It's homecoming week. Bonfires, the peanut barn, a Saturday game, beat ribbons, and a crackle of urgency in the air. I wish you all the very best as you celebrate.
My son's high school homecoming was this weekend. As part of it, the entire school did a "lipdub" production that is fantastic - the kind of high school experience we all wish for our children. If you have five minutes, check out this exceptional video... and yes, my son is the first character (with feathers in his hair) who kicks it all off.
I'm going to flood Facebook over the next couple days before going dark on Sunday. A lot of memories rambling around in my head. I see that the reunion is meeting in the Science Room. Many weird memories there. I VIVIDLY remember our Freshman year. Frank Gray coughed and Wesley Killion and I saw smoke billowing out of his mouth. Quite Hilarious. Remember pitching pennies virtually the whole year?
Still thinking about the science room: There was the time that the "chemicals closet" was robbed. Frank was amused to discover that two items were missing - Nitric Acid and Glycerin. Frank correctly assumed that The-Thug-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named had broken in and stolen what he thought would create nitrogylcerin.
Still thinking about the science room: On a personal level, I remember Freshman biology and the animal dissection segment. Nancy Medford, Kathy Wilson, and Susan Walker and I were all in the same work group. The girls claimed to be too grossed out by the process so after I did my dissection, I did theirs. Then I still had time on my hands so I goofed around (imagine that) and Frank ...would wind up reducing my grade for being a distraction, while the girls maintained their As on my efforts. I do believe all of you graduated with a higher GPA than me. You're welcome. Susan, if I had any self-control at all, I would have given you a run for Valedictorian.
I’ve put together a list of my Top 50 or so favorite songs (link). A few years ago when I started this project I discovered how powerful the memories are that are bound up in these songs – many tied to Rising Star. “When we were young” Rock was at its zenith and the albums by Carole King, Carly Simon, and Joni Mitchell that came out in the 70s were the work of geniuses. I’m still blown away by “Both Sides Now” that we played so often in band. Much the same for “Colour My World” and “25 or 6 to 4”. I remember Bruce Cohen doing his impression of Joe Cocker singing “You Are So Beautiful To Me” – perfect every time and hilarious. What are your fondest music memories?
Music continued… During our Senior year, Susan Walker and I went to Brownwood for a high school jazz competition – just to listen. Two great friends sat beside each other and cried like babies when we heard one group play “MacArthur's Park” and we realized how much we had missed out on thanks to our annual rotation of band directors and under-funded band program. We never said a word to each other, but we shared one incredible emotion – loss. Heart. Breaking.
Music continued… As you all recall, radio in rural Texas in the 70s was dismal on its best day. I had an old tube AM radio which, at night, would catch faraway stations “on the skip” - WLS in Chicago, WNOE in New Orleans, and XROCK80 in Ciudad Juarez. The next day at school we’d discuss “new music” like “Don’t Rock The Boat, Baby” and “A Horse With No Name”. Listening to that music on those distant stations was like taking a cultural acid trip… but, really Mom, it was just music.
Music continued… I remember Johnny Hubbard was into Jethro Tull and Seals and Crofts. I think Craig Campbell was kind of an Eagles, America, and Grand Funk Rairoad guy. (Bonus Points: Who can name the crowd favorite performed by Sabana Rain? You do all remember Sabana Rain, right???) I mainlined Led Zeppelin and Queen. I remember several of us discussing the deep meaning of “I’m Not Lisa” in History class. And remember our excruciating 8th Grade baccalaureate performance of “Bridge Over Troubled Water”? It’s a good song, but I wince every time I hear it.
Visit my Greatest Songs page and then tell me what you think.
Music continued… And before I leave the topic of music, I want to say Thank You to all my band mates through-out the years at RSHS. You are partners in the best memories I carry with me from RS. One of my phone ringers is Peter Gunn and I smile every time I hear it. The riffs from Bill Moffit’s SoundPower Series can still be heard in every stadium across America on Friday nights and Saturdays. These days, we seldom hear songs like “The Entertainer”, “Magnificent Seven”, “Hawaii 5-0”, but when I hear a snippet from that era, I think of my 30 or so band mates who made my life richer. In truth, we sucked more air through our horns than we blew, but we did it together, and that made whatever we did wonderfully special. Thank You All. I wish we knew what real love was back then so I could have told you all, I love you.
