***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of…..Lost Yearbooks    

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I have spent not a little time lately touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies to communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later on a class website recently set up to gather in classmates for our 50^th anniversary reunion.  (Some will never be found by choice or by being excluded from the “information super-highway” that they have not been able to navigate.) Interestingly those who have joined the site have, more or less, felt free to send me private e-mails telling me stories about what happened back in the day in school or what has happened to them since their jailbreak from the confines of the old town.

Some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, those endless tales about the doings and not doings of the grandchildren, odd hobbies and other ventures taken up in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand commentary on. Some stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did, or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has naturally perked my interest.

But there have been other topics of interest as well. One that hit home, hit me deep in my angst-ridden soul involved a fateful loss of a class yearbook, the Magnet.  I was all ears on that one not only because as you will find out in the story I will relate to you an untoward thing happened to a classmate’s yearbook which caused a traumatic experience but because I know exactly where my copy of the Magnet is and why it is lost. I had been so eager to shake the dust of the old town off my shoes, had had so many fallings-out, had been shunned some many times, and had more than my fair quotient of teen-age angst and alienation that shortly after graduation I threw the damn thing in the Neptune River that runs through the old town. While I have no particular regrets about having done that action then it did leave me without a visual frame of reference in dealing with class memories as the 50^th anniversary reunion approached. Not to fear though through the miracle of modern technology every year’s edition of the Magnet since North Adamsville High’s opening in 1926 is now on-line via the town’s Thomas Parker Public Library system, Nice, huh. Better the class website has a convenient link to that source right on the home page so it is just a click away. That technological marvel will not however fully solve classmate Marilyn Madden’s problem.

The name Marilyn Madden is not just any name in North Adamsville Class of 1964 lore, but a key name. She was involved in almost every intellectually interesting activity at the school and had been crowned senior year by her classmates codified by a photo in the Magnet as the class genius-female side. (As I mentioned to Marilyn when she contacted me about her yearbook story I had not voted for her but rather Lila Rosenberg. Marilyn expressed to me that she had been surprised that she had won and confided in me that she had voted for Lila also. Which is neither here nor there except to show a modest streak. Moreover Marilyn was very smart and the honor was not really misplaced.) Everybody and I believe rightly so thought she would go far. Moreover she had a certain pedigree. Her forbears, including her parents, were well-known in academic circles as professors at the local religious college. She had endlessly dreamed of going to Wellesley College, her first choice and had been urged on in that dream by many teachers, particularly her English teacher, Mr. Holly.       

Well, for whatever reason Marilyn did not get into Wellesley. She wasn’t sure why not and I did not press the issue at this far remove. So she needed to scurry to find another college. Some college who could provide scholarship money given her parent’s well-known lack of funds since in those days professors were at local colleges were not particularly well paid. Eventually Marilyn thorough Mr. Holly found a scholarship spot at well-respected Perkins College out in Iowa (I know, I know Iowa is hardly the right spot for an ocean-bred young woman from the shores of North Adamsville but what can you do when there is no dough around and some decent college is glad to have you). Although this college was far from home, she had no connections in Iowa and, despite her activities resume, considered herself a shy person (that only found out by me recently to my surprise because she seemed a very self-assured young woman back then when I mentioned that I had been shy), left North Adamsville in the late summer of 1964 filled with hopes. Apparently with plenty of luggage as well from the way she describe her train ride out there. That luggage including her record collection and…her cherished Magnet.  And, as many of us, many of us who felt the wanderlust in those days, the many of us that I call in shorthand the generation of ’68, Marilyn secretly thrilled once she arrived in Iowa to be away from the glare of family and high school friends. 

 

Marilyn told me she adjusted pretty well at first, found solace in a group of young people who had imbibed the 1960s folk minute, you know Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk and the like, as she had (and I had as well). She found the classes interesting and was moving along pretty well. Freshman year passed easily (helped by she said finding her first real boyfriend out there and by implication, or my fervent imagination maybe have learned a thing or two in the boy meets girl department). Excited that summer she came home and had been looking forward to her sophomore year. That school year started uneventfully enough but somehow that boyfriend thing did not work out (he found some other girl) and she felt lonesome all of a sudden. Worse, and critical for our story, something awful happened in the late fall. Somehow if you can believe this out in the bloody cornfields of Iowa there was some kind of gang of thieves who specialized in ripping off college students in their dorms. One day (most of these thefts were done during the day while students were out according to the local police) Marilyn’s dorm room was hit with all her belongings taken…including of all things her precious Magnet and that prized record collection. She was distraught, frantic, especially over the loss of that yearbook. Marilyn finished her sophomore year but when she came home that next summer she told her parents she was dropping out. They freaked out to use the language of the times but she stuck to her guns. Several years later she went to another local college, graduated with honors, went on to have a successful career in publishing, got married and had a couple of children. A full life. But for years that theft of her Magnet weighted on her. She tried every possible way to get a copy, any kind of copy but to no avail with such a specialized publication. Until now. Now Marilyn joins me via cyberspace in looking through the on-line Magnet when we cut up torches about the old days. Nice, huh…                   

Oh yeah, Marilyn, here is a folk song via a YouTube film clip from the early 1960s to "replace" one of the ones stolen from you out in the cornfields of Iowa.