CHICKS, KICKS, CATS, COOL - SCHOOL!
CHICKS, KICKS, CATS, COOL – SCHOOL! Gene Spesard posted his responses to a quiz about your senior year in high school and asked others to respond. I graduated from Wichita Southeast High School, class of 1965. The image is from my 1962-63 yearbook. I’m in the top row, 5th from the right. The friend I refer to below is top row, 3rd from the right.
1. Did you know your current partner? No. I met Vicki in Tucson in 1978.
2. What kind of car did you have? I usually drove my mom’s ’59 Volvo. She bought me a brand new ’65 Volkswagen after I graduated.
3. What kind of job did you have junior/ senior year? I had summer jobs. The one I remember was handyman at the Kansas Milling Company, a flour mill. I inhaled so much flour dust over the summer that I came down with asthma. That job probably saved my life. When I was drafted, I took a note from my doctor about the asthma to the physical, which got me a deferment and kept me out of Vietnam.
4. Were you a party animal? No. My best friend graduated a year early, and I spent my senior year keeping mostly to myself. I learned a lot that year, reading at least five books per week and beginning to explore various kinds of music outside the Top 40 during the 1964-65 school year, but I was pretty much a loner.
5. Were you a jock or nerd? I was an introvert who always had his nose in a book, as they said back in those days.
6. Were you in choir/Band? Nope. I played sousaphone in 7th grade. I wasn’t good at it, and gave it up as soon as the year ended.
7. Did you ever get suspended from school? Of course not. I had an independent streak, and refused to exert myself in classes I didn’t like (math, science, physical education), but I enjoyed my other classes and would never have done anything to get myself kicked out of school, even briefly.
8. If you could go back would you? To do it over again? Nah. Not unless I could take some of my hard-earned maturity with me. I’d do a lot of things differently if I could. But I’m happy enough with the way things turned out for me. Why tinker with the past and maybe wind up with a different future?
9. Do you still talk to the person that you went to prom with? What is this “prom” of which you speak? Fifty-two years later, I’m only in contact with two people from my graduating class. The only reunion I’ve gone to was the 50th, and then only because those two friends promised to show up.
10. Did you skip school? In the 9th grade, I used to avoid Gym class every chance I got, which was fairly often. The coaches didn’t seem to care. Apart from that, though, I only missed school if I was sick.
11. Go to all the football games? Didn’t go to any of them, or any other sporting events either.
12. Favorite subject? English and Latin. I took four years of Latin, and never regretted it. And to this day, I still speak reasonably fluent English.
13. Do you have any of your year books? All three of them. In Wichita back then, elementary school was K-6th grade, junior high was 7-9, and high school was 10-12.
14. Did you follow the career path you imagined? All I knew about careers in 1965 is that I didn’t want one. Well, that’s not entirely true. In my senior year, they had a Career Day, and I went to hear Paul King from KLEO-1480 talk about a career as a disc jockey. Getting paid for playing records sounded like a good idea. Ultimately, though, I followed the path of least resistance and kept going to school for the next ten years. As an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, I got a job in the library, working as a student assistant for $1.00 an hour. When I graduated (and got my draft deferment), I took a paraprofessional job in the library, making $3,400 a year. The more I interacted with the librarians there, the more unfair it seemed that they were making three times as much money as I was when it was clear (to me, anyway) that I was at least three times smarter than they were. Thus it was that in 1973, I moved to Tucson to seek my fortune as a professional librarian.