(By the way, senior year band director Paul Fullerton wound up running a flower store in Dallas. Seems about right.)
Sports… somewhere I have the original newspaper clipping of the 1971 RSJH Mighty Fightin’ Kittens district championship football team. “Kittens” or not, we were some desperately tough BAMFs (can I say that?). Except for one non-district loss to Class-A Early (score 0-6), we were otherwise UNBEATEN AND UNSCORED UPON. We were the bomb, weren’t we guys?
Sports continued…Between bad knees (after seven surgeries, I had my right knee replaced in 2007) and a lack of enthusiasm for Frank Gray’s coaching style, I didn’t play the Big 3 team sports in high school. But I hasten to remind you all that RSHS won district in Volleyball in 1975. (The team featured Johnny Turner, Kenton Joyce, Randy Woods, a couple others, and me. Actually, at the district tournament, only FIVE guys showed up for the six-man team… and we still dominated!) Two of us (myself and the older Newberry kid) won district in Tennis in 1976. I’m not sure how many times RSHS has won district in the intervening years, but back in the day, volleyball and tennis were the only sports bringing home the hardware. (Am I bragging? Oh, I’m sorry.)
We all had our unique journeys through the rigorous RSHS curriculum. As I have said elsewhere, Mary Claborn was the absolute best person and I love her with all my heart. I can’t say that many of our classes expanded my horizons, but one teacher certainly did. When Bob Fortune showed up the first day of 8th Grade, I think most of us thought our lives had come to an abrupt end. He was mean and surly. For good reason if you recall, he had just had spinal fusion back surgery and he was in great pain. Fast forward to our senior year History final exam. I think the whole class met out at Marilyn Clark’s house to cram for the final. We ALL wanted to ace the test because, I think, we had come to truly love the man. He was insightful, challenging, and encouraging. As for me, he did more to inspire me through high school and beyond than anyone else. Susan Walker and I got to know Bob’s other side after graduation. He was funny, humble, and wonderfully proud of all his students. My wife and I stopped through Brownwood to see Martha after Bob passed away. It was sad, but also sweet to remember him. The kids, Brad and __?__, were beautiful and mature. Bob Fortune was a good man and I think we are all better for having him in our lives. I know I am. …and I think the lowest grade any of us got on that final exam was a 95.
I have one more thing to say about Mary Claborn – and I’m sorry if this sounds self-serving, I simply mean to honor the spirit of this beautiful person. In a paper I wrote my Freshman year, Mary’s last year teaching, I referred to my brother and sister collectively as my “siblings”. Mary circled that word in red and above it wrote “Word?”. She was not familiar with this rather common word. Like many other teachers of her era, Mary was not as well-read and well-educated as most teachers are today. But there was something greater about Mary than her vocabulary. Two years later, I was a Junior. Early in the Fall semester of 1974, Linda Burns was absent and Proud Mary came back to substitute. It also just so happened that there was a faculty meeting that day. After the private, closed-door meeting, Mary found me in the hallway and in the peculiarly fierce-but-gentle look she could muster up, she said to me, “If something good happens to you today, you have me to thank.” A couple anxious hours later, Bob Fortune called Jerilyn Winfrey, Johnny Turner, Theresa Lawrence, and me into his office and told us that we had been selected by the faculty to participate in a region-wide pilot program called Talented Youth Seminar. Once a month for the next two years I had a rare privilege to be introduced to fascinating people and even more fascinating ideas through the Seminar. (Marilyn Clark joined us for Senior year.) It changed my life and in many real ways it still impacts my life today. If Mary Claborn had not been on campus that day, I know for a fact the rest of the RSHS faculty would not have given a class-clown, loudmouth, obnoxious, dope smoker like me a second thought. I don’t know what she put on the line that day, but whatever it was, she changed the trajectory of my life. I owe Mary Claborn more than I can ever express. God blessed us all by giving us Mary Claborn. Amen.
