the slide rule club

Ah, the slide rule, never was a fan of it myself, there was a matter of, I think, two numbers to match up, and then you looked someplace else for another number, something like that, and it was always hard to remember which number went where, but worse was that your number never was on one of those lines, it was halfway there, or a third, or a sixteenth so that you would have to eyeball that, and then when you wanted to read your answer it was never right on a line so you would have to eyeball if that was a half, or third, or sixteenth. A lot of eyeballing going on, a lot of analogue shit going on, deeply offensive to a careless and digital man such as myself. I used it reluctantly and with middling results at best.

I remember first becoming acquainted with it in college, but when I was looking through my yearbook, there was the slide rule club. The slide rule club?

There were clubs in high school, I vaguely remember. I think they were after school events, so at a time when everybody was gladly getting the hell out of Gage, you would be remaining, but why? Why would anybody prefer to stay in that building when the alternative was leaving it?

Let’s go to Icarian of 1963. Ken Schadt...Biochemist (fell a little short of that)...Senior Class Treasurer (That will require an explanation, but not now)...En-Gager Staff (That was something I wanted to be on, but I think that only lasted one semester, due to an unfortunate incident involving a letter opener)...B.A.A. (I think you got that for taking gym)...Senior Prom Committee (I think I got that for being class treasurer, pretty sure I never did any actual planning on that )...Scholarship Club (I think you had to be in that if you wanted to apply for a scholarship)...Debate Team (Well who wouldn’t want to stay after school if it meant getting to argue?)...Chess Club (The cool guy’s alternative to the slide rule club).

Now let’s look up Beagles. Beagles...Farmer...En-Gager Staff...Honor Club...ROTC...Usher’s Club...Picked Platoon...Creative Writing...Slide Rule Club.

I’ll be looking forward to Beagle’s explanation of the first seven and concentrate here on The Slide Rule Club (by the way, I have a nice photo of that on my GagePark63 photo). I notice a lot of men in uniform there, perhaps you used the slide rule to gauge your howitzers, if you know what I mean, nudge, nudge.

But really, I have to ask, because this has been burning my curiosity for years, what the hell did you do there? Did somebody yell out, “1,234 x 5,678,” and then slide, slide, slide, and somebody called out the answer, and then they got to yell, “9,123 x 4,567,” and so on, deep into the afternoon while everybody else was eating fries and catsup at one of those hangouts by 55th and California, or trying to talk their older brother into buying them some beer.

And girls. You had girls in there, and you know we even had girls in our chess club (Though, “Hey, how about that queen’s gambit, huh,” did not turn out to be the cool pickup line that one would think it would be). What were they thinking? You kind of expect guys to join some club like that, but you expect girls to have more sense.

As you know, I have been all into high school lately, what with trying to turn out the class of 63. Maybe we can get back to bio fuels later, it seems like we just recycle these issues endlessly, don’t we?

I was just looking at all those photos, all that hair, all that deadly seriousness, all frozen in time in I expect the spring of 1963, and knowing only 18 years of life, and all the rest before that was stories of our parents and grandparents that might as well have been fairy tales, and thinking the world after graduation would be pretty much the same as it had been before, and being teenagers and not really given to thinking too far ahead anyway. And all the while, behind the soundproof, opaque glass, the sixties are assembling.