – if not particularly confident about the idea – in becoming a model.

"John was a wonderful photographer," she said. "I had always thought that I was stupid and ugly, no matter what other people said, but he took me to his studio and took pictures of me. He showed them to me and told me how beautiful I was."

She started crying, and even today it’s still not easy to know if they were tears of happiness or of regret for all the years she hadn’t been aware of the beauty she possessed.

"During our conversations I found myself inadvertently staring at her but it was not until after a visit or two that I fully realized Rande’s potential as a model and asked her to pose," Barretto said. "After putting together an informal portfolio, she was introduced to several agencies in Dallas. She was a hit and began getting invitations for casting calls."

All of a sudden the dream was real.

"We expanded her portfolio and I added some work of this beautiful lady to my own sales book," Barretto said. "In retrospect the best pictures in my own portfolio were of Rande and more jobs came from her samples than any other. Creatively we brought out the best in each other and it was only later that we realized it was the labor of love that was the special ingredient."

She began modeling, and from 1973 until 1980 she appeared in print ads and television commercials in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. She and Stephen had a son, Nathan, in 1975 and a daughter, Erin, in 1980, but the marriage was definitely less than ideal.

"Stephen was always too busy or had plans," Rande said. "John was the one who was always there for me. He would baby-sit for Nathan and when the baby was sick, he was the one who drove us to the doctors. He was my very best friend."

Both of them wanted it to be more, and at some point they became what she called "kissing friends."

"We had almost a brother-sister relationship until that point," she said. "We did everything and went everywhere together, whether it was paying bills or spending the afternoon shooting pictures."

So why didn’t she leave her husband? At her core, Rande was still her parents’ child. There hadn’t been any divorces in her family, and she knew her folks would view her as a failure.

"I just couldn’t," she said. "John was always there and I thought he always would be, hanging onto me as I toyed with being with him or staying with my husband. But finally the strain was too much."

She couldn’t let go of her marriage, and John needed more than the "pretend life together" that was all Rande could give him. He started dating someone, and she pushed him to take it further. It was more than seven years since they had met, and he stopped by to tell her he was moving back home to the Colorado Springs area.

"I had known that was what he wanted, but I never thought he would go," she said. "I was selfish and I thought he would always be there for me when I needed him. I was so stupid."

He turned to leave and she slammed the door behind him. It was October 1980, and her daughter Erin was three weeks old.

"I started to cry and I held my daughter so tight that she woke up," Rande said. "All I could say to her was, 'There goes my best friend, Erin. I’ve lost my dearest friend and he won’t ever be back.’"

John wrote to her from Colorado, but Rande was hurt and angry and told him she didn’t want to hear from him anymore.

"I told him I had a marriage to save," she said. "What marriage? Save it for what?"

***

Time passed, year after year after year. Rande and her husband stayed together and their children grew to maturity. She never heard from John, and in 1998 she got an unpleasant surprise when she learned that she had Parkinson’s disease.

Pretty much the only nice thing that happened was that sometime in the early ‘90s – neither woman remembers exactly when – she re-established her friendship with Joan Ansheles.

They had seen each other at the 10-year class reunion in 1977, but had pretty much lost touch after that. But on a layover in Washington, D.C., Rande called Joan and asked her to stop by her hotel room and catch up.

"I was working for the U.S. Senate," Joan said. "But I thought Rande’s job as a flight attendant was so glamorous. I remember catching a cab from Capitol Hill to the Hotel Washington, where she was staying, and wondering what it would be like to see her after all these years. Would we have anything to talk about, or would it be awkward and disappointing?"

It was neither. They went to Rande’s room, flopped down on the beds and talked, just as they had so many afternoons after a day of high school.

"We seemed to pick up right where we had left off," Joan said.

If it surprised Joan, it didn’t surprise Rande at all. "True friends never have trouble picking up where they left off," she said. "They never get bogged down with stuff. Their love for each other takes them to a higher plane."

Then came Parkinson’s. The National Parkinson Foundation defines the disease as a "brain disorder that occurs when certain nerve cells (neurons) in a part of the brain called the substantia nigra die or become impaired."

Normally, these cells produce dopamine, which allows smooth function of the body's muscles and movement. When enough of the cells have been damaged, symptoms such as tremors, slowness of movement, rigidity and difficulty with balance occur.

There is as yet no cure, although there are medications and treatments that can help alleviate the symptoms.

"It broke my heart to tell Joani about my disease," Rande said. "I knew she would feel for me as I did about myself. That was scary and I did not want her to know that kind of stress. But my soul needed her to know and it too was in need of a friend like Joani."

Ansheles knew, and she once again became the best friend she had been all through high school. The two women started talking regularly on the phone and visiting each other whenever they could.

Once, when Rande was in Philadelphia for a clinical trial, the two stayed together at a luxury hotel, where they visited the salon together and had dinner at a good Italian restaurant.

"We would eat breakfast together sitting on a bench," Joan said. "Rande would suffer through withdrawal because she had to stop taking her medication before her appointment. Then she would go through her tests, recover and then get on a plane back to Texas as I drove back to Virginia."

On another occasion, after another clinical trial, they got all the way to Dulles Airport outside Washington before Ansheles convinced Rande to stay a little longer.

"I wanted her to ride up to Maine with me to surprise my mom and my four sisters who live up there," Joan said.

Rande remembers the trip fondly. "It was an 11-hour drive, and on the way we learned to lip sync to a country and western song. We even put some dance moves in there so we could show her mom. She loved it."

Ansheles even came down to Texas in 2006 to help Rande get packed and organized for her trip to Atlanta for another clinical trial procedure.

"She flew all the way to Dallas," Rande said. "She spent all night helping me get ready while my husband was sleeping in the next room. He was never there for me – ever. The next morning I drove her to the airport so she could fly back home. How many friends would do something like that for you?"

Rande didn’t realize it then, but she had another good friend who was about to re-enter her life.

***

In 2006, after 36 years of marriage, two grown children and two grandsons, Rande Probst finally decided that she didn’t want to be married to her husband any longer.

She didn’t realize that in Colorado, John Barretto was also making the same decision to end his marriage.

She also didn’t know that every time he had come to Texas in the last 26 years, he would drive to Denton and cruise past her house, hoping just to catch a glimpse of her.

"It was so high school to do that," he admitted. "It was revisiting the past, and the epitome of the old cliché 'you can never go home again.'"

Of course, Rande had never left.

"All I knew was that I was very unhappy and still married," she said. "I would cry every time I heard music from the ‘70s that reminded me of him."

But if Rande Probst was only hearing sad songs, John Barretto was listening to different music – to a love song.

"Something drew me to those old haunts and Rande," he said. "Road trips by motorcycle would take me all over the country and all over Texas visiting friends and enjoying the ride, so a drive by her house seemed natural. It was not necessary to visit personally; just knowing she was a few yards away for the few moments it took to go by was enough.

"What would have happened had we actually seen each other? Who knows? But it was not the right time to meet again."

Rande was getting ready to undergo a major clinical trial in Atlanta that held out the possibility of not only helping her to "hold her own" while waiting for a cure, but also would improve her quality of life. It was a fairly big deal that involved surgery – a shaved head, two holes drilled in her skull and a titanium plate inserted.

"I looked at it as not having anything to lose," she said. "I had no other options at the time, but I had no idea what would happen since it was a double blind study and half the people would get placebos."

She was sitting with her friend Patricia discussing it, and Patricia – who was also a friend of John’s – handed her a piece of paper with a phone number on it.

"Call John," she said. "Call him and tell him about your surgery. Call him!"

What Rande didn’t know was that Patricia had seen John when he was in town over the years. She had asked her friend not to carry messages between the two of them.

"I had stayed loosely in touch with Patricia," Barretto said. "At some point she informed me of Rande’s condition. The news hit hard and brought to the surface feelings I thought were long gone. But even with that and after all the years that had passed I respected her wishes and kept my distance. It was not the right time then either.

"The staid normalcy of my life would take over when I returned from the road and would continue until that day in July when everything changed for both of us and our lives became intertwined again."

Rande wanted to call, but it had been a long time and she was very nervous.

"I picked up the paper and told Patricia to call him first to see if it was all right," she said. "My heart was racing and my hands were shaking, but it had nothing to do with Parkinson’s."

She and John talked for an hour, long enough to learn that both of them were getting divorced and that even after 26 years, all the old feelings were still there. They started meeting, and in the summer of 2007, Rande moved to Colorado Springs to live in an apartment above Barretto’s business.

Her divorce was final in December 2007, his three months later.

"He lost about $500,000 in cash and another $200,000 in things," Rande said. "He still refers to me as his most expensive date."

***

Happiness was a long time coming for the beautiful young girl who went through high school thinking she was stupid and not realizing how lovely she was. When Rande Barker Probst looks back on her life to date, it’s strange for her to realize how different it all turned out to be from what she had expected.

"It’s hard even to put into words," she said. "Never in God’s green world did I ever think I would have a disease with no cure. I never thought I would ever divorce, or that I would move far away from my babies and their babies. But even though I’m far from them, I feel closer to them. My life is so full of peace – the peace I looked for back then – and the simple of enjoyment of all that is around me, there are times I think it’s a dream."

Her life is very different from her view of her parents’ life.

"They were content to have the world judge them as they appeared on the outside," she said. "They just let it be as dysfunctional as it could be within the walls of our house. Big house, big car, big troubles. As long as no one asked why or got too close, all was well."

Rande loves living in Colorado, but to be fair, if John Barretto lived in Missouri or Montana or Michigan instead, her heart would easily transfer its geographic allegiance.

"I am really happy for the first time in my life," she said. "When I hear a love song, I get it. When you are meant to be with someone, there are forces that take over and you just hang on for the ride."

God willing, the ride will continue for many years. When Rande thinks of Paul McCartney’s voice singing the ditty from "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band," she no longer thinks of old people.

"... will you still need me, will you still feed me ..."

"No, 64 is not old," she says. "When I’m 64, I plan to be at my love’s side in our new home … happy at last and where I should be with the mountains as a backdrop.

"Somebody sing a love song."

Anybody else on Facebook?

2008-10-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

I got an e-mail today telling me that Mike McCuddin had recently joined Facebook and had listed me as a friend.

I went to my account, confirmed it and found myself wondering how many other members of the Class of '67 are on Facebook.

Maybe we could set up something of a network. If anybody wants to list me as a friend, I'll confirm them and see what we can get going.

Give it a try.

Has it really been a year already?

2008-10-19T19:33:00.001-07:00

It was a year ago this weekend that we all met in Arlington for the 40th reunion of the Class of 1967.

Almost to the day.

It was shortly after that weekend that I started this Web site to give us a chance to stay in touch, and it was a few months ago that I started work on what is turning out to be a massive project, "When I'm 64."

Partly because of the book, partly because of turmoil in my own life and partly because of a lack of anything to say, I didn't post very often this summer. And with no reason to come to the site for anything new, readership fell off.

I see from the increasing numbers on the stat counter that some of you are starting to come back. Nobody has commented on anything yet, but that's all right. Eventually I'll find some topics worthy of your opinions.

