Once Again….Then-With The Carver High School Class of 1962 In Mind 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Jack Dawson as he prepared to get ready for his 50^th class reunion of the Carver High Class of 1962 (or rather prepared to think about going to the event since as the reader will discover Jack’s thinking about attending this particular event was no better than six, two and even given his past traumatic experiences growing up in that town) in the early days of January, 2012 wondered out loud about certain concerns of prior generations come 50^th anniversary time. Wondered whether the parents or grandparents of his generation had in their 50^th anniversary times wondered, wondered out loud about all the changes, social and technological changes that had taken place in their lifetimes. That 50^th anniversary, given the social conditions of those previous generations, not necessarily graduation from high school since many did not graduate (his own father and grandfather, “boggers” both, in the cranberry bogs that had made Carver famous back then since, as his grandfather had sternly said when asked how far he had gotten in school, “what does a bogger need schooling for”). Could thus have been 50 years of marriage, 50 years on the same job, no unheard of then, as his own grandfather’s life history testified to with 55 years in the bogs, that kind of stuff. Those changes Jack was wondering about were things like the transition from telephones to cellphones, radio to television, newspapers to Internet for information, going into space and the moon and surviving, it being okay, if not universally okay, to be gay, it being okay, if not universally okay, to have a live-in companion out of wedlock, it being okay to change jobs at the drop of a hat, stuff like that.    

Jack had directed his out loud thoughts to his old friend Josh Breslin, a journalist whose name you might recognize if you read certain small publications and journals on a variety of subjects for he, as he himself would be the first to tell you, had written for them all in his time and knew, which he also would tell you, “where all the bodies were buried.” Josh was a guy Jack knew not from Carver boyhood but as a guy from Olde Saco up in Maine whom he had met out in the California great blue-pink American West night back in the mid-1960s after he had graduated from high school. He, then footloose and fancy free, went out there with a couple of corner boys, Frank Jackman and Bart Webber whom he did know from those Carver days, to search for, well, to search for “something” which was a mantra for segments of his generation and wound spending a couple of years “on the bus” as they called it then. The “bus” being a converted yellow brick road school bus such as Jack and Josh had ridden in as young schoolboys but which had then been turned in a day-glo, psychedelic, sound system-equipped communal travelling “home “ for an assortment of the lost, the wayward and the merely curious who got “on” and “off” the bus at various points. The whole enterprise “sponsored” by Captain Crunch (real name Saul Stein, Yale Class of 1957 if you need his bone fides) who had been rumored to have “bartered” for the bus in some exotic earlier drug deal. Those were the days when young men and young women, people like Josh, Jack, Frank, and Bart lived and died by the slogan of their generation (or part of it since as always some could not, would not, take the ticket, take the ride)-“drugs, sex, and rock and roll.”

They would throughout the following forty some years keep in contact with each other, sometimes in close contact and at other times some years would go by before they spoke to each other. Once the millennium hit though and as thoughts of intimations of mortality clouded their respective views they had been in much closer contact meeting at least monthly at The High Hat in Cambridge where Josh lived before he retired back up to Olde Saco (something he swore he would not do back in the 1960s when he, like Jack and his boys, just wanted to get the dust of the town off his shoes but things change over a lifetime and so back to Olde Saco). Or lately at the Crow’s Nest up in York where Jack (and Minnie, his long-time companion, companion rather than wife a long story but three divorces should give the reader an idea of the “why” of that arrangement) had a small “get-away” condo, get away from their collective broods of kids and grandkids as much as they adored the whole crew).           

Since for both men that “wonder” was a moot question as both sets of parents and grandparents had long gone to earth they could only speculate. (And moreover it was possible given that earlier ethos that drove Carver and Olde Saco life that those forebears would not be forthcoming with their answers since they were generations that “kept their own counsel,” like when Jack and Josh asked their respective fathers and grandfathers about their military service in World War or World War II they would be met with stony silence.) Josh thought that his own Irish-French-Canadian (mother nee LeBlanc) parents and before them his F-C grandparents (he had never met his paternal grandparents since his father had been born and raised in Kentucky and when World War II came he enlisted in the Marines, got stationed at Portsmouth Naval Base before being discharged, met his mother and stayed in Olde Saco never going back down South thereafter as a far as he knew and only hearing about their deaths later when he asked when he grew older) pretty much acted like social change was a social disease and kept to the various old country ways like keeping with one’s own, keeping the old religion, language, holiday, alive (and old America ways too like self-reliance, keeping your own counsel, keeping your nose to the grindstone, don’t air your dirty linen in public).

