The sad story of a real showman

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

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

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

"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"

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?

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?

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

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?

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?

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

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"

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?