But the book is going well. I hope to post another sample chapter soon, so that all of you can see.

So stick around. In this first year, we had nearly 12,000 page views. That's not bad. We'll try for even more this year.

A year.

Wow.

Commercials just overwhelming TV

2008-10-16T17:28:00.000-07:00

It seems like forever that "Saturday Night Live" has been on the air, and it has been at least 15 years since I watched it regularly.

These days, thanks to YouTube, I have been able to catch most of Tina Fey's hilarious portrayals of Sarah Palin. They make me laugh, but not enough that I want to stay up till 11:30 on a Saturday night and watch television.

The fact is, I hardly watch any scheduled TV shows at all anymore. It isn't that I'm some sort of snob; it's just that I really can't bear to watch all the commercials. Most of us from the Class of '67 probably remember the time when a half-hour show had one commercial in the middle and another one just before the end. These days if you watch late night TV, there seem to be a couple of minutes worth of commercials every seven or eight minutes.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one Saturday night in Houston I saw the same Cal Worthington commercial 24 times in a three-hour period.

For those of you who never lived in the West, here's a sampler of the Worthington commercials, in which Cal and his "dog" Spot sold used cars. Sometimes the dog was a dolphin or an elephant, other times a tiger or a snake.

But at least his commercials were funny. Most of the ones we see these days are insulting.

So I'll watch shows on DVD, and I certainly love to watch movies, but I've pretty much banned regular shows from my entertainment package.

What has changed the most since 1967?

2008-10-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

It's a question I find myself asking quite often these days.

It's apparent that America has changed -- indeed the world has changed -- since we picked up our diplomas in June 1967. Just a few things that come to mind -- home computers, fax machines, cable television, cellular phones, microwave ovens.

I remember that making a long distance telephone call seemed to be a big deal. Even in 1976, when my first wife and I lived in Vienna, Austria, it was $2.25 a minute to call from the States. When she was in Beijing for three months in late 1978, it cost me $10 a minute to talk to her.

Now long distance is free in most plans, and even internationally, Skype gets it done for pennies a minute.

That's just one change.

I'd like to know what you think are the biggest changes that have taken place in the last 41 years.

Remember when America went to bed?

2008-10-12T14:06:00.000-07:00

I was watching "Poltergeist" this afternoon for the first time in more than 20 years when I was struck by another way our country has changed.

You may not recall that when the movie starts, the first thing we hear is the National Anthem. As it continues, we see a man who has fallen asleep in front of the television. The anthem is playing because the station is signing off for the night.

As the anthem concludes, the TV screen goes to white -- nothing but static.

Do TV stations sign off anymore? Maybe I'm jaded because I live in Los Angeles or maybe I just go to bed too early these days, but I think most stations these days broadcast around the clock. If there isn't any original programming to put on the air, there are always infomercials and old movies.

I remember when I was living in Reno, I caught "Tarantula" and "Lord Love a Duck" in the middle of the night on a UHF station out of Sacramento. Movies like that aren't on in prime time. One night in Houston, when I had to be up at 5 a.m. to go to the airport, I watched three hours of "Outer Limits" reruns -- complete with 24 airings of the same Cal Worthington commercial.

Face it, we're a 24-hour society now.

When we were in high school, nothing was open in the middle of the night except for a few convenience stores, the rare drug store and a couple of all-night diners. Now you can shop for almost anything any time of the day or night if you live anywhere near a good-sized city.

Progress? Maybe, but I miss those old signoffs.

It has been a while, but we're back

2008-10-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

I want to apologize for not giving you much of a reason to check in on this blog recently.

Most of my efforts have gone into "When I'm 64," which is moving along nicely. I do want to update you on what's happening there, but I also want you to know I'm going to try and post two or three times a week on other subjects so that we can rebuild our camaraderie.

Anyway, the book:

I couldn't be more fascinated than I have been with some of the places our class has been and things we have done. I have been working on chapters about Rande Barker, Lee Millette, Dudley Wilson and yes, even myself. I also am in the early stages of working on Darla Garber, Mike McCuddin and Bob Douthitt, as well as one on Dale Morgan and Judy Hart and another one on Mike Willis.

There are other fascinating stories I haven't gotten to yet, and more of you that I still hope to hear from. The book ultimately will have an introductory chapter and about two dozen chapters on people and their lives. I am aiming for a completed first draft by the end of 2008.

Some of you have promised to send in questionnaires and haven't yet. I have not given up on you.

Anyway, I'll keep you updated on this, but look for other posts as well.

An advance look at "When I'm 64"

2008-09-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

Since some of you haven't heard from me for a while, I wanted to let you know that I am still chugging away at "When I'm 64." If you're interested, this is a draft of what will be the introductory chapter of the book. I welcome your comments.

GRADUATION DAY

The rented gowns were heavy and more than a little scratchy. Royal blue for the boys, white for the girls and gold sashes for members of the National Honor Society. We had been told what to wear underneath them, and there was talk that a few of the more adventuresome among us might disregard the instructions and opt for being as cool as possible. These days they call it “going commando.”

It was June 5, 1967, the beginning of the summer season in the Washington, D.C., area, an area so hot and humid that Congress always used to adjourn for the year by Memorial Day in the days before air conditioning. Just 23 years earlier, almost to the day, a president had informed the nation that American troops were coming ashore in France as part of the D-Day invasion that marked the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler. Those soldiers, many of them no older than we were, and others like them who fought in other theatres of the war, were our fathers.

They had beaten the Axis and then returned home to enjoy the seemingly limitless bounty of postwar America. A big part of that bounty turned out to be children, and our class in 1967 represented flood tide of the so-called baby boom. The 804 seniors at W.T. Woodson High School in Fairfax – most of them graduating on this Monday night, represented the largest graduating class up to then in the state of Virginia.

The school had opened only five years earlier, and more than 3,300 kids were crowded into a five-year old building that year, with a senior class that was more homogenous than even seems possible in a public school today. Only 14 members of the class were African-American, and the only senior of Asian descent was an exchange student from South Vietnam.

We had no idea that anything was at all out of the ordinary. Those of us who had grown up in Virginia had lived through “massive resistance,” the effort led by the Byrd political machine to prevent the courts from implementing integration in the schools. Woodson hadn’t been integrated at all until our junior year, when a handful of black students included two basketball players who led our team to the state tournament.

The next year, with the final closing of Fairfax County’s black high school, several hundred students enrolled at Woodson and many of us went to class with someone of another race for the very first time.

Our families weren’t all that wealthy, but there may never have been a better time to be middle class in America. Beautiful suburban homes were available for less than $30,000, and most of our fathers had access to low-interest government mortgages due to their military service.

Not that many of us had cars – this wasn’t California – but mohair sweaters, Gant shirts, London Fog windbreakers and Bass Weejun loafers were relatively common status symbols.

Within two or three years, dress codes would be a thing of the past. But at Woodson in the middle of the 1960s, boys were sent home for wearing blue jeans or ordered to get haircuts when their hair touched their ears or their collars and girls fought and lost the battle of whether they would be allowed to wear culottes to school. Slacks or shorts were completely out of the question.

Dozens of American cities exploded in race riots during the summer of 1965 and again in 1966, and protesters in the northeast and in California were already questioning the war in Vietnam. But Washington, D.C., was a company town, and most of our fathers worked for a CEO named Lyndon Baines Johnson. We were young enough and America in general was still innocent enough that few of us even considered the possibility that we might not be getting the whole truth.

"We were so sheltered," 1967 graduate Dudley Wilson said. "I don’t think we thought we were, but we were."

Of course we were. The idea that high school students – suburban high school students – would have anything to protest was ludicrous. Our parents got great pleasure from telling us how much better we had it than they did. We hadn’t grown up during the Great Depression, suffered through rationing during World War II or gone off to fight the war before we were old enough to vote.

By almost any standard, we were pampered. All that was expected of most of us was that we would get good grades and get into a decent college. For the boys, at least, our options were limited. We couldn’t plan a year or two off or a stint in the military unless we wanted to spend 1968 in the jungle in South Vietnam. That meant college, which wasn’t the toughest possible future.

We knew all that as we waited just outside the football stadium on June 5. If there was one place on the 78-acre campus that held more good memories than any other, it was probably the stadium. For members of the football team like class president Mike McCuddin, the previous fall had been the best season ever – eight victories in 10 games. For another of the graduation speakers, Nancy Abt, there was the memory of being crowned homecoming queen the previous October.

For others there were memories of cheerleading, of marching in the band, or just of sitting in the stands and enjoying an autumn Friday night.

But now it was June, and for most of those waiting to graduate, it would be the last time they would ever walk into the stadium. And as the symphonic band began playing Elgar’s "Pomp and Circumstance," there were more than a few people fighting back tears.

It wasn’t because of the music. Elgar didn’t much move us, and neither did most classical music. We were the rock 'n' roll generation, and most of us tuned our car radios to AM stations like WEAM in nearby Arlington("The WEAM team") or to WPGC's "Good Guys" across the Potomac River in Maryland.

In that first week in June, we were listening to songs like "Respect," by Aretha Franklin, or "Groovin’," by the Young Rascals. And of course there were the Beatles, who had provided the soundtrack for our high school years in a way no other classes could claim. They had burst upon the American scene in the winter of our freshman year, and we had sat faithfully in front of our television sets to see them on the Ed Sullivan show that March.

No one was more prolific in those days. We got a new Beatles single every few months and at least two albums a year. A new Beatles album was a major event, and few had been more anticipated than their most recent effort. "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" had been released just four days before our graduation, and if we didn’t know then that critics would one day call it the greatest rock album ever, we did know it was special.

It was a different sort of Beatles album. Most rock albums in those days contained three or four singles and a lot of filler material, but "Sgt. Pepper" wasn’t like that. It had songs that sounded like singles, but weren’t, and it had songs we were never going to hear on our favorite Top 40 stations.

One song never failed to make us laugh. Hearing 26-year-old Paul McCartney sing, "When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now," we couldn’t even imagine it. Heck, people were telling us not to trust anyone over 30. We were the generation that invented the youth culture, the kids who were never ever going to get old.

There may have been a handful of seniors waiting to graduate that night considering what life would be like when they were 64, but there were far more of us thinking about post-graduation parties, trips to the beach and the endless summer that stretched out ahead of us before the next phase of our lives would start.

When I’m 64? None of us were even old enough to vote, although that didn’t make any difference to the handful of senior boys who would be on their way to Vietnam before the end of the year.

When I’m 64? An 18-year-old in 1967 would celebrate a 64th birthday sometime in the year 2013, and we all knew there would be pills developed before then to slow the aging process. We would take them in the morning on our way to work in our flying cars.

We were never going to be 64. We had enough mixed feelings about graduating from high school. Sure, we were happy to be finished, happy to be heading on to college. But some of us had to wonder if there would ever be moments in life as wonderful as being named homecoming queen, or getting elected class president, or learning that we had nailed – absolutely nailed – our SATs.

