Hail to the high schoolers
All across the United States this year, the high school classes of 1968 will be gathering together to celebrate a half-century since their graduations.
Particularly this fall, those who’ve managed to survive 50 years of adulthood will be meeting in hotels and restaurants and community centers to reminisce, to catch up on old friends, to recapture perhaps a few moments of what to some were the best years of their lives.
The Legal Genealogist‘s own high school class is getting together this weekend in New Jersey. I wish them well, but had already accepted a speaking obligation out of state long before the invitation came in, so I won’t be there.
And besides, I still can’t begin to wrap my head around the idea that it’s been 50 years — and more in my case since I left school early to head off to college — since we were in high school.
Five decades. Fifty years. A half century.
It isn’t until you stop and take stock that you can even start to grasp what a time it’s been.
You think back to what we experienced just getting to high school. Do you remember crouching in the hallways of our elementary schools, tucking our heads between our knees in case the bomb dropped? I remember.
Do you remember class sizes? Thirty kids in third grade, 40 in fourth, 50 in fifth until the new elementary school finally opened? Double sessions in junior high? I remember.
And our school situation was easy compared to some. Do you remember watching black children in the south needing armed escorts just to go to good schools? I remember.
Do you remember a Russian leader pounding on a desk at the United Nations with his shoe? I remember.
Do you remember sitting glued to the television as the President of the United States explained to the country that he was ordering a naval blockade of Cuba because there were missiles pointed at us? I remember.
Do you remember the day when our teachers had to tell us that President had been shot down while riding through the streets of an American city? The days that followed … the shock … the mourning … the funeral? I remember.
And then came high school.
Do you remember the start of the war in Vietnam and the beginnings of the student protests against it? Birth defects due to thalidomide? Riots in the streets of some of our cities? The marches of the Civil Rights movement and the signing of the Civil Rights Act? The Voting Rights Act? More cities burning and more riots?
I remember those… and more.
I remember the Blackout of 1965. The Gemini space missions. The march from Selma to Montgomery. The Aberfan disaster in Wales. The debut of Star Trek. The Six Day War. Loving v. Virginia. The start of public broadcasting. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
All of these, and so much more… and we weren’t yet old enough to vote.
Some of us weren’t even old enough to drive.
And yet we survived. For five decades. Fifty years. A half century.
Some of us, at least. The list of those who won’t be at the reunion this weekend because of war and accident and illness is sobering.
For the rest of us, well, we can look back on five decades. Fifty years. A half century.
At marriages contracted and ended. Children and grandchildren born, and some lost. Degrees and careers begun and sidetracked and restarted and reimagined. Places lived in, places left behind. Dreams fulfilled, bucket lists still waiting to be achieved.
Five decades. Fifty years. A half century.
Of life.
Here’s to the Class of 1968.
Race on Class of 68′, to infinity and beyond!
Thank you, Judy. This is an excellent summation of our era; those memories are still fresh. In Phys Ed class, we had to run a mile every day, so we could “run home when the atomic bomb was dropped.” Seriously.
I’m 7 years behind, and I remember pretty much all of that! It was quite a time in our country. Congratulations to the class of 1968!
Yes. I remember the fear that I took in from the frightened adults around me during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember being taken out into the hallways of the school, to kneel down against the wall with my head in my arms, in the same posture now used for tornado drills. I remember a classmate next to me who said, “You know, this isn’t going to do any good.”
We lived on the East Coast and I remember that my parents still had “blackout shades” on the windows from WWII and drove a 10 year old car that was just like new because it had hardly been driven due to gas rationing. (While me Dad was away in the army, my Mom used to drive it a couple of times up and down the driveway once or twice a week just to keep the moving parts in working order.
I remember going to a neighbor’s house to watch Howdy Doody and WaltDusney’s first TV show, the first hydrogen bomb test and Queen Eluzabeth’s coronation. There were only three TV sets on our block at the time, so watching these broadcasts was a communal activity. There was only one telephone in each house and they all came from AT&T. Some of the neighbors still had a shared “party” line.
