Class of ’65

Fifty years later

Those who attend their 50th high school reunion, whether it be in Batesville, Paragould, Hope or Camden, would relate to the poem I was asked to deliver in Harrison Saturday night.

The names and places obviously have different names. But the mutual experiences of teenage hormones raging and youthful human behavior being what it was in 1965 were remarkably alike in every city.

It didn't much matter if a senior class graduated 20 or 200, back then the rituals were predictable. We'd pile into our Chevys, Pontiacs and Ramblers on Saturday nights. Some drove their parents'. Girls wearing the rings and letter sweaters of their steady boyfriends would don bobby socks and tennis shoes while the boys wore high-water Levis, white socks and black loafers. Girls would snuggle close as their boyfriends went through the "cool" process of constantly shifting from first to third then back again. Remember those clutches in the floor, just left of the dimmer switch?

Their friends without a ride (like me) would beg for a double date in the back seat. The normal date in Harrison was to the long-since vanished drive-in movie then over to Fischer's Drive-In restaurant. Radios were tuned to rock and roll love songs from disc jockey Dick Biondi with WLS in Chicago, or Wolfman Jack broadcasting from offshore in Del Rio, Texas. Remember "Sealed with a Kiss"? "Sherry"? "Oh Donna"?

Cruising from the town square and back out to the highway to Fischer's to see and be seen was the normal weekend; well, that combined with pulling to a stop behind classmates' cars along the dirt road known in Harrison as Speer's Lane.

Friday nights during the football and basketball seasons also were almost identical in Harrison and elsewhere. Games were over by 9, then it was either over to a classmate's home for a clutching carport dance, or a trip to Speer's Lane. That narrow, winding road and other seldom-used gravel thoroughfares were always predictable necking spots.

Parents all knew their own children's friends and functioned as surrogates in many ways, threatening to squeal (and often doing so) when they so often caught us doing something we shouldn't.

Many of us used church youth groups on Sunday evenings as an excuse to be away for a few hours and see friends and steadies on what otherwise would be considered a "school night." Besides, it wasn't unusual for these groups to hold social gatherings, always popular when life and budding love was in bloom.

On the evening of the reunion, we learned 15 percent of our classmates already are gone. That number fit with the national average in a class from 1965. They left us too soon. We focused together on a slide show set to the class song to honor each of the 31, all the while remembering their smiles and the last time we heard their voices.

There also was a screen to thank the committee who worked so diligently to make this evening and the barbecue cookout a night earlier, sponsored by classmates Bob Hodges and Louie Keener, even possible. On the list were former class president C.W. "Bill" Dill, now on the Arkansas Board of Dental Examiners; Ken Reeves, an attorney now on the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission; Don and Shannon Walker; Norman Flynn; Linda Berry; Glennis Estes; Ralph Guynn; and a dozen other helpful souls. Former teachers John Wallace Hudson and Jann Rife even came.

If you, too, were budding toward maturity during this wonderfully innocent and simple era, you can change the names and easily relate to a few edited excerpts from the poem shared from the lectern at the Quality Inn Convention Center (with apologies to the late great Henry Wadsworth Longfellow):

Listen, classmates, and you shall hear of a Harrison class in its very best year.

It was '65 and back in the days, when carefree pups were learning to play,

and date, and cruise, and park, and cheer and fill our days with learning to say, the words that formed friendships in lasting ways ...

It was yesterday morning when life was young, before changes began one by one, as our creek crooked and winding,

to mold and leave us reflecting in mental concoctions of years spent as youthful Goblins ...

Like this creek we love, life is change we now know. Not one of us escapes its flow, or memories of all we shared and came to know, in the town that would help us prepare to grow. This roomful of friends once so free and young now stand side-by-side facing afternoon's sun ...

Has it been 50 years? Where have they flown? Wasn't it yesterday we were carefree at home, with our LP records and black dial phones. Cedric's Cafe, the square's spit-and-whittle brigade and our Homecoming parade. Old Spice or White Shoulders most weekend nights. Clearasil to hide pimples. Life in '65 was so thrilling yet simple ...

Late fall is upon us, accept it or not. Where did the years go? Oh hell, I forgot! Memories today number in the millions. As the joys for so many have shifted to fresh faces we know as grandchildren. In them stir memories of our own youths so dear, and those months long ago we'll cherish as our very best year.

------------v------------

Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com.

Editorial on 10/06/2015

Upcoming Events