This was our last day of being the big kids in school. In three months we would be off to colleges from coast to coast, trying to get the hang of being freshmen again. But tonight was our night to think about the future as we sat and waited to pick up our diplomas.

Mike McCuddin told us and our assembled guests how lucky we had been.

"We are fortunate to live in a country where we feel so confident in freedom and liberty that we often take them for granted; to live in a community where we are not worried about where our next meal will come from. We have spent almost one quarter of our lives at Woodson, and have actually been exposed to very little outside our own small world."

He then spoke of a photo most of us had seen in recent weeks, the famous shot of a naked child running down a street in Vietnam to escape being killed.

"Not everyone has been as lucky as we have been. Today in Vietnam, there is a little girl who has no family. They have all been killed. She has no home. It was burned. She is starving and lives in fear. She has little hope or opportunity to improve her life or be a factor in the forces that control it. She would gladly risk her life to be here with us today. And unfortunately, there are millions like her."

Then, of course, there was the inevitable look ahead.

"We leave Woodson with fantastic opportunities and challenges ahead of us. We can make a difference in a world that desperately needs our help. This is our chance, the first day of the rest of our lives. It’s time to get started. There is so much to do, and so little time to do it."

So little time? Not really. We had all the time in the world, or at least we thought we did. We were 18 years old and aching to get out and do the things we had been learning about. College, whether at an Ivy League school, a military academy or a large state university, would be a first step into that world.

McCuddin himself said it when he alluded to one of the more popular slogans of the time. Today was the first day of the rest of our lives. If the average lifespan of an American child born in 1949 was about 70 years, we still had three-quarters of our lives to enjoy. Our parents were fond of telling us to enjoy our childhood, that these years were our best years and we would never be able to get them back.

We laughed knowingly. We wanted to be adults, to control our own finances, to have our own cars, to enjoy more adult pleasures. Folks might look back now and think that we couldn’t possibly have been as innocent as most of us were. After all, it was the Sixties. But in suburban Virginia in the spring of 1967, life had much more in common with the "Happy Days" Fifties than it did with long hair, love beads and wild times.

There must have been a few of us who had tried marijuana, but there were ten times as many who had never even sampled beer. There certainly were some of us who were sexually active, but there were far more who graduated as virgins. As for anyone questioning the status quo or the war in Vietnam, it really wasn’t done.

When one senior homeroom teacher told her all-white class one morning in September 1966 that black people didn’t want to work for a living, only one student challenged her on it. "That’s a racist thing to say," he said, and only the fact that it was kept her from blowing up and throwing him out of the class. She certainly didn’t apologize for her belief.

That senior remembered that September morning then and he remembers it now. He was one of the kids anxious to leave Woodson and move on, even though there were far worse times and far bigger pitfalls ahead. He wanted to be a lawyer and go into politics, but he didn’t do either. He didn’t even get a flying car.

God willing, he’ll learn what it means to be 64, although plenty of members of the Woodson Class of 1967 never will. The memory book at the class’s 40-year reunion in October 2007 listed 30 seniors who died, from Jon Rumble and Mike Sullivan in Vietnam in 1968 to Nancy Bilger in 2006. There have been more since. The class has lost touch with about 300 of its 804 members.

Those of us who survived have learned a lot. Since high school, we have lived through the King and Kennedy assassinations, the Chicago convention riots, the moon landing, Woodstock, war protests, Kent State, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the Reagan years, the Challenger crash, the Clinton years, 9/11 and two wars in Iraq. The Six Day War actually started the day we graduated, and Robert Kennedy died one year to the day after we stood and accepted our diplomas.

Lee Millette, as a Virginia Supreme Court justice one of the highest-achieving members of the class, says being a baby boomer meant being the center of attention.

"To me the thing that is most interesting about our generation is that the world is always about us," he said. "Because of our tremendous demographic impact, we have always had an inordinate influence on what is going on in the country."

Nancy Abt’s graduation speech no longer exists outside our memories, but she remembers talking about the "Old College Try" and speaking of that famous ant that kept toppling rubber tree plants.

Yes, we had high hopes more than 40 years ago. A different song, this one by the Grateful Dead, one of the iconic bands of our era, sort of sums it all up.

"Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me; Other times, I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me ... What a long, strange trip it's been."

The Woodson Class of ’67 has indeed enjoyed a long, strange trip. Some of us lived our dreams, while others didn’t. It’s a pretty fair bet that most of us have learned a lot, although there remains one important thing we need to know.

Will they still need us, will they still feed us, when we’re 64?

There are still 'blasts from the past'

2008-08-22T18:15:00.000-07:00

I was listening to the Sixties channel on my XM Radio on the way to Burbank Airport Friday when I heard a familiar jingle:

"Thirteen 90, W-E-A-M."

Talk about your blasts from the past. I'd be willing to bet that most of us in the Class of 1967 had buttons on our car radios tuned either to WEAM or to WPGC at 1580. Both of them were highly entertaining radio stations, but both were seriously flawed.

While we were in high school, WPGC-AM only broadcast from sunrise to sunset. When the sun went down, WPGC was only an FM station. As far as I knew, most of us didn't have FM radios yet in the mid '60s. I know I got my first one in 1971.

As for WEAM, it was a directional signal that reduced power in the evenings, and for those of us who lived in Fairfax, it was almost impossible to get at night.

Those of us who were really into the music got it from far away. I remember the weekly countdown with Cousin Brucie on Tuesdays on WABC out of New York, and WBZ in Boston always seemed to be the hippest most up to date with British Invasion stuff. We could all get WKBW from Buffalo, CKLW from Detroit (actually Windsor, Ontario) and WCFL -- "The Voice of Labor" -- from Chicago.

But WEAM was our local station, and the thing I remember most was that coming out of the news at the top of the hour, they would play an oldie that had reached No. 1. When it ended, they would say, "No. 1 then, No. 1 now," and give us the current top hit.

Ah, memories.

An update for those of you who want one

2008-07-21T23:21:00.001-07:00

Believe it or not, "When I'm 64" is still progressing, albeit a little more slowly this month.

We're moving from our house into an apartment at the end of the month, so getting everything ready to go -- some to our new home and some into storage -- has taken a lot of time.

But stories are progressing, and I'm still waiting to hear back from some of you who promised me you would participate.

Some of your stories are great.

So bear with me. We'll be gearing up again in August.

Mike Willis in "Two Bit Taj Mahal"

2008-06-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

Eleven of our WTW 67 classmates watched Mike Willis perform in the play "Two Bit Taj Mahal" last night at the George Mason University. All I can say is that if any of you have an opportunity to see him perform, it is well worth your while. He truly is a natural. Our group met early for dinner, carpooled over to the theater and were totally enthralled with the entire performance. Afterwards, Mike was kind enough to meet us again at a nearby establishment where we laughed and picked his brain all about the play. We just had a great time!

Now's the time to keep it going

2008-06-12T19:28:00.001-07:00

I'm really pleased with the way you have responded so far to the request for questionnaires. I've already got answers back from eight or nine people and the promise of answers from a half dozen more.

We still need more, though, and I have been pursuing some of them on my own. In addition to asking more of you to send in your own, I would appreciate it greatly if you would go to the other blog -- When I'm 64 -- and help me in a different way.

I'm going to post a different file for each of the people who have sent in their questionnaires, and as I get more, I'll add them to the list. If you know these people now, or if you knew them in high school or later, please take a couple of minutes and write at least a paragraph or two (more is welcome) about them that I can use in the stories about them.

Thanks.

Off to a very strong start

2008-06-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

The response from many of you has been good to our initial request for participation in "When I'm 64," our proposed book about what a long, strange trip the Class of '67 has been through.

We're going to do something that could help tremendously with the research and reporting for the book. I have set up another blog site, called "When I'm 64," on which I'm going to post people and topics for which I'm seeking memories. When you check it out, the idea is that you will add comments of your own that can be used in the book as we see fit.

I hope you will visit the site frequently as I add things to it.

Thanks.

A post from a former "lurker"

2008-05-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: This was sent to me as an e-mail with permission to post it.

Dear Mike,

I need to come out of lurking to tell you how much I have enjoyed your blog. Last December I suddenly realized that it had been 40 years since our graduation and “googled” Woodson 1967. Sure enough, there was a reunion with pictures posted on the web and a wonderful blog,
your blog.

What fun it has been to recapture all the memories with your help….although there are many I wish to forget. Your blogs have been thought provoking and have shown how much we’ve grown and matured. They’ve made us wonder why we did things and why we didn’t.

Your blog in April about how cruel kids can be really hit home with me. I remember the classmate you wrote about who was the “most abused of the class.” He’s still on my conscience. He was on my bus and I remember how he had trouble finding a vacant seat. He tried, he really tried to be accepted. He always had a smile on his face and a kind word, but we shunned him. How could we be so mean?

Since graduating, I’ve lived all over this country – from East Coast to West Coast and some in the middle. I’ve always had a excuse not to attend a reunion – too far away, no time, “why would I want to do that?”, etc. Sounds like you had many of the same until this year. How lucky for us, you decided to attend.

Thanks to Gail and her camera, I enjoyed pictures from the reunion. We’re still a good-looking bunch. And has Carol Pallesen aged a day??? I don’t think so. What’s her secret? Is it for sale? And Mike Willis is a movie star? Didn’t we all hope to be? How did he do it?? And Mike, you were one those “really cute guys.” If you hadn’t had your eyes on those beautiful baton-twirling Cavalettes (is that what they were called?), maybe one of us would have had a chance. So sad! I’m sorry to say, I never knew Dale, but I wish I had. Many thanks to you, Dale, and Gail for bringing us closer and celebrating our bond.

Vicki Wetherington Hoffmann

An invitation to be part of a great project

2008-05-25T18:10:00.001-07:00

Within the next few days, you should all be getting an e-mail from Dale informing you of this project, but I want to spell it out in a little more detail for those of you who are interested.

For the last 30 years, I've made my living as a journalist. Some of you have been kind enough to comment positively on my writing ability, and I want to use my talents as both writer and journalist to write a book about our class.

Some of you may have read Michael Medved's book from 20 years ago or so called "What Really Happened to the Class of '65?" Medved wrote of a California graduating class 20 years after high school, but what I want to do is something different.

We graduated from Woodson in June 1967, right at the beginning of an extremely eventful period in our nation's history. We were early Baby Boomers, the Pepsi Generation, the age group that was convinced we would stay young forever.

The summer that we graduated, the Beatles came out with the Sgt. Pepper's album, maybe the most significant rock album ever (except of course for the Archies). If you're like me, you remember some amazing songs off that album, but one that must have sounded funny to us was "When I'm 64."

Heck, we weren't ever going to be 64.

Were we?

Well, those of us who made it are now 58 or 59, staring 64 -- and the years after it -- right in the face. It has been a long, strange trip from 18 to 64 for all of us and I want to chronicle that. I think it can make for a wonderful book about the Baby Boom and the effect we had on America.

I want to do it in a similar style to what Medved did, with each chapter being about one member of our class -- or two in some cases. So I'm looking for 25-30 people to answer questions and be interviewed about your lives.

