The way we were

Do you remember what you did in those two meetings of the slide rule club? Was it just adding or dividing big numbers?

Even back in high school I wanted to be a writer. I was a big fan of Robert Benchley then, and tried to write funny articles like he did. That’s why I wanted to be on the En Gager, but there was that letter opener incident which I just barely remember, and Ms Kew was never a fan of mine. I’m not surprised to hear that they told you what to write. All the clubs were kind of like that I think, run by the teachers. Well everything was run by the teachers. We were like an occupied country. There was an alley just west of the school where me and my nerdy group gathered to smoke cigs once we picked up that filthy habit, but we had to keep our eyes peeled because any teacher, any teacher at all, who spotted us could report us.

The honor club was just kids who got good grades. They didn’t have any meetings or anything. I always kind of wanted to be in it, but I think you had to have good deportment too and it seems like I always had some black mark on me.

I think I’ve told you that my first year in college I had to take ROTC. U of I was what was called a land grant school, which meant the government gave the school the land and in return the school was required to make its students take ROTC.

We had to do drills, we had to shine our shoes and polish our brass, we had to be inspected and get demerits which could only be eliminated by going into the ROTC office and doing some kind of busy work, we had to march, we even had rifles that we had to sort of take apart though few of us did that very well, and worst of all, we had to salute dumbasses. Well, I’ve heard war is hell.

We were supposed to take if for two years, but after the first year they dropped the requirement. I think like the draft, the army just didn’t want to have a bunch of people who didn’t want to be in it in their organization.

I did like wearing a uniform when I was in the boy scouts, I remember looking at myself in the mirror, and we were in a parade or two and I loved that, but then they wanted us to work to earn merit badges and to sleep in tents in the winter and I didn’t like that at all.

Creative writing club sounds like something I might have wanted to join. I took another look at it in the yearbook and I noticed one reason I might not have wanted to; it was all girls. Not that that was a bad thing, it seems like most groups I’ve been in, I would always rather there were more girls. But in school it was different.

There was some point in eighth grade when me and some of my smart buds got together and discussed school subjects. Math and science, we noted, always had an answer that was either correct or incorrect. But other subjects like English and history, or any subject really that wasn’t math or science, it was kind of vague, an answer could be kind of wrong and kind of right at the same time, kind of a matter of opinion. They were squishy, you know, they were girly.

And I am speaking of the girls at that time, maybe not the girls of today, but they were all, oh, hearts and flowers. There is a sort of genre where everything comes up roses and is inspirational. Especially under the rule of the teachers who didn’t trust us with a negative thought, it doesn’t seem like the kind of writing I would be interested in. And there was always that staying after school thing.

I guess that is one thing I thought of about school, that we were unjustly ruled (why did they have the power?) by this caste of teachers, and they not only wanted us to do what they told us, they wanted us to think like they did. Well it might not have been the way they really thought, but the way they felt they should teach us kids to think. I hated that shit.

Of course another reason I acted up was to get laughs and to get a certain kind of popularity, though it never did score me chicks, like I probably thought it would. But that thing about everybody should think in a certain way, which just seemed so solid in the fifties on the southwest side, it just set me against it.

Thinking about it, there was a sort of negative current running through the student body, a sort of anti teacher, anti school spirit, anti goody goody, attitude, so it wasn’t that I was alone in my way of thinking, it wasn’t just me.

And I’m going to go out on a limb here. Going through the year book I see you like fifth in GPA, Honor Club, high up in the ROTC, like an ideal student. And you’ve told me how you always looked up to adults and believed in doing the right thing in the right way.

And the right thing in Gage Park, in the honor classes, in the day, was going to college, getting ahead. Going to college and getting a good job and getting ahead, and then the shocking news (I do remember it as shocking), that Beagles wasn’t going to college.

I think you have explained this before, and I’d love to hear it again. But as long as I have the floor right now, I am thinking that you did believe in people doing the right thing in the right way, but along the way, you saw hypocrisy (the famous Sawyer School blue jeans affair), the powers that be, who claimed to have that power by right of acting right, weren’t really acting right. Whereas I, who resented just the fact of them having power over me, regardless of why, and when I had my chance I bolted to the hippies, where I was in an opposition group, but it was a group, and among them I was pretty much a conformist; you resented them because they weren’t really following the path of right that they claimed to be, but you still believed in that path, and I think you had become to distrust other people generally, and so you set off alone.

Sounds good, huh? We Americans love people who set off on their own. Well not really of course, we just claim to like them, and we like people who claim to like them, but in actual fact we don’t like anybody who rocks the boat.

Maybe the best thing is to stand up alone for what you believe in, and maybe the best thing to do is go along with the group. I’m not going to go into that at this time.