Math class… Somehow I found a way to limit my learnin’ in ‘rithmetic to one year. God is so good! Freshman year we had “Related Math”. At the beginning of the year, in September, there was a textbook malfunction. Many months later, in March of 1973, The-Math-Teacher-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named caught me red-handed. During an in-class assignment he caught me “checking” answers in the back of the math book. The pint-sized pupil-hater sashayed back to my desk and started in with his trademark sneering, “Clark, Clark, Clark, what would you do if you didn’t have answers to the odd-numbered problems in the back of the book.” I couldn’t restrain myself… I answered boldly, “I’d use Wesley’s book, he has the Teacher’s Edition.” The midget mathematician turned eights shades of angry red, looked at Wesley, grabbed his book, and turned an additional nine shades of furious fuchsia (that’s seventeen in all, see I can do math). Wesley was pretty upset that I had slain the golden goose, but he understood, it was the only reasonable response to being emotionally water-boarded by that diminutive dictator of digits.
Who remembers painting the Kaleidoscope of Freedom flags? My mom and dad paraded those flags all over central Texas for a half dozen years giving many full presentations as well. Eventually they donated the whole set of large flags to Howard Payne’s Academy of Freedom. Then… mom made a whole new set of flags about half the size of the originals. Mom took so much joy in seeing all us kids engage in that flag project. She loved flags and used them to teach kids about their history. Good times.
I’m sorry that I’ve lost touch with all of you. In just the last couple years I’ve reconnected with just a few of you enough to know something about your lives. I’m especially heartened that Nancy and Marilyn are teachers. I have my teaching degree and certificate, but life has taken me another way. I’m so thrilled that you two are daily shaping the lives of young’uns who are encouraged by your love. I did a little Facebook stalking and I saw some fascinating photos on Kathy’s page. Kathy, thank you for exporting your compassion to faraway fields. I imagine even now those little kids are fondly remembering that willowy Texican who gently ministered to their health and hearts.
A debris field of other memories – First Baptist Church burning / meeting in the funeral home for a year, Teco getting his face slashed by a broken pole vault pole, Skeet Clark’s untimely passing, Edith Bibb’s sad tragedy in May, somebody got busted for pot, winning district in One Act Plays (somebody won Best Actor), summer rodeos, all your sweet cousins visiting from out of town(!), Bailey’s snack shop, the grabby science teacher in junior high, someone misspelling WILDCATS in the middle of his ill-advised try-out for cheerleader, band trips (somebody brought banned substances), that Byrd kid cutting off his nose when he fell into one of those fiberglass chairs at a pep rally, memorizing the FFA creed, castrating pigs (has that been banned yet?), Vic Childers cautioning me not to be “a chicken-shit” even if the math teacher was acting like one, spending the night at Nathan Jones’ drinking moonshine and walking over to Nancy Medford’s house in the middle of the night under a full moon and praying to an apparently-deaf God that she would wake up and run out to us and make-out with at least one of us (sorry Nancy, I guess for your sake there is a God!!), summers at the swimming pool at Lakewood (no cut-offs in the swimming pool please) listening to Ray Stevens “The Streak”, Johnny Hubbard and Craig Campbell and somebody else streaking, Mr Frizzell the bus driver, the sycamore trees in front of the high school filled with wooly worms, somebody welding pliers together just to drive Horace Geye NUTS, the HVAC blowing black-lung disease down on us at a parliamentary procedure competition at Tarleton, Susan introducing me to pizza at Pizza Inn in Brownwood, driving out-of-town guests north of town and asking them how soda gets its fizz just before your get to the sign that says “Carbon 8”, summer church camp at Lake Brownwood, twenty cent gas, putting 100 miles on the odometer just driving the drag on Sunday afternoons, the creepy abandoned side of the old hospital, finding a dead monkey in the dump, a summer-time murder, picking pecans, hoeing watermelons, loading turkeys, hauling hay, driving death-trap peanut trucks, swimming in stock tanks with the Chambers girls, Agnew’s five-hundred square foot carnival of food, reading “Julius Caesar” as a group in Freshman English, LBJ dying, buying fireworks at that little old lady’s house in town, hard decisions – whether to eat at the truck stop or the E-Light Café, Dog Nunally’s pronunciation of French terms, Dorothy Diddle’s assessment of the clothes Hollywood starlets’ wore the night before on the Johnny Carson show, frito-pies at football games, and the twice-as-large-as-usual beat ribbons we wore for Homecoming.
Go W I L D A T S.
Be sure to watch my video greeting for the 35th Reunion of the class of 1976.