I want ordinary people and stars, class presidents and kids who just sat and watched. athletes, actors, class clowns and most likely to succeeds.

This is a non-fiction book, so I will be writing about you as a journalist -- under your own names. So if you're hiding from an ex-wife or safely in the Witness Protection Program, you probably don't want to participate.

One thing I promise you -- Nothing will be published that you don't want to see published. I will give each of you approval of the chapter written about you, including the chance to have it withdrawn from the book.

The chapters will be headed with song titles from 1967, and they will be based on archetypes. For example, a song like "Never My Love" could introduce a chapter about classmate sweethearts -- we've got a few -- who fell in love at Woodson and are still together.

Here are some of the archetypal examples I'm looking for -- volunteer yourself or suggest someone:

The Jock, the politico, the "can't miss" kid, the queen, the outsider, the clown, the dreamer, the dancer, the preacher, etc.

I've gone on long enough. You don't need to post your own interest in this as comments -- I'd rather hear from you via e-mail. But I will tell you this -- some of you who don't volunteer will be hearing from me to ask (cajole, beg, whatever) you to participate. I want you in the book.

I hope you're interested.

All right, I have learned my lesson

2008-05-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

I received a really nice e-mail today from another classmate of the female persuasion, someone who admits to being a "lurker" on the site since December.

I learned my lesson the last time I chastised someone for simply lurking and not participating, so this time I won't mention the name of the lovely lady who wrote to me. I'll just say that I looked her up in the yearbook -- I don't think I knew her in 1967 -- and maybe it's just that I have a thing for 17 year old girls, but she looked very pretty.

Editor's note: We're going to get in trouble if you keep heading down this direction ....

After all we went through with you and the Olsen Twins, you've got no right to complain.

Editor's note: All I said was that they were lovely young ladies.

Yeah, but they were 9 when you said it.

Anyway, I was very happy to hear from this particular classmate.

I hope to hear from a lot more of you.

Two kinds of people in this world

2008-05-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

I keep coming back to this thing about meanness.

I once heard somewhere that there are two kinds of people in the world -- those who give nicknames and those who receive them. One of the most unpleasant characteristics about our lame-duck president is his penchant for giving nicknames to everyone he comes into contact with.

Yes, even the Easter Bunny.

Don't ask.

I'm ashamed to admit that I was a nickname person for a long time. In fact, I think it's a little like being an alcoholic. You don't stop it -- you just recover from it, one day at a time.

The saddest part of it is that all too often the people who receive the nicknames -- usually meant to denigrate them in some way -- accept them in the mistaken hope that they're being accepted.

This might be a little of a reach, but I think there's an element of the Stockholm Syndrome operating here.

In the summer of 1970, I was working as a night manager at the old Red Barn fast-food outlet in Fairfax. Along with a Navy enlisted man who worked for me, we gave nicknames to almost everyone else in the place.

There was one kid -- just 16 that summer -- who was all too eager to please, to be part of the "in-crowd," as it was. I remember his full name, but rather than embarrass him totally, I'll just call him Gary.

We called him "Sack."

It wasn't short for "Sad Sack," or anything only halfway obnoxious. No, we let him know that "Sack" was short for "Sack of ...."

Nice, huh?

It would have been one thing if he had protested, but he didn't. He answered every time we called him, as in "Sack, clean up the lobby" or "Sack, cook some hamburgers."

But what I remember the most about it was one afternoon when I answered a ringing phone.

"This is Sack. I can't come in tonight."

I wish I could apologize to him.

What does summer still mean to us?

2008-05-03T20:22:00.000-07:00

When we were in school, there was something magical about first starting to feel the warm breezes of summer.

Remember those spring days when it just felt too good outside to be cooped up in a classroom? Remember all the times we asked our teachers if we could hold class outside, and how wonderful it was on those rare occasions when they said yes?

Most of all, though, remember all those countdowns toward the last day of the school year, and the marvelous feeling of waking up on a weekday morning and knowing that you didn't have to go anywhere you didn't want to go?

Summer was special then. Nearly three months of just enjoying life, or of working a little to make some extra spending money. We always felt sorry for the kids who had messed up during the year and had to go to summer school. I had that happen to me the summer after eighth grade, and I was glad it never happened again.

I remember all the great summer songs, and how summer songs were different somehow than others. I think the last one I remember came out around '73 or '74, a song called "Beach Baby." It was good, but not as good as our summer songs.

Maybe that's because summer doesn't mean what it once did. Summer isn't three months of lazy bliss anymore. It might be two or three weeks of vacation, or it might not. There's no special feeling about the beginning of summer, no melancholy feeling when a chill in the nighttime air portends the beginning of fall.

But some folks still manage to enjoy themselves, as the five pictured above did at Nags Head in 2007.

Good for them.

Our lives are about firsts and lasts

2008-04-18T21:17:00.000-07:00

When you're young, life is all about firsts.

There's your first step, your first word. The first time you dressed yourself, fed yourself or took care of business in the bathroom.

Then there's learning to read, learning to write, to do math or all sorts of other academic pursuits. There's the first time you successfully hit a baseball, or caught a football, or made a jump shot from the top of the key.

Then there are the big firsts. The first time you kiss someone, or touch them intimately, or make love. The first time you hear -- or say -- the words "I love you" to someone outside your family.

You get the picture. There are plenty of unpleasant firsts as well, like the first time you realize you aren't a good enough student, or a good enough athlete. The first time you don't get a job you want, or lose one you have. The first time you realize the feelings you have for someone aren't reciprocated.

The first time someone says, "But I like you as a friend." And those were the days before "friends with privileges."

When you get older, the firsts are fewer and farther between. Many of them are our own children's firsts, and seeing my kids experience all the joy and pain of their own firsts means every bit as much to me as my own.

As you get older, you start having more "lasts" in your lives than firsts. All of us had the last time we walked the halls of Woodson as students, the last time we saw each other on a regular basis. That's not completely sad. You finish high school and you move on to the next stage of your life. It's as natural as waking up in the morning.

But what about the last time you were happy with someone? What about marriages that fall apart? When my first marriage was coming to an end, I remember waking up on a morning in January 1980 thinking that this was the last time I would wake up with her, the last time we would share breakfast or just idle conversation in the morning.

It was, but I was lucky. I found something better, and I sincerely hope my last day with Nicole will be the last day of my life.

I've been thinking lately about the last time I saw my dad. It was when I was home for the 40th anniversary reunion in October. We spent some time together. He was frail but very alert. His old self mentally. I talked to him on the phone in late February or early March, and a few weeks later I found myself thinking I hadn't called for a couple of weeks.

He died before I had a chance to talk to him again, and I don't remember much about the last time we talked.

We're flying to Virginia tomorrow for his funeral service Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery, but I guarantee Tuesday won't be the last time I think of him or miss him or wish I could have one last talk.

We always remember our firsts.

We need to think about the lasts too.

Apparently some of you are ... lurking

2008-04-17T16:49:00.000-07:00

I got a very nice e-mail the other day from another one of the golden goddesses I never had the nerve to speak to in high school.

Julie Conrad, who is now Julie True (what a great name!), wrote to me to let me know that she had seen my dad's obituary in the Washington Post Tuesday. Turns out it was a very nice article, and aside from wondering why my two married sisters kept their maiden names, there wasn't much in there that surprised me.

Julie, another of you who was very beautiful in high school (see the picture), told me she has been checking out my various blogs but hasn't gotten around to posting any comments anywhere. I believe she used the word "lurking."

Editor's note: Did all the girls in the senior class have to wear the same dress for the pictures?

Uh, yeah. They took turns. They had to burn the dress after they were through taking the pictures. Don't you have an Olsen Twins Fan Club newsletter to write?

Editor's note: Oops.

One thing I often do after one of you gets in touch with me is check you out on the Classmates.com Website. I looked up Julie, and I saw something that always makes me wonder. As with many of you, Julie True signed up for Classmates and then didn't answer any of the Q&A's or write anything about yourself.

I guess that's another form of lurking.

So this isn't aimed just at Julie, but at all of you. If you're visiting this site, post comments and let us know you're here. If you're on Classmates or Reunion.com, take advantage of the site and post interesting stuff about yourself.

But even if you don't, keep visiting.

You're always welcome here.

Were we really cruel when we were kids?

2008-04-14T16:28:00.000-07:00

Were we the cruelest generation?

It's a question I have been asking myself lately, living in one of the great melting pots of civilization. Kids out here to go school with black kids, Latino kids, Asian kids from almost every country over there. We were so homogenous -- basically 98 percent white and Anglo -- that we were left with only each other to hate.

Oh, I don't mean we all hated each other. Far from it. But with all of us basically the same, we gave each other a hard time over things like looks, athletic ability, career choices, stuff like that.

When I attended the 40-year reunion in November, I was reminded of the fact that the big controversy of our time was "collegiates and greasers." In some other towns it might have been called "preppies and rednecks," or some other variation on a theme. What it amounted to was a conflict between those who were going to work with their hands and those who were going to work with their minds.

Those of us who were "collegiates" were our parents' dreams. We were going to have white-collar jobs, own houses in the suburbs and read lots of good books. The "greasers" would live in slums, have a hard time getting clean after work and watch low-brow television shows.

We didn't realize that auto mechanics. electricians, plumbers and a host of other blue-collar trades would wind up making a much better living than a lot of office workers and teachers.

But we sure made those kids feel like shit. We sure let them believe they could never be as cool, as smart or as blessed as we were. We sure let them believe there was nothing they could ever do to make us accept them.

It wasn't just them, either. There were plenty of kids who were a little too clumsy, a little too slow or a little too ugly to be popular, and there was always at least one of us around to make fun of them.

I remember one story that was making the rounds during our senior year. A girl in one of my classes -- no names, please -- really wanted to go out with a guy who was probably out of her league. She supposedly offered him $50 to go on a date with her, and his response was that he would do it if she would wear a bag over her head.

I had a good friend who wasn't overly masculine. He had to suffer through a lot of "queer" and "homo" stuff, and he got pushed around by some of the testosterone cases in gym class.

We had a kid in the band -- once again, no names -- who was a little too fat and a little too strange. He took more abuse from people than anybody I knew.

None of these people ever come back for our reunions. I remember one of them writing in one of the reunion books that there was no way he would even spend one minute more with members of the Class of '67.

Sure, we were just kids. Most of us probably think we would never do anything like that now, and some of us kid ourselves by saying we weren't that big a part of abusing anyone even then.

I don't know if I can say that, but I know to my everlasting shame that I didn't stand up and defend them when they needed it. One of the most abused kids in our class was someone I didn't know at all until I spent senior year preparing for "It's Academic" with him.

It turned out he was a perfectly nice guy, but he won't be coming to the reunions either. He died sometime in the last 40 years.

There's been one thing I worked very hard to teach my son.

Don't be mean to anybody.

In his first year of college, his roommate came to me and paid him a real compliment. "Virgile is the nicest person I have ever met in my life."

It made me wish I'd been nicer myself.

Getting back into the writing thing

2008-04-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

In the movie "Arthur," Dudley Moore told his valet that he was going to take a bath.

