A memoir: the most important high school years

For a few years, fate threw us together in the same high school in the mid 1960s--the class of 1967 from Madison High School--and yet those years have left their indelible mark on our lives. We were the Madison Rams, our colors were orange and white, and we had merged into the high school, then 7-12, from four or more elementary schools. A few of us were catholic, two were Jewish, the rest of us were wasps--white, Anglo-Saxon, and and protestant. Although the Supreme Court had ruled segregation to be a violation of the 14th amendment in 1954, we were not yet an integrated high school. Most of us came to Madison High School still clinging to friends from those earlier schools. Some of us were ready to spread our wings and make new friends.

Last weekend about half of us met for our 47th class reunion. Most of us will turn 65 this year. As a memorial board cataloged, twenty of us have already died.

I came to Madison High School at the end of my freshman year and stayed until very near the end of my junior year. Coming from Louisville, Kentucky, where I had unhappily been since 7th grade, I was ready to make new friends and renew some old friendships from my elementary years.

For you see, I had gone to one of those elementary schools that merged into Madison High School for a few years before my family moved to Louisville, Kentucky. When I was in the third grade, we had moved from Richmond, Virginia, to Madison, Tennessee,  We lived on Berwich Trail with the mighty Cumberland River in our back yard, and I rode my bike to Neely's Bend Elementary School for the next three happiest years of my young life.

Last night at the reunion, many of the people that I remembered best had gone to both my elementary school and Madison High School. That may have been true for others, too, especially for those who had been together from first grade through twelfth grades. One man was going around and finding each of us from "the school on the bend"--Neely's Bend Elementary--and asking if we remembered each other. I certainly remember him.

When I was driving to the reunion at Old Hickory Country Club, I got to take a short walk down memory lane. Once I exited Interstate 65 North (which had not been there in the 60s), I passed by the old Madison High School on my left, which is now a middle school. I have always liked its welcoming u-shaped facade and am glad that the old building has not been torn down. Even before that, to my right I had recognized the name of the street that I had lived on when I was in high school--Marthona Road. I took a quick turn and looked for the old brick ranch house--the first house my family had ever bought, instead of rented--but could not recognize it. If memory served me, we paid $12,000 for that rather nice house! There were other street names--Graycroft, Vantrease, and Due West--that I recognized from the days that I was first learning  to drive.

1965-66--the school picture from my junior year in high school--On the back of the picture, it says Quill and Scroll (I was on the newspaper staff of The Ram Page, wrote poetry, and was to be the literary editor my senior year) and National Honor Society.

As I passed the familiar street names, my memory went back to an incident when I could have easily died. One of the things that we did back then was to drive past the house of our current crush, in hopes of seeing him or just to feel near him, I guess. Anyway a friend (Barbara Dunlap, I believe) and I had just driven past Tommy Cooper's (my latest crush) house and honked. Curious, he quickly came out of his house, jumped in his car--a Volkwagon Beetle, of course--and began to follow us. Not thinking, barely breathing, and not wanting him to know that it was me, I naturally sped up to get away from him. I was in my father's powerful, big Buick, and within minutes, we were at Gallatin Road, a major thoroughfare in Madison. Barbara screamed to me that the light was red and that I had to stop, but I told her that I couldn't and to hold on, because we were going through the red light. As we made it through, Barbara looked back to see that the cars on Gallatin Road had swerved to the shoulders to avoid hitting my car and that Tommy had stopped at the light. I just kept going--so afraid that the police were going to find and arrest me and put me under the jail! So afraid that my father was going to find out!

Tommy Cooper at Barbara's house. When I first met him, my sophomore year in high school, he was going steady with a girl named Cindy. Forbidden fruit, I chased him until I caught him in my junior and his senior year. I had dated another brown-eyed, handsome boy named Charlie Ligon through my sophomore year. 

When I walked into our 47th class reunion, a man came up to me saying, "You're Laura Drawdy, aren't you? And you married Tommy Cooper, didn't you?" Then he asked me if I had known what Tommy had recently died of. I had just heard in the last month that Tommy had died this past year. I had completely lost touch with him. The last time I saw Tommy was when he sold me my first Honda CRV after my Sabb had gotten totaled in Chattanooga. That must have been around 2000 or earlier. Tommy and I had been lovers through late high school, even after I moved to North Carolina to finish high school, and into college. We had married when I was about 20 and stayed married a few short years while I worked as a cashier at a small grocery store in Clarksville and finished college at Austin Peay. Perhaps I should have stayed married to him, but I had married him to escape my home life and because everyone else seemed to be getting married. We really had little in common. One day he told me that he never wanted to have any children. Though I wasn't so keen on having children myself and certainly not anytime soon, that was just the excuse I used to divorce him. Then I began my all-consuming teaching career. Later, after the divorce, Tommy and I were friends, even seeing each other occasionally, until I met John Mallernee.

At the reunion, I kept asking myself, "Who are all of these old people? Men with grey, thinning, or completely bald heads? Lots of women with grey hair, too. In my mind's eye, these people had frozen in time and should not have aged! They had name tags with their senior pictures (I had not been graduated from Madison so had no senior picture), but the pictures were really too small for most of us to see very well, without getting out our readers! We would look at the name on the tag and then at the person's face and sometimes we would see a slight resemblance! Other times the resemblance was quite obvious!

It seems to me that back then, we only took pictures at Christmas time!

