Fifty Years

our school newspaper, June 1970

Fifty years ago today, I graduated from Royal Oak Kimball High School. Our class reunion was cancelled due to covid-19 so a friend suggested we post photographs and memories on our class Facebook page.

I culled through my scrapbooks, mementos, school newspapers, and photographs to share.

Our Senior Class Trip

Classmates talked about the Senior Prom (which I did not attend), the senior float, school play, and our class trip.

We remembered people no longer with us, old girlfriends and boyfriends, good times.

My graduation photos. Lower left with our
exchange student from Finland, lower right
with my brother

Some admitted they couldn't participate in the class events because they worked to earn money for college, or were shy outsiders, or never found their place in the social network.

One girl, a fellow school paper staffer, wrote about the social and political conflicts that dominate her memories of 1966-1970.

My family moved after I had completed fifth grade. I was shy and had trouble assimilating into sixth grade, the highest class in my new elementary school. All the cliques had been formed. I had always had a best friend instead of belonging to a group.

I had sung in the school choir since Third Grade, taken piano lessons, and liked classical and musicals but disdained the Beatles. I was a big reader, bringing home classic children's literature I found in the school library filled with early 19th c books.

I still rejected the cool teen things in junior high, said I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, reading Jane Eyre and The Count of Monte Cristo. I liked to draw and make up stories. I wouldn't go to the school dances.

As a high school freshman, I was lonely and wanted to fit in. A friend took me up as a hobby and helped me change. I was silly, boy crazy. I listened to Simon and Garfunkel. I still played my classical music on the piano and read Les Miserables, but had expanded.

We didn't have a fancy house or a lot of money. Mom had serious health issues that sometimes left her bedridden or hospitalized.

I became totally enmeshed in high school activities, still an observer, but also finally participating. Four years of choir, from Girl's Choir to A Capella, three years of journalism, hosting an exchange student, attending all the plays and concerts, kept me busy. I read all the poetry books in the school library, wrote poetry, published some poems in the school newspaper. And every night I wrote about my day in a journal.

local moratorium protest in our school newspaper

I wanted to just be able to grow up, figure it all out, but the world infringed, as it does for every generation.

The assassination of Martin Luther King in the school newspaper

The Vietnam War, civil rights, 'generation gap', Detroit Rebellion, assassinations, the political activism going on, the body counts--it all impacted my generation. So much so, that in later years I hated to think about those teen days, it was too sad and conflicted. I even avoided the music.

Every generation has its inherited ills. Fifty years later, I feel for the 2020 graduates and the world they are facing. A pandemic threatens their economic, educational, and social future. The country is divided socially and politically, in a fight for democracy and freedom and equality being waged. Again. Still.

So much has changed in fifty years. And yet, so little.