Out In The Be-Bop 2000s Night- A Class Website Of One's Own, For The Class Of 1964 Wherever You Are

By Bart Webber

 

North Adamsville (Ma) Class Of 1964, comment:

Although these blog sites that I have been involved in through the good offices of my friend Sam Lowell who taught me the best he could since neither of us are “techies” and blogs that I contribute tend to reflect old time, be-bop night, hard times, beat times, beat down times, beat down, beatified schoolboy concerns and memories I am not adverse to coming into the new millennium to try, try hard by the way, to deal with the implication of the new technologies like the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram  and whatever comes up next as the “new” mode of so-called social networking in order to get that “message” out. That said, I was surfing one such social networking site (okay, okay I won’t be coy Facebook) looking at the class message boards of the classes at North Adamsville just before and after my class, the Class of 1964, and found that Rodger Goldman had made an announcement that the Class of 1965 has its own website hosted by its own webmaster. Correct me if I am wrong but didn't the Class of 1964 have several members who went to MIT or other scientific or technically- oriented schools who could take on such a task?

Actually, these days doesn't someone have an eight-year-old grandchild who could serve in that Webmaster capacity? In either case, isn't there someone who can take on this chore so that we get to see all the photos of children and grandchildren, the family dogs and cats, the aging children of the Class of 1964, and whatever else cyberspace will accept. I am on a crusade, fellow classmates.

Now I have not always been a techie fan. In fact in the past I have been something of a technological Luddite (if you do not know who a Luddite is go to Wikipedia but if you don’t have time that started when English home weavers trashed, or tried to, the new industrial spinners in the early 1800s at the front end of the Industrial Revolution. Maybe they were right or wrong but they were swamped by history and efficiency). During most of my life I have consciously kept a few too many steps behind the latest technology, at times from a political prospective and at others from a desire not to get too much clutter in my space. Now, however, although cyberspace has not brought us the “golden age of the global community,” far from it, that I have long hankered for, it does permit those of us from the Class of 1964 to take a stroll down memory lane.

I know there is someone out there who, with evil intent in his or her heart, someone like Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, king hell king of the be-bop early 1960s schoolboy night, says " Well, why doesn't old Bart Webber take on this task?" Fair enough. However, as this is a confessional age, I must come clean here. While I appreciate and can certainly use the Internet when the deal goes down and I get into technological trouble or have to upgrade, etc. I must call in my "significant other" to rescues me. When I say,” Cindy, the #*& computer just went kaput” she comes to the rescue. Moreover, if the truth were known I also still use a CD player when I go for my walks. In the age of the iPod how yesterday, right? I, however, would be more than happy to write a little something for our website. But we need a Webmaster extraordinaire to get us up and running. And I know it will not be old Frankie and his progeny because, king of the night he might have been but he was (and is) a techno-no. His thing was pitter-patter, and girls. Where is there room for techno-competence in that world? So, as this is also an age that is addicted to sports metaphors- who will step up to the plate?