High School Clubs

I got suckered into a few clubs in my freshman year, but that didn't last long, except for the ROTC, which wasn't really a club.

En-Gager: That was the school newspaper. We didn't stay after school for that, it was scheduled during the regular day. You were supposed to have taken the journalism class before you could be on the En-Gager staff, but they waived that requirement for me because I was such a brilliant writer. I did take the journalism class later, but I quit the En-Gager staff after one or two semesters. The teacher always told us what to write, so there wasn't a lot of room for creative license. Not my cup of tea.

Honor Club: I don't remember that one, but it must have had something to do with the "honors" classes that we were enrolled in. If they ever had any meetings, I don't remember attending one.

ROTC: I took gym the first year, and then I found out you could take ROTC instead. I was interested in military stuff in those days, so I didn't take it just to get out of gym.

Usher's Club: I have no memory of that one, but it might have had something to do with ROTC. Maybe the ROTC provided ushers for school events, but I don't remember ever doing that.

Picked Platoon: That was part of ROTC, but I don't remember what, if anything we did. I do remember the Drill Platoon, and maybe that was the same thing. It wasn't fancy precision drill, just regular marching steps. There was a city-wide competition once a year, and our school usually came in dead last, until I took over. It wasn't a coup or anything like that, Sergeant Williams asked me to be the leader that year. We came in at 7:00 AM for what seemed like months and trained for the competition for an hour each day. There were a certain number of moves we had to make in a limited space within a limited amount of time, and we got so good at it that we could do it in our sleep. We got into the finals, which Gage Park had never done before, and everybody was excited about it, maybe too excited. The finals were held on the same floor as the main competition, which was the exact same size as the marked off area we had used for practicing, but they had put up a table on the edge of it to display the first, second, and third place trophies, which would be awarded later. Nobody told us about that, and I didn't realize that the table was in the space we were accustomed to using until I looked ahead and saw that we were about to march right into it. I gave a quick command to get around the table, but that wasn't in our rehearsed choreography and it threw everybody off. The command I gave was "left oblique" which sounds a lot like "left flank". About half the guys thought I said the one, and the other half thought I said the other, and the formation kind of disintegrated. It only took us a few seconds to get our act back together, but it was enough to put us over our allotted time limit. I don't remember how many schools were in the finals, but I do remember that we came in dead last.

There was another ROTC activity that I was in called "City Corps Staff ", which turned out better. We didn't really do any work for the City Corps, but we marched in several parades downtown. I always liked marching in parades. It was a lot more fun than the drill competition, not nearly as intense, and there was music to march to. To get on the City Corps Staff I had to go before a military board of revue, which was a whole experience unto itself. It was kind of like a job interview, but really stiff and military. There is nothing quite like it in the real world. With Sergeant Williams' expert tutelage I won that competition hands down. Years later, in the real army, I found myself before the exact same kind of board of revue in competition for Soldier of the Month. This was kind of a sucky thing which I would have never volunteered for except that we had a new First Sergeant who, unlike all the other First Sergeants I had dealt with, was not a mean prick. He practically begged me to do it, and I owed him a favor, so I agreed. Since I had not been trained for this sort of thing, he didn't expect me to win, but I did because of my ROTC experience. After that I was a big hero for the rest of my time in the army. Too bad is was only six months.

The Creative Writing Club was a new thing they were trying out with us honor students. It was interesting at first, but the few of us who joined it soon lost interest and the club disbanded.

The Slide Rule Club was like that too. I only went to one or two meetings, and it just wasn't my cup of tea. I'm surprised that those two clubs were mentioned in the yearbook because they were in our freshman year and they didn't last long. Maybe it's true what the adults use to tell us: "Once you get something like that on your record it will follow you all your life."