Maybe, Josh thought, it had to do with the isolated existences in mill-towns, both Olde Saco and Carver being such worn-out towns, working hard and keeping their own counsel (no “airing dirty linen in public” the order of the day as he remembered his mother always saying like she was some old “shawlie,” like some of the Irish women in the town who gossiped endlessly about the misfortunes of other and were mum on their own sorrows on their grapevine which would make the CIA and NSA blush with envy). Mixed in with that particular Catholic fatalism which they were both exposed to as kids, the sense that in this “veil of tears,” Jack’s grandmother’s eternal expression there was nothing to done about the fates but in the next life, well, milk and honey-he hoped she got her fair share since she never got it on this good green earth. That pray hard, say the rosary endlessly, pray hard some more, repent ye sinner that attached to everything and drove both men crazy when they were trying to jail-break out of the old time mold. (All forebears “freaked out” to use an expression from the 1960s at the thought of Jack or Josh spending a couple of years “on the bus,” which all forebears never let either man forget about.)         

One night over high-shelf scotches, gone were the days of heavy drug use which got them acquainted back in the day and prior to that cheap low-shelf whiskies and lower shelf rotgut wines, in the Sunnyvale Grille in downtown Olde Saco across from the famous Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street when Jack and Minnie went up to visit Josh at his home they decided to play a game about the changes they could recall from back in the 1960s. First off was the change in attitude toward drugs which back then were seen as the province of dead-beat junkies and odd-ball New York hipsters (read jazz musicians, read black people). They had to laugh when Jack said they probably ingested more drugs that all the “beats” combined. Another was the change from fag-baiting guys who seemed girlish (“light on their feet,” or “different” in polite society but fag the more common expression on the street corners) and dyke-baiting once they had understood the idea of different strokes for different (none of their forebears would have understood the whole gay marriage phenomenon).

Josh mentioned attitudes toward cigarettes, especially since that was “cool” in searching for girls and both having been long-time heavy smokers who had only quit after many tries shook their heads at that idea. Of course the whole thing with women (then girls) had gone topsy-turvy with woman now in professions like the law and medicine that were unheard of then and while both their mothers had worked (in their respective town mills, Olde Saco textiles and Carver shoes the other industry that kept the town afloat then) and so had been working Moms that was a necessity then to keep the families afloat and had been the cause of many caustic comments by guys whose mothers did not work, did not need to work.

Jack and Josh went on that way for a while until they ran out of broad-based big ticket social subjects to think about, ran out of  booze too as the hour got late and Jimmy the bartender wanted to close up. So as they walked up the street to Josh’s house about ten blocks away they started on the silly stuff. Stuff in high school like why did the boys and girls have separate gym classes, why were there separate sex bowling teams for Christ sake. Why girls could not run on the track team like both of them had done who were believed even by gym teachers who should have known better to be incapable of running more than about ten yards without faltering (that track team business before that “cool” smoking stuff shifted their priorities). Why girls could only play half-court basketball like going full court would break their feminine wiles wide open (both laughed when Jack mentioned that today’s taller more athletic women could run any guys from back then ragged in a pick-up basketball game, giving plenty of points too.

Big question, big : why even on a friendly date was the guy, them, poor as church mice guys, supposed to pay for everything and “Dutch treat” was considered bad form, very bad form even when the girls had plenty of dough. It went on like that until they got to Josh’s house and then they having exhausted the subject started talking about whether Jack was going to his class reunion. Yeah, there was plenty of wondering going on that night, wondering too about whether when their kids were getting ready for their 50^th anniversary high school class reunions they would be wondering about what their respective fathers made of their times.

[In the event Jack Dawson decided for a host of good reasons not to go to his class reunion which really is a story for another day. Josh, Class of 1966, is still up in the air about the question from last report.]