***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of…..The Be-Bop Night  

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Recently I have avidly been perusing the personal profiles of various members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964 website as fellow classmates have come on to the site and lost their shyness about telling their life stories (or have increased their computer technology capacities, not an unimportant consideration for the generation of ’68, a generation on the cusp of the computer revolution and so not necessarily as savvy as the average eight-year old today