The valet, played so wonderfully by Sir John Gielgud, said drolly, "I'll alert the media."

That's a little bit how I'm feeling by passing this along, because it really isn't news unless you want it to be. I haven't been writing a lot lately, but in the last week or so, I have started posting consistently on my two other blogs, "The American Hologram" and "Captive on the Carousel."

I'm even thinking about an interesting piece for this site that I'll post over the weekend.

I hope you'll tune in.

Was it really all about self-confidence?

2008-03-25T16:46:00.001-07:00

When I was at the reunion last October, I remember showing my wife a picture in the 1967 yearbook. The lovely and gracious Dale Morgan turned to my wife and said, "He was hot."

To be fair, I don't think Dale and I ever knew each other in high school.

I knew of her. She was one of the real beauties in our class, one who moved in all the right circles and had all the right friends. Me, I was different. Most of my friends were younger back then. I had skipped second grade and didn't turn 16 until midway through our junior year.

Unless I'm mistaken, I never asked a girl in our class for a date the whole time I was in high school. Without a license -- I got mine a week before the prom -- dating just didn't seem like an option. I did go out twice with my dad driving, but both of those evenings seemed to me like something of a disaster.

I don't know if it was the Woody Allen in me, but I always had this fear that if I asked someone really lovely out, she would look at me incredulously and then start laughing hysterically. The story would spread quickly and everyone in the school would know within 24 hours.

I would have had to develop a life-threatening condition so that I could do all my schoolwork from home.

Of course it wasn't like that. Well, maybe if I had asked the lovely Karen Theurer (pictured) out, it would have been. But I think an awful lot of girls were probably nicer people than I gave them credit for.

There was that one girl, who will remain unnamed. I went up to her and asked her to dance, and she said, "Get the hell away from me."

"Is it because I'm not cool enough?" I asked.

"No," she said, glaring at me. "It's because we're on the school bus."

Things got better, of course. I've actually managed to get married twice and stay married once, and I've had good, friendly relationships with numerous women as an adult.

I guess it really was all about self-confidence.

Upcoming Performances of our Actor Classmate...

2008-03-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

Last week I emailed my WTW 67 elist a heads up about seeing our classmate, Mike Willis, on TV last Sunday and about a play he is performing in during the month of June. Did any of you have an opportunity to see that "Law & Order" episode last Sunday night (March 16) at 9PM? I, for one, had company so I taped it and plan on watching it soon.

Mike is also scheduled to perform in a play at George Mason University in their Theatre of the First Amendment. This play is called "Two-Bit Taj Mahal" and is scheduled for about 3 weeks during June. Cindy Tallia and I are hoping to go. Anyone else interested?

Not all great men are famous men

2008-03-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

I was 17 when this picture was taken, eagerly looking ahead to my adult life as I sat with my dad at College Night listening to someone talk about some college I never attended.

My dad was 41, 41 years ago, and my final spring at Woodson turned out to be the halfway point of his life on earth.

I didn't appreciate him then. He was pushing me to excellence and I was resisting. I suppose I won our battle, although I turned out to be the one who had to live with the results.

Norman Rappaport was classic Greatest Generation. He was born in 1926 to immigrant parents, grew up in Brooklyn during the Great Depression and served in the final year of World War II as an 18-year-old soldier.

He went to work for the government after the war, married at age 30 and raised five children. He was married to the same woman for nearly 52 years, and probably the defining thing anyone could say about him is that he loved his wife and children so much that he always put them first.

He never bought expensive suits or drove flashy cars. In fact, he almost had to be forced to ever spend any money on himself.

He wanted to be a writer, and two friends from college who were both very successful writers said he was the most talented of the three of them. I suppose one of the things I did that made him proud was making a living as a writer for nearly 30 years.

He wasn't an easy man to understand, and I didn't always appreciate his parenting style. But before I became a father myself, I realized that in many ways, he was the finest man I ever met.

Everything good I am as a father myself -- and I've been told I am a great dad -- is due to him and the things I learned from him.

I don't write about him often. My parents don't like it when I write about them, but I figure today is a good day to make an exception to that rule.

You see, my dad died this morning.

As I said, he was 82. The picture taken was half a lifetime ago, but it says a lot about him. He was listening attentively where I probably wasn't, not only giving up an evening for College Night but making the most of it.

He was more than special.

He was my dad.

I find myself wondering ...

2008-03-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school, I always figured that at some point in my lifetime, a woman or a black man would be elected president.

It just seemed logical. A system that was churning out guys like Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and LBJ would appear to need some help from the rest of the population. But I never figured it would be 2008 before a woman or a black man would have a serious chance of being elected.

What makes me wonder, though, is the case of Hillary Clinton. Maybe I'm being unfair to the senator from New York, but while I would love to see a woman president, maybe this particular woman isn't the right one.

If you look in the dictionary under "polarizing figure" ...

It seems to me like half of America hates Hillary and half of America loves her, and she hasn't even been elected yet. There is no question she is a talented, intelligent person, but she sometimes seems a little too slick for comfort.

What I wonder is if some women -- and feminist men -- of our age are supporting her just because they think it's time that the barriers come down. That's not a terrible thing; I also think it would be one of the benefits of electing Barack Obama.

I'd love to hear your opinions on this one.

Sorry for being away so long

2008-03-06T15:57:00.000-08:00

I keep apologizing.

When I thought I was too busy, I found myself posting at all three of my blogs on a fairly regular basis. Now that I have a lot more free time, I don't seem to be able to bring myself to write.

That doesn't bode particularly well for my retirement, either planned in 2010 or sort of thrust upon me this winter. It also makes it a lot easier to understand what I once thought was kind of a dumb statement:

If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.

It isn't that I'm not doing anything right now. First and foremost, we are in the process of trying to sell our house. It's something we were going to do later this year anyway, but circumstances sort of pushed it up. We go on the market Saturday and have our first open house on Sunday.

Of course we have a Realtor. (If you don't capitalize that word, they get mad.) She is the one doing most of the word, although we had to clean our house almost to the point where it looks like no one lives in it. Our garage, on the other hand, now contains almost every one of my personal possessions.

Usually I have to make my wife angry for that to happen.

The whole thing is ridiculous, but in a good way. My parents bought their first home in 1956 for $12,000 and the one in which they still live in 1963 for $25,500. That second home has significantly more square footage than the house we're selling, but for the difference in price, it might as well be in Rwanda.

If you look in the dictionary under "ridiculous," you'll see "California housing market." The median price of a home in the state is $430,000, and that's down 22 percent from a year ago. Since we live in a wonderful neighborhood, we're selling for a little more than twice that amount and we'll probably get it.

No offense intended to anyone, but living in La Canada Flintridge is more than a little nicer than living in San Bernardino or Fresno.

So I'm working hard on the house thing.

But that doesn't mean I can't write. I haven't written anything for pay for nearly six weeks, so I need to keep in practice.

Anyway, I'm back.

We'll see what happens.

Stepping into God's loving arms

2008-02-11T20:31:00.000-08:00

Things are different in big cities.

In small towns, kids finish school and see everyone around town for the rest of their lives -- classmates, teachers, the principal.

In cities, kids graduate from high school and spread out across the country, across the world even, and forget most of what they left behind. The last time I visited the Woodson campus as an alumnus was the fall of 1967, when I came back to see my friends in the marching band at the Woodson-Annandale football game.

I went back in 1980 as a sports reporter, covering a basketball game between Woodson and one of the Alexandria schools for my first newspaper job with the Alexandria Gazette.

I never went back to see the teachers I had known and liked. There weren't many, and my favorite teacher of all -- Rachel Maguire from 12th grade English -- had moved over to Oakton.

But teachers stay.

Teachers stay and teacher generations of kids, affecting their lives the same way they did those of their parents and sometimes even their grandparents. It's why movies like "Goodbye Mister Chips" move us so much.

Joan Bedinger was one of those teachers, not for me but for many others. She taught drama and directed productions at Woodson for 30 years till her retirement in 1994. The theatre at Woodson is named after her.

She died last week after the last in a series of strokes. I was kind of surprised to realize that while we were there and she was teaching, she was younger than my 27-year-old daughter is now.

The Woodson drama Web site, which has information about her and her funeral services that will be held Saturday in Fairfax, says she "stepped into the loving arms of God."

That sounds pretty nice to me.

Getting together this summer up north

2008-02-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

The lovely and vivacious Helen Roberts asked me to post this, so how could I resist?

Editor's note: She didn't ask you to post the picture.

Spoilsport.

I could have made her a blogger and told her to do it herself, but I don't have all that much to do these days other than to apply for unemployment, look for jobs and watch old movies on DVD.

Hey, it's a great life.

Anyway, Helen wanted me to announce to the entire class -- at least to the folks in the know enough to read this blog -- that the annual WTW Northwest Rendezvous will take place August 1-3 in the metropolis of La Conner, Washington.

Now what I find interesting about that is that La Conner has the same initials and the same number of letters as my home town of La Canada (pronounced Can-yada, it's a Mexican thing) and is actually within an hour or so of the real La Canada (pronounced Can-a-da, it's a French thing).

Anyway, Helen is among a group of West Coast Woodsonites, including Marna (Podonsky) and Leroy Hanneman (who actually live in La Conner), Bob and Dianne Douthitt (who live in Spokane, home of Ryne Sandberg, John Stockton and that quarterback I can't remember who won the Redskins' last Super Bowl), Rob and Loretta Gohd (of Bremerton), Greg Keever (of Los Angeles), Chris and Carol Kessler (of Seattle), Mike and Wendy McCuddin (of Port Orchard) and Anne Gibson Snyder (of that easternmost of west coast cities, Middletown, Md.), who get together in the Northwest every year or so.

Now Helen had a lot of cool stuff to say about La Conner, about the fact that it's an outdoor paradise, an art colony and that there are two girls for every boy (wait, I think that's Surf City).

She's right. It's a cool place, even though the closest I've ever been to it was Seattle in 1989 when I was covering college basketball. You can look it up on this link to the city's Web site if you doubt me, but there's really only one thing you need to know.

If you have always lived in the East, if you've never been farther west than West Virginia, you've missed out on the best part of this country. I don't mean the Northwest (I actually prefer California), but the entire West itself.

I've lived in Colorado, Nevada and Southern California, and things really are different out here. Don't forget that the bluest skies you'll ever see are in Seattle (Perry Como), that it never rains in Southern California (Albert Hammond, a lie) or that you can see it raining fire in the skies of the Rocky Mountains (John Denver).

Once you've been to La Conner, you can carry yourself back to old Virginny for the rest of the year. But don't miss it.

C'mon, how often do you have a chance to see two of the greatest legends of the class of '67 in the same place?

Editor's note: Which ones?

That's the best part. There are enough people on that list that they can be whoever you want them to be.

So in the Virginia vernacular, y'all come.

A return after a short hiatus

2008-02-08T12:32:00.000-08:00

Hey, it's been a while.

Sorry I haven't been posting lately, or doing much else. A little of it has been shock, a little the stunning fact that I don't have anything to do.

