It’s fall and that means homecoming season. It means class reunion season as well.
I watched fondly as the Crystal City High School class ahead of mine celebrated its 50-year reunion in September, wearing matching T-shirts in the school’s homecoming parade and sitting in a boisterous gaggle at the football game later that night.
The end of their reunion weekend marked the beginning of my own 50th anniversary year, something that boggles my mind. How was high school so long ago, when it feels like just a few months since I sat in that grand, second-floor library, looking dreamily out on a sunny afternoon and counting the minutes until the bell rang?
The four years we spent at CCHS marked some of the most profound changes the world had seen since the Renaissance.
We entered those hallowed halls as freshmen in 1972, the same year the last man walked on the moon and the first game of Pong was played on a computer screen. The SALT treaty was signed and Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment that year. That summer was the Watergate break-in and that fall saw the Munich Olympic massacre.
During our sophomore year we saw the first mobile phone released, Skylab launched, the Paris Peace Accords signed and the US draft abolished. Suddenly Vietnam was no longer a looming shadow over us. Things were looking up.
Billie Jean King fought and won the Battle of the Sexes, the designated hitter rule was instituted in major league baseball and the Endangered Species Act was created. The American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder and the Supreme Court ratified Roe V. Wade, overturning the federal ban on abortion.
That was the year someone at Crystal City High heaved a fetal pig out the window of the biology classroom to land squarely at the feet of a horrified Mrs. Gruber, the prim and proper business teacher who was walking between buildings.
It was around that time, too, when my friend Brent “Bunky” Evans taught me the finer points of shooting craps in the back of the history classroom during a raucous “study” period. (I think I may still owe him $3; may he rest in peace).
Things got more serious when the OPEC embargo triggered the oil crisis, the DEA was founded to fight the war on drugs and Native Americans occupied Wounded Knee in protest.
Our junior year was the Nixon resignation, the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the detonation of a nuclear weapon in India – the sixth world nation to do so. Hank Aaron hit 715 homers to bypass Babe Ruth’s record, and Hungarian architecture professor Erno Rubik invented his famous cube.
The high school at that time had an “open lunch” policy, which meant students were free to leave the campus during the noon break. Hordes of us walked down to Dee Gees Market (where the library is now) to buy candy bars and cans of Coke and maybe a bologna sandwich at the butcher counter.
Others hopped in cars and headed to the brand-new McDonald’s, to the Burger Chef on Festus Main Street, maybe to Smitty’s for a triple or to Crystal Burger for those cheese fries that were absolutely FIRE.
By the time we were seniors, the Alaska Pipeline construction was underway and “Lucy,” the hominid ancestor of us all, had been discovered in Africa. NASA launched the Viking 1 Mars probe, and we watched as Saigon fell and South Vietnam surrendered. The Apollo-Soyuz project debuted, and Margaret Thatcher became the first female leader in UK history. We were horrified at the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia and elated at what Bill Gates was doing at Microsoft and a little later at what Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne were doing over at Apple.
When graduation rolled around in May 1975, the world was a very different place than it had been when we walked through the doors as innocent freshmen. Along with the classes a few years before and after us, we were the peak of the Baby Boom, and we experienced fundamental societal changes unlike other generations before or since, in a short amount of time.
It was bewildering in many ways, a little frightening and very exhilarating.
That little school in that little town launched us – launched us good – into a world we were probably unprepared to inhabit.
But we all were anchored to the history and traditions of Crystal City, and the basic values we got here gave us the skills and confidence to change and learn and grow, to meet the world of today head on.
I’m excited to begin planning for our golden reunion. It will be fun to sit around looking back on all the changes (both minor and profound) that have taken place since high school and pat ourselves on the back a little over how well we’ve coped.