Having not been to a class reunion since my tenth one, it was great fun to see people from high school again. It was fun to see who I remembered and who remembered me. Only good for about three hours of socializing, still being somewhat shy, and with the round dinner tables crowded together to accommodate all of us, I'm sorry to say that I could not get around to seeing everyone that I would have liked to see and to talk with. About 100 of us were able to attend, 50% of our original class. What surprised me was that some of the rather plain-looking people in high school were the most attractive now in our 60s. One lady from my elementary school who said that she had five great grandchildren did not look much older than 50, if that, and she had the loveliest face. And some of the people who were the most attractive in high school were not so attractive now. One studly looking guy in high school now looked like such an old man! Though many of those bald and grey-haired men that I alluded to in the previous paragraph were mighty handsome men, in contrast to their high school days.

It was good to sit at a table with some old friends from high school for a couple hours. But a lifetime had passed so quickly before our very eyes that we had little in common. Having not seen most of these people for nearly fifty years, I felt tenuous connections to them, connections as thin as gossamer. They didn't know me, nor did I know them. Wow to those who had not left Madison, who still lived in the area. How they must have felt connected to one another! But for most of the rest of us who had gone our individual ways, we were just reminiscing that night, as I am here.

Check out a picture of this dog the year before when she was but a puppy in a blog post that I wrote about another incident in my Madison High School years. I think that I was trying to look "sexy" in this picture! I remember being so proud to have gotten that MHS class ring in my junior year!

One big thing for me in high school was the time that I had cheated in biology class. No, we didn't get caught, but I had felt bad all of these years--perhaps because it was wrong or perhaps because the teacher was so nice. Anyway, my friend and I had similar handwriting, and we were to memorize the names of  the major bones and the muscles in the body. She memorized one set, and I the other, then we exchanged papers. We both got a 100% on that test. When I asked my partner in crime if she remembered our cheating, she laughed and said that she did not remember the incident at all. So much for my decades-old guilt!

At the reunion, one of our classmates (the daughter of our chemistry teacher) was reading out fun trivia questions for us to answer such as "How many elementary schools fed into Madison High School?" and  "How many drive-in movie theaters were in Madsion in 1967?" when she shocked me by asking one personal question, "And who put those "for sale" signs in my yard?" I actually involuntarily raised my hand, but no one seemed to pay me any attention. But I was guilty as charged.

Let me tell you the story. It is one of my most vivid memories from my Madison High School years. I was in Mr. Jenkins chemistry class, and one day I got kicked out of class! Mr. Jenkins had once again lost control of his class and yelled at all of us to sit down and to get quiet. We misbehaved in his class because so few of us "got" chemistry. Except for some "eggheads" or "nerds" in the back row (you know who you are!), it was beyond most of our comprehension.

Anyway, as I said, Mr. Jenkins had lost his temper and yelled at the whole class to get quiet. In the meantime, Randy Fisher (who I'm sorry to say didn't make it to the reunion because I was going to fuss at him again!) was my lab table partner who sat next to me on those tall stools. Unknown to me, he was up to his old tricks and had just taken that big gold safety pin out of my plaid wool kilt and was taunting me with it. When I saw that he had it, I flipped my left hand over to him to indicate that he was to return the pin to me pronto. At about the same time, Mr. Jenkins just happened to look up from reading at his desk. He ranted at me, "Laura, get out of my class and go to the office immediately!" I heard a general gasp from the rest of the class as we were all rather stunted. I was a good student who had never been in trouble before.

I spent three days out of chemistry class, sitting in front of the office. When the principal Mr. DePriest came by, he asked me how yearbook sales were going. To which I responded that they were going well. I was ashamed for him to know that I was in trouble nor did he expect trouble from me. The vice-principle Mr. Bridgeman always took care of the trouble-prone students. He had told me that I had to go to Mr. Jenkins and ask him if I could return to class. Each morning during homeroom for three days, I went to Mr. Jenkins, apologized, and asked if I could return to his class. Each morning for three days, Mr. Jenkins ignored me. Besides all of my friends, my homeroom teacher Mrs. Eldridge seemed to be on my side.

Finally, Mr. Jenkins allowed me to return to chemistry class, but each day that I had been out of class and though I had tried to keep up, he had given me a zero--three zeroes that were to be averaged into my grade for the six-weeks! I had not told my parents about my getting kicked out of chemistry class. But when the report cards came out, there were those little blue Bs that I had gotten in all the six-weeks' grading periods before, and there, for the fifth six-weeks, was a big fat D, written in red!

Now I knew I had to explain that grade in chemistry to my parents, and I was plenty scared. When I did, they listened patiently to me and just said that Mr. Bridgeman had called them several weeks ago and explained the situation. They had been wondering when I was going to tell them! They figured that I had suffered enough already in silence and gave me no further consequence.

So my friends and I were out one night, looking for something fun to do, and we decided to "pay back" old (he must have at least been in his 40s!) Mr. Jenkins! I honestly do not remember who was in on the prank or whose brilliant idea it was, but we decided to do more than just roll his yard, we also "found" a dozen or so "for sale" signs to put in his yard. The next week at school was a nightmare of Mr. Bridgeman quizzing me and my friends about the deed. Knowing that I would get in even bigger trouble, all of my friends, some of who even confessed, remained loyal to me and kept me out of it. No matter how many times Mr. Bridgeman brought up my name, they would not incriminate me. I loved my friends for that.

That's how I learned the extremely valuable lesson that teachers are not always fair, and later in life, as a teacher myself, I would keep this message in mind. And I want Mr. Jenkins and his daughter (to whom we meant no disrespect) to know that as a teacher, I got more than plenty of pay back from my own students!