I function better when I'm busy, and since I got fired for the first time in my life early last week, I just haven't been that busy. I've been reading a lot, watching DVDs -- hey, that first season of "Friday Night Lights" was pretty good -- and sleeping late.

I haven't checked out the Web site I was asked to check out, and I haven't read the stuff Dale sent me.

But, as my Carolina friends say, I'm fixin' to.

Let's get moving again.

What is your passion?

2008-01-27T23:04:00.000-08:00

Muse on this a few moments. Where and what is your passion? In what are you engaged when you sense a quickening of your heart and soul? When do you feel most alive, most in touch with your own essence?

Each of us may have multiple replies. Perhaps your list is ever growing.

Scanning back over the years can yield important clues to opportunities for future inclusion, for ways to bring more passion into life.

As a child, what activities held your attention? You might recall such deep absorption that you were surprised by hearing, “It’s time for dinner!”

I remember experiencing this phenomenon when I was reading, writing stories, finger painting, choreographing little dances for myself, lying on my back in the grass while watching clouds, and being steeped in imaginative play. I enjoyed playing checkers, card games, jacks, jump rope, and hopscotch.

My sister and I nurtured our doll children in our play house (converted from a chicken coop by our father and uncle, bless them). We took our host of “little ones” for wagon rides near the woods and on picnics in the backyard. When they were sick we held them, murmured encouraging words, and gave them medicine.

Within these reflections, I can see some roots of what feeds my soul today: writing, spontaneous dance, meditating, making art, walking in woods and on beaches, and reading. I feel intensely plugged into the heart of life when I teach meditation to eager students, when I connect with individuals in therapy sessions, and when I place my hands in someone’s energy field.

At parties and other social gatherings, the one question I like to ask is, “What feeds your soul?”

SO - - what feeds YOUR soul?

~ Dena Ward Clayton

How much do people really change?

2008-01-24T15:43:00.000-08:00

It was 41 years ago this month that we started the second semester of our senior year at Woodson.

Some of us were excited about our basketball team, the year after the Cavaliers made it to the state quarterfinals. Others were rehearsing for "Extrazaganza" or getting ready to try out for "The Unsinkable Molly Brown."

Those of us in the band were preparing for competition, learning the extremely difficult "Overture Candide." And once a week at lunch time, I was getting together with nine other guys to practice for the appearance three of us would make on "It's Academic."

I don't remember very many of those nine. I know Roger Pasternak and Ray Redd were the other two guys who actually went on the show, and Thom Smith was our alternate. I know my good friend Gary Oleson was one of the other six, but that's all I can remember.

It was an interesting year. I remember nearly every night before going to bed, listening to WBZ out of Boston, WKBW out of Buffalo, CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario, or WCFL ("The Voice of Labor") out of Chicago for my nightly rock 'n' roll fix.

There weren't any girls in my life that year. My long-time friend Tracy Antley had transferred away, and mostly what I remember about that year was the unbridled teenage lust I felt for my French teacher.

Of course there were the lovely majorettes I saw twice a day in the band room -- Rande Barker, Joan Ansheles, Donna Fenerty and the others, including Karen Theurer, who might actually be the most beautiful girl I've ever seen except for maybe Jane Seymour.

But lately I find myself wondering:

What if we did it all again? What if some cosmic twist of fate put those of us who are still around into the halls of Woodson in September 2016 for one year as real seniors?

We proably wouldn't have much of a football team, that's for sure. Bones are far too brittle at our age, and most of us probably don't run all that fast anymore.

But I wonder if a lot of the kids who were too shy ever to say boo when we were young might not be the outspoken leaders. Late bloomers, you know.

Would Mike McCuddin still be the class president?

Would Bob Douthitt still run the student government?

Or would both of them have gone on to other, more satisfying ways to spend their time?

I guess the real question is how much have we changed.

I certainly hope we'd be more tolerant -- and I think we would -- toward the ones who were sort of outcasts in 1967.

After all, we have grown up.

What if it all was just a dream?

2008-01-21T20:03:00.000-08:00

I woke up confused this morning.

That's not an entirely new occurrence for me, but it happens rarely enough that it still manages to throw me. For a couple of seconds, I couldn't remember where I was or even what year it was.

One thing that compounded the problem briefly was that the clock radio was set to an oldies station and "My Heart's Symphony," by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, was playing. That's a song you rarely hear, and it was popular during the summer between our junior and senior years.

I smiled to hear it, remembering at the same time that it was 7 a.m. on a Monday in January 2008 and I had to hustle to get ready for work. But the song stayed with me and I was humming it during my 43-mile commute.

I don't dream about high school. I don't know why that is, but I do know that I have been thinking about those days a lot more since I went to the reunion in October and then started this blog.

When Dale posted the 1967 yearbook the other day, I spent a few hours going through it page by page and bringing back memories. I saw people who had been my friends but had completely vanished from my memory. I remembered playing bridge at lunch in high school, but I sure didn't remember that there had been a bridge club and that I had been the treasurer.

I read a story once in which the writer compared the passage of time to a river. When you're young, the river is a lazy, meandering stream; by the time you get old it's a raging river.

My river has been raging for some time now. I don't know if I have 10 years left, or 20, or 30 or more. But I know I've changed. I'm not that kid who listened to Gary Lewis sing in the summer of 1966, for better or for worse.

I think of the kid who was terrified to ask girls out and I smile.

I think of the kid who walked the halls with his head down and I sigh.

But I think of the young soul who really believed in the goodness of others and the beauty of the world and I can't believe I was ever that innocent.

Was it real ... or was it all a dream?

Maybe a little of both.

Just another something to read and consider

2008-01-20T19:40:00.000-08:00

I haven't been around much lately.

Things have been busy here, and I have been hoping some of the other bloggers would step up. Dale did, in a big way, when she got our yearbook on line.

Just a thought: I've been changing some of my blogging tendencies. I decided that two of my blogs weren't that much fun, so I cut them. Other than this one, I now have only "The American Hologram" and a new/old one -- "Captive on the Carousel."

Go to the links on the side and check them out.

Our Senior Yearbook is Now Online!!!!

2008-01-15T13:16:00.000-08:00

Our 1967 Senior yearbook is now online and can be located at:

> > > > > > > http://Yearbooks.EveNDon.com <http://yearbooks.evendon.com/> > >

I am also sending an email out to everyone for whom I have an active email address.

There is no set of instructions for using the website. The short time I have played around with it has helped me, but so far I have been able to make only rudimentary searches...of course, it could be me....?????

When you logon to the site, just note that it has 3 sections. Left column (section) is where you would enter your search words. Also, once you click on the yearbook itself, the left side column also lists the index (in very simple terms). You can click on "Help" in this section to get to the "search pointers and limitations."

Top right section contains the "search pointers and limitations." If you enter a word to search in the left section, everywhere your word is found will also pop up on this top right section.

When you click on the yearbook site, the yearbook will open up on the bottom right side (which is the largest section). You can also then expand that section by clicking and dragging the section dividers.

Good luck and we look forward to any positive, helpful feedback from those of you who become friends with the site and negative, yet positive feedback from those who do not. I will send the feedback to the owners of the site.

One more thing. I did not have scanning capabilities so that is why I mailed my yearbook to this company. It costs about $60 (which is a gift from our class). My point is that if one of you has the capability to scan in each page of a yearbook, it costs nothing to get the other yearbooks online. The company wants to make their real money from people who want a CD burned of the yearbook. So we can do the remainder for free if someone can make that happen.

Have fun!

All right, let's try something different

2008-01-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

I loved Sean Kennedy's comment on the experience he had with a ripped set of tuxedo pants, and I found myself thinking that if there's one thing almost all of us have in common, it's probably embarrassing social circumstances.

I'm hopeful that all of them are far enough in the past to laugh at.

So step up, share your most embarrassing in a humorous way movements.

I'll go first.

It was the fall of 1969 and I was at a fraternity party at George Washington University, the second of my four stops on my 14-year quest to finish college. It was a rush party, and I was with a girl I had met at a mixer the week before.

She knew some of the guys in the house, and she was partaking heavily of the "purple Jesus" punch. Ah, those were the days. We were on the dance floor, her dancing somewhat groggily, when all of a sudden she slipped on a wet spot on the floor and fell flat on her face.

I was horrified for her and reached down to help her up. I didn't think it would be a big deal -- people slip all the time -- but I was surprised to find that she had passed out. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but most everyone was looking the other way.

By now she was snoring softly.

I finally managed to awaken her and get her over to one of the couches.

The funny part of the story actually didn't happen. A few days later, I was telling my best friend Mick about what had happened. He asked me if anyone had noticed and if it had caused any problems.

I said no and he told me what I should have done.

If a guy came up and asked, "Is that your date on the floor?," he said my response should have been this:

"Nope. My date's in the ladies' room."

-- or --

"Nope. I don't like girls."

New Year's Eve is highly overrated

2007-12-31T12:55:00.001-08:00

I'm trying to remember if I ever had a truly memorable New Year's Eve.

Now some of you who knew me back in the day, which I believe was actually a Thursday, probably could ask yourself if I ever had a memorable night at any time of the year. Until my early 20s, when it came to social skills, I was riding the short bus.

I had my moments, though. I had a really spectacular Valentine's Day 1970, and a couple of Independence Days that weren't too bad. But I never remember anything all that great happening on New Year's Eve.

I suppose I probably enjoyed the Pleasures of the Harbor a few times -- I have been married, between two wives, for something like 20 different December 31sts. But I don't remember more than one or two when I was single, and those that stick in my memory are usually there because of social fiascos.

I've talked with friends and colleagues about the question, and a lot of them agree with me that New Year's Eve is highly overrated. People think they're supposed to have such a great time that they try too hard, and trying too hard rarely works out well in social situations.

Am I wrong?

Did everyone else have wild, wonderful times?

I'm curious.

A look at our blessings as 2007 ends

2007-12-28T21:02:00.000-08:00

We are so blessed, blessed almost beyond imagination in the class of 1967.

We were born in an era of peace and tranquility and came of age in exciting, interesting times. We live in a country that often falls short of its ideals, but remains one of the safest, most prosperous societies in human history.

In the 40 years since we graduated, many of us have loved and lost, but others have stayed with each other and raised families. When I look at Dale Abrahamson and Susan Spell, or think about Steve Rust and Janet Thornton, I am filled with admiration for folks who knew their minds at a very young age and stayed with their choices through the good times and the rough ones.

Some of us have grandchildren already. My daughter and her husband are planning to have their first child in 2008, so God willing, I'll be joining the club sometime next fall.

I thought Nicole and I were doing really well to plan our retirement at 60, but boy, was I jealous to see how many of you have already called it quits.

Was it Browning who said, "Grow old with me, the best is yet to be," or was it some other poet?

My senior English teacher, Rachel Maguire, would be disappointed that I can't remember.

That's OK, I think all of us remember what really matters.

Love and friendship.

This is still the best time of the year

2007-12-23T09:16:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting as much lately, and our three other posters seem to have vanished completely, but it's understandable.