I remember going out in the back yard to look up into the night sky for Sputnik and our school hooking up a live radio broadcast to the PA system so that we could all hear the countdown to Alan Shepard’s first flight live as it happened.
My mom’s family actually *made* blackout shades during WII – and they still make window shades now!
This strikes me as something that could only be written today by someone who lives their every moment, of every hour, of every day, in terror, anxiety and fear. There are people who have been doing this for three years now – every day bringing some bit of news that they are sure signals the end of civilization tomorrow.
I refuse to live my life like that. I remember all the good times – I concentrate on those good times. Good friends. Good memories. You can spend your life wallowing in negativity, thinking that somehow, your precise period of life has been ever so more terrible than anyone else’s.
It is that exact attitude that will keep half of all eligible voters (or more) from voting in the midterms in a few weeks, and from voting in 2020.
I certainly can’t control the prism through which you read my words. And the fact that you can read these words so negatively tells me you’re not likely to read this blog often enough to get a real feel for it. It’s truly laughable that the mindset would be described as “thinking that somehow, your precise period of life has been ever so more terrible than anyone else’s” only days after the blog post “That ‘travel nightmare’.”
If you think the memories I mentioned reflected a mind filled with fear and, depression, or a sense of deprivation, well, you are dead wrong. These events were full of a joy and companionship that we have been deprived of by present day luxuries like smart phones, electronic notebooks and tablets, live-streaming and the small-mindedness and loss of vision that have isolated us from each other and caused us to lose the sense of overwhelming wonder we felt when we first looked up at the stars and saw Just one that moved steadily across the night sky. The spirit of our age was filled with the excitement of the space race, and with astonishing discoveries made in the exploration of Antarctica and the depths of the as yet unpolluted oceans of our planet. Even in the difficult times of civil unrest and protest marches, we believed the end result of it all would be a better world for everyone. The material things we have gained will never outweigh those intangible riches we have lost.
My class was ’76 (and I also missed graduation due to early admission at college) but I remember going to the neighbor’s house to watch the Moon Landing on their COLOR television! First in the neighborhood …
The first color TV I ever saw was when we lived in California briefly in the late 1950s!
I think you are bragging about how young you are! My high school class celebrated our 55th anniversary of our graduation this year, because I was in the Class of 1963. They had to do it without me because I was otherwise occupied in a project for my church where I now live near Philadelphia.
Thanks for the list of things you remember from those days. I remember them too. For me the three assassinations–Martin Luther King, Jr., President John F. Kennedy, and Senator and Presidential Candidate Bobby Kennedy–were the worst tragedies I had endured at that time. Of course that was years before 911, mass shootings, lives lost in several wars, destruction by several hurricanes and flooding, and the list goes on.
Keep up the good work you are doing by blogging. I get them by email and enjoy them very much.
We’ve both been called youngsters by a friend of mine, who responded on Facebook that she was getting ready to attend her 60th college reunion next year! 🙂
My class of ’68 celebrated in May and we had a wonderful time! There were so many memories to share and a time to remember those who are no longer with us. For that weekend, we were eighteen again, if only in our minds. Thank you for the walk down memory lane.
After reading this, I couldn’t resist…
“What’s your advice for people over 50?
Never start a sentence with the phrase ‘I remember’.”
Eric Idle, Interview AARP, Oct 2018
😉
🙂
I’m a member of the class of ’69, so very similar memories of big news things, but some differences, as we were in a rural community in the Midwest. 2 friends who were 2 and 3 years older, brothers of my classmates, and our class had 60 in it total at its largest, were killed in Viet Nam, something which still has an impact on that community and our neighbors and friends. 10 of my classmates have died over the years, while other classes near ours, have had very few, or none. I’m glad I have lived when I did. I watched the first moon landing from my exchange student’s parent’s tv set in their bedroom, in Rio de Janeiro–my graduation trip was a month long trip to visit her, the year after she had lived with us for several months. She came back to see us in 1993 with 2 daughters. Many good memories.