Unless you're living at the YMCA, heating Top Ramen in a cup and re-reading "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," this is a pretty busy time for most of us.

Editor's note: Where did that image come from?

We'll be leaving a little later this morning to go to the mountains, where we'll spend Christmas Eve and the better part of Christmas Day with our son, his girlfriend and her family. With both our kids grown, we're fortunate to still have one of them around for one more family Christmas.

Because really, family is what Christmas is all about. I could probably count on one hand the specific Christmas gifts I remember receiving over the years, even though I'm sure I wanted some of them desperately at the time.

But I'll never forget the look on my kids' faces when they got gifts from us they had been wanting but weren't expecting to receive.

I don't really have a favorite Christmas. This will be my 16th with Nicole and all of them have been special, even if a few of the early ones involved a little more drama than I would have preferred.

One that stands out for a different reason was 1989. I was working in Reno that year and had college basketball games to cover in Los Angeles on the 23rd and in Reno on the 29th. I wasn't planning to fly cross-country, but my mother sent me a plane ticket and asked me to come for a very special reason.

It turned out to be my 94-year-old grandmother's last Christmas, and it meant so much to me to have one last opportunity to spend some time with the best person I ever knew in my life.

Two months later I was flying east again, this time for her funeral.

There's no great point to this, other than the easy one. Let the people you love know exactly how you feel about them this Christmas. It may mean more to them in the short run, but in the end, it's the greatest gift you can give yourself.

Merry Christmas to all my old -- and new -- friends from the Class of 1967. To Dale, Gail, Nan and all the rest of you, I wish I had known you better then, but I'm glad I'm getting to know all of you now.

The most wonderful time of the year?

2007-12-17T12:04:00.000-08:00

You may already know this, but the suicide rate spikes right around this time of the year.

If you think about it, it's understandable. All the Christmas spirit, all the shopping, cooking and baking, and all those wonderful songs ...

Editor's note: Like "Leroy the Redneck Reindeer?"

Well, maybe not that one.

"And it was Leroy The Redneck Reindeer, hooked to the front of the sleigh. Delivering toys to all the good ol' boys and girls along the way."

Face it, folks. At Christmas time, you're supposed to be happy. You're supposed to get a lot of hugs and kisses, drink a lot of egg nog and listen to the sound of children's happy laughter.

But if you're alone, Christmas is the time of the year you feel it the most. Maybe you're divorced and your kids live in another state. Maybe you never had kids, and your parents have long since passed away.

Christmas is one of those times when if you're unhappy, it feels as if everyone else in the world is happier than you are.

For some folks, Christmas is something to be survived.

So if you have friends or relatives in this situation, give them a call. Give them a hug. Drop them a line.

Christmas is about friends and family.

It's nice to have them.

College expenses can be crippling

2007-12-12T17:57:00.001-08:00

How much did it cost you to go to college?

Don't worry, I'm not asking for specifics. The odds are pretty good that it was a lot less than it costs now, even if it did strain our budgets at the time.

I mention this because of an announcement by Harvard -- yes, the Harvard -- that from now on, families making up to $180,000 a year would be required to pay no more than 10 percent of their annual income for a child's tuition at the school.

Considering that the total cost of a Harvard education as of this year is about $46,500 a year, with tuition about two-thirds of that, that's a pretty good deal.

I'm no expert on this, but I have been paying college expenses for a student for eight of the last nine school years, finishing in May 2007. We told our two young students that we would pay $15,000 a year for four years and that anything beyond that was up to them. We based the numbers on what a year at a state university would cost here in California.

Our kids were fortunate in that they finished school without any debts, but there are millions of young adults in this country staggering under the burden of college loans that they needed to start them on the way.

Some of them don't get out from under until it's time to send their own kids to college.

Some never do.

Many European countries offer free education for qualified students. My lovely wife earned doctorates in astronomy and geophysics and never had to pay any tuition. Some folks in this country would call that socialism, but it seems to me a pretty good way to make use of the talent of the people in a country.

Perspective on holidays changes with age

2007-12-09T20:57:00.000-08:00

It's a little more than two weeks till Christmas, and we've already finished most of our shopping.

It helps that our kids are grown, and we don't have any grandchildren yet. In fact, the only actual children for whom we shop are my two young nephews.

We're not quite at the gift certificates or checks stage, but instead of getting each of our two kids eight or nine gifts, we're down to two or three for about the same amount of money. Of course, we've acquired a son-in-law and a prospective daughter-in-law as well, which does complicate things a little.

What's great about it though is that most of our Christmas these days is giving, not receiving.

My wife and I have most of what we need; in fact, we got a wonderful Christmas gift already in the form of the great health news I wrote about earlier this week. We'll buy something for each other, but mostly, we spend money on the people we love.

That's so much more fun than waiting and wondering whether we'll get what we want and as often as not being disappointed.

"What, no pony again?"

Yup, definitely better this way.

Maybe I'm an old codger, but ...

2007-12-06T12:44:00.000-08:00

The Class of '67 probably isn't the target demographic of the proposed bailout of those folks who got into trouble with gimmick mortgages the last few years.

Most of us who own homes are probably well along into our mortgages -- if we haven't already paid them off -- and most of us probably didn't get interest-only or teaser-rate mortgages.

Most of you probably don't live in parts of the country where 1,400 square-foot homes in nice neighborhoods reached $1 million in value at the peak of the boom.

But I would imagine that most of you grew up dreaming of someday owning your own home -- picket fence, 2.3 kids and a dog named Scooter along with it.

This bailout -- helping folks stay in their homes but keeping prices high -- is kind of controversial.

I'd love to know what you think about it.

Sometimes God really does smile at us

2007-12-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

We've had a bit of a scare in my house the last couple of weeks.

The kind of scare I'm sure many other people in the class have gone through before; I'm not trying to make us sound unique. But no matter how many other people go through it, it's still tough to be in the middle of it.

Shortly after we returned from our trip to Virginia for the reunion, my lovely wife began showing some symptoms that might possibly have signaled a particularly virulent form of cancer. Nicole had one test, and all they were able to say from the first test was that they needed to have another test.

Now Nicole is the bravest person I know. She hasn't complained, or cried, or talked about what I should do after she's gone. She just faced the problem, head-on.

Today we had the second test, and when we got the results, I could feel the relief as a palpable thing. A minor irritation, no cancer at all.

Sometimes God really does smile at us, and sometimes we can feel the safety in which he holds us. My mother had a friend who was a poet and philosopher, and one piece of advice she gave changed my life for the better.

"Never ask, 'Why me, God?' Instead, it is much better to say to yourself, 'So this is what it feels like.'"

None of our problems are unique, but it's still nice when things turn out for the best.

Did any of us know how lucky we were?

2007-12-01T10:44:00.000-08:00

I got an e-mail from Darla Garber the other day in which she said I was crazy for saying she looked like a "young goddess" in high school.

Anyone who looked at our yearbook pictures from back then will see that Darla was a beautiful blonde in the full bloom of youth. Jeez, I wonder if there's ever an age at which girls look better than when they're 17.

Heck, when I looked at our senior yearbook for the first time since 1971 and saw myself in some of the activity pictures, I found myself amazed that I really wasn't the troll I thought I was.

A great philosopher -- I think it was either Plato or Spiro Agnew -- put it best.

"Youth is wasted on the young."

Ain't it the truth.

I talked to several of you at the reunion -- sorry to keep picking on Darla and Dale -- who really don't seem to have had any idea how lovely you were back then, and I found myself wondering if anyone really did. Or were we all so insecure that we could only see the flaws in ourselves?

As at adult who has fought a -- mostly losing -- perennial battle to keep my weight under 200 pounds, I marvel at pictures of a kid who was every bit as tall as I am now and weighed only about 160. When I dieted for six months in the late '80s and got down to 160, people asked me if I was ill. I didn't look ill in 1967.

I was trying to think of who had been generally regarded as the most beautiful girls in our class (by the guys, of course), and some of the names that came to mind were Karen Theurer, Susie Ludtke and Nancy Abt.

Somehow I have a feeling that even they weren't as confident about how they looked as they should have been.

In a post back in the early days of this site, I remember Dale saying that there were boys she had hoped would ask her out who never did. As a former boy myself, I'd be willing to bet that at least some of those boys probably wanted to go out with her but didn't have the nerve to ask.

Forty years probably have changed some of that. One of the happiest moments of my life was a result of my lovely wife's courage. When Nicole and I were first dating, I was seeing someone else as well. On our third date, when I took her home, she said the most wonderful thing I ever heard in my life.

She told me that she knew I was seeing someone else and she didn't think I would ultimately choose her. But she said she wanted to keep seeing me because she thought I was worth it.

Do you think any of us knew back then that we really were special, or were we all just foundering, trying to keep from drowning and hoping someday to make it to shore?

It's a fascinating thing about diversity

2007-11-29T15:28:00.000-08:00

"We weren't just whitebread, we were racist."

That's a pretty courageous comment that was left at the end of an earlier post, and although it's easier to see this 40 years later, some folks never do figure it out.

I had exactly one black kid in a class with me the whole time I was at Woodson, and that was my senior year in symphonic band. I don't know if I ever met anyone who talked less than Larry Smith, although he may have been so intimidated that he figured the smartest thing to say was nothing.

The defining moment for me in high school came as a senior. I don't know if any of you were in the same homeroom I was; the teacher was a woman whose name I can't remember. It may have been Howell. She was a German teacher who I think actually had come from Germany.

It was the fall of 1966 and there had been quite a few riots that summer. I remember her comment: "The black people don't want to work at all. All they want is the welfare."

She already wasn't real fond of me, but when I spoke up, it got a lot worse. I couldn't believe myself when I said out loud, "That's a really racist thing to say."

A few days later we elected our homeroom representative to the Student Government. The class elected me, but she refused to allow it. A week later, when she was told she didn't have the right to block an election, I was elected again.

But I digress.

The black kids I remember from Woodson dressed pretty much like we did and talked pretty much like we did. Can you imagine how we would have reacted if they had worn dashikis to school?

In the fall of 1968, when I was in the Jefferson Society at the University of Virginia, we had a guest speaker. Charles Hamilton was the co-author of "Black Power" with Stokely Carmichael, and during the Q&A period, one of our Southern gentlemen asked him, "Mr. Hamilton, would you like to be white?"

I always thought he missed a bet with his answer. "That's an insulting question."

I would have liked it if he had talked about how being white might make life easier, but that didn't mean it was better.

I don't think we knew that.

Sports just not worth it anymore

2007-11-27T18:48:00.000-08:00

I would never have thought there would come a day when I would feel this way, but I am completely fed up with big-time professional and college sports.

It's odd to hear myself saying that. For 16 years, I made my living as a sports reporter in seven different states, covering some of the biggest sporting events in the world.

Super Bowl? Been there.

World Series? Done that.

Final Four? Twice, including the amazing Villanova-Georgetown game in 1985.

But other than a few Dodger games -- I still love going to the stadium -- I haven't watched a sporting event all the way through in close to 10 years. I don't think I've watched pro football on TV at all in five years.

There's just too much ... I can't think of any other way to say this ... shit going on along with the games. Steroids, mega-contracts, gambling, thuggish behavior on and off the field.

I feel like weeping for young kids growing up who really live and die with their favorite teams. How do you explain to a young kid that because he doesn't live in a large enough city, his favorite players won't stay? How do you explain to him that his favorite quarterback enjoys watching dogs fight to the death? Or that his home-run hero cheated, lied and took all sorts of drugs to do what he did?

My son isn't a sports fan. He loved playing sports, and we go to ballgames, but he doesn't follow any teams. He gets excited when the World Cup comes around -- he was born in France -- but that's about it.

That's why I didn't have to explain anything about Sean Taylor to him. (Of course, he's 22. I don't have to explain much to him) I don't know if Taylor was a random victim of crime or if his death had some connection to his own past. It doesn't really matter. It's tragic either way.

Heck, we grew up in a simpler time, cheering for Sonny Jurgensen and Charlie Taylor, for Frank Howard and the rest of the hapless Senators. Probably the happiest day of my life to that point was Dec. 31, 1972, when the Redskins beat Dallas to advance to their first Super Bowl.

Do kids still care that much? Do we even allow them to care that much?

I still read the sports pages. I still check for scores, and I still feel a twinge if my formerly favorite teams lose. But that's all it is. A twinge.

Mostly I get about as much enjoyment from sports now as I do following politics and business.

Which is to say, not much.

Were we really completely 'whitebread?'

2007-11-26T18:51:00.000-08:00

If you look at yesterday's post, the picture from the reunion, there's one thing that's very apparent.

All of us were white and most of us were what would be called "Anglo."

Now I know that not all of the 804 of us in the Class of '67 were white and Anglo-Saxon, let alone Protestant, but there was definitely a WASPy flavor to our school back then.

Think about it. We lived in the Washington, D.C., area, and in only one of the four years we were at Woodson were there any black kids on our basketball team. As for Latinos, I work in a city that is 68 percent Latino and even though we must have had a few kids with Latino names -- lovely cheerleader Susan Morales comes to mind -- there certainly wasn't anything going on in terms of culture beyond the Spanish Club.

So tell me.

What am I missing?

Were we really that whitebread, or was there something going on that I missed?

Not just getting older, getting better

2007-11-25T19:39:00.000-08:00

We started our family retirement tour this weekend, checking out places we might consider retiring to in 2010 after we sell our overvalued L.A. area home.

We spent the weekend in a fascinating little community just outside Tehachapi. It's called Bear Valley Springs, and it's got great mountain homes with fabulous views for less than $400,000. To those of you not living in our state, that may sound ridiculous. Well, I don't blame you. California housing prices are ridiculous.

Anyway, we returned home feeling pretty good and I found the reunion CD in the mailbox. Thought I'd post this picture for all of you. Figured it was a nice start and an easy post after a four-day weekend.

So remember when you look at the picture, Class of '67: We're not just getting older, we're getting better.

And as the great south Florida philosopher James Buffett once said, "I'm growing older but not up."

Truly the best family holiday of all

2007-11-21T19:54:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the most uniquely American of all holidays and the one of which I have the fewest memories from youth.

For some reason, I remember 1974, a big family gathering in Columbus, Ohio. I remember being absolutely certain the Redskins would finish their victory over Dallas -- Staubach had been knocked out of the game -- and then Clint Longley came off the bench and threw that long, last-minute touchdown.

Driving back to Virginia that Sunday, we got stuck in a snowstorm and my fiancee and I wound up trapped in Breezewood, Pa., for two days.

Today I've got family in Virginia and Ohio, my lovely daughter and her husband in Beijing and my son, his girlfriend and my wife with me here in California. Life is good.

The picture is the last of those from Dena, and it isn't a member of our class. Cheryl Newman was a freshman cheerleader in 1966-67, but this picture says more about the exuberance and the sheer happiness of being young than any picture I've got.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Looking for Margie Smith . . .

2007-11-21T09:24:00.000-08:00

Does anyone out there know where Margie Smith is? We didn't see each other much after she married in '71. The most recent address Dale has on her is from '97, in Florida.
At that time, her name was still Marjorie Smith Danzig. I'd love to check in with her again, my memories of her are of an adventurous, fun-loving, and compassionate person.

Many thanks.

~ Dena Ward Clayton
awareness@mindspring.com

Where Were You That Day?

2007-11-20T13:19:00.000-08:00

This is the month President John F. Kennedy was shot. It was1963; our freshmen year.

Where were each of you on that never to be forgotten day?

Another plug for the message boards

2007-11-19T21:08:00.000-08:00

All right, ladies and gents, or as they said when I lived in Vienna in 1977, meine damen und herren.

Check out the message boards. So far, at least, the only person who has taken advantage of them is Dena. If you're not interested in the first two topics I posted -- great songs and movies of 1967 -- create topics of your own.

As for the pictures, let's move along to another one from the yearbook, one of our posters here -- the lovely and vivacious Gail Schultz.

Enjoy.

More to come.

We've added yet another new feature

2007-11-18T20:58:00.000-08:00

Check out our message boards by clicking on the appropriate link at "67 Topics" on the right side of the page. It's a little bit of a pain the first time because you have to register a user name and a password (make them the same, it's easier).

After that you can comment on existing topics as well as creating new topics of your own.

We'll throw in a picture here of one of our most frequent commenters, the lovely Nan.

Your First Day at Woodson

2007-11-18T14:11:00.000-08:00

Making the transition from a Middle School to a High School is pretty intimidating even knowing most of the kids you have gone to school with for the last 8 or 9 years. For those of you who came to this area from somewhere else, how scarey was that first day, whether it was your freshmen, sophomore, junior or senior year?

I came from a junior high school in Montgomery, AL that probably had about 60 classmates in the entire 9th grade class. My first day sophomore year at Woodson left me in shell shock. And we had only 5 minutes between classes??????

Did everyone else who was new to the area have the same feeling?

If I don't post this one, I know Dena will

2007-11-17T18:48:00.000-08:00

Most of these pictures have been coming courtesy of Dena Clayton, who actually could be posting them herself but hasn't figured out how.

I've been using my Microsoft Picture It software to frame them properly and add highlights so that we're getting a little more than old yearbook pages.

As for this picture ...

It's amazing how many people have looked at this picture and laughed, but the irony of it all is that I was really proud of it.

Sure I looked like the ultimate doofus with my mouth hanging wide open, but take a look at how high my feet were above the horse.

I really cleared that baby. These days, I'd probably pull a hamstring
just running up to it.

Still more about these amazing pictures

2007-11-17T14:37:00.000-08:00

I'm posting quite a bit today, but you can blame it on Dena for sending me all these great pictures.

I've already punked Dale and myself, so now it's Sean's turn. Except for one thing. When I saw Sean's picture in the yearbook, I found myself thinking, "Wow! Now that's a cool picture."

I decided to show you both his picture and the guy next to him, just for the contrast. The guy next to him -- who I legitimately don't remember -- looks like a high-school kid.

Sean looks like a member of the Rat Pack, ready for a night on the town in Vegas with Sammy, Frank and Dino. His hair looks great and the look on his face tells us that he is way too cool for the room.

Am I right or am I right?

I wonder why we were all so serious

2007-11-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

If you look at our yearbook pictures, one thing you will see is that very few of us were smiling.

Maybe it was because we were such serious people, but I doubt it. I have a feeling it was probably that we knew these were our senior pictures and they were the ones that would be sent out with our college applications.

I know that's how my mother got me to cut my hair shorter than it had been since eighth grade. She reminded me these pictures would be sent to my grandparents, which turned out to be a real mixed blessing.

For the next 15 years, whenever I would visit my grandparents, my grandfather always pointed to this picture on top of his television and said, "We liked it when your hair was like that."

Now I was never Arlo Guthrie or Abbie Hoffman, but I couldn't tell him that my hair was actually never like that -- except the day they took that picture.

Still, I wish I had thought to at least smile.

Yes, we were children, but still ...

2007-11-17T11:50:00.000-08:00

It's very strange to me when I look at these pictures.

Editor's note: Aren't you at least going to thank Dena?

Oh, pardon my manners.

Editor's note: You mean lack of manners, don't you?

Ignore him. He's just upset that he missed the "Full House" marathon. But anyway, thanks to Dena Clayton and her trusty scanner, I've got some old yearbook pictures for the site.

What's strange about them is that we were mostly 16 or 17 when they were taken, but when I look at the pictures, we look much older than the 16- or 17-year-olds I've seen in raising my own children.

Maybe it's that the pictures are black and white, or maybe it's the difference in styles. But where I could look at female friends of my daughter or my son at the time and see nothing more than young kids, you know what I think when I look at this picture?

Hubba hubba.

Now I know I've embarrassed Dale enough by talking about how beautiful she was in high school, but I'm serious. When I look at that picture, I don't see a 17-year-old.

I wonder why that is.

Maybe it's because I know the person she grew up to be, or maybe it's because in looking at pictures of myself, it puts it all into perspective for me.

Anyway, it's a nice picture.

These days, we might as well not exist

2007-11-16T17:19:00.000-08:00

Remember when it was all about us?

We were the Pepsi generation, those who thought young, the ones folks selling everything from soda pop to fast cars wanted to reach. We were the pig in the snake, as some have described it, the big bump in population traveling from crayons to caskets.

In a "Doonesbury" some years back, Garry Trudeau poked fun at the Baby Boomers by saying it would be obvious when we were starting to die because USA Today would be running articles about the hot new funeral homes.

All right now. When was the last time you felt an advertiser was trying to sell his product to you? If you're a member of the Class of 1967, it was probably about four years ago, unless the product was pharmaceuticals, denture creams or adult diapers.

You see, the coveted demographic advertisers are seeking is called 18-54, meaning that if you're under 18 or over 54, you're not their audience. It's a little short-sighted at both ends of the spectrum, especially since those 55 and older have more money these days than any other segment of society.

I asked a friend in advertising about that contradiction, and her response was that even though older people spend money, their buying habits tend to be well established.

Now I don't know if all that's true. Some of us may have had fathers who always bought Chevrolets or Zenith television sets, but I've never bought the same kind of car twice in a row in my life.

I'm not buying denture cream, and I don't think I've ever asked my doctor for a different drug than the ones he prescribed. As for Depends, I wouldn't tell you if I were buying them.

But isn't it weird to not exist?

Isn't it weird to be ignored by advertisers?

I don't know about you, but I bought my first iPod after my 55th birthday. I don't think all my habits are set in stone just yet.

I still don't care for Pepsi.

Never did.

I'm a Dr. Pepper man.

Child abuse in the 1960's???

2007-11-15T18:19:00.000-08:00

Nowadays we hear of child abuse, domestic abuse, ADHD, and many other mental, emotional and physical issues that shape a person's future.

Ever wonder what was happening in our era? Statistically you have to figure it was all around us.

I was oblivious. A few years out of high school I heard a neighborhood "kid" committed suicide. Made me wonder if anyone noticed his pain.

Do you all remember being suspicious that something was going on with a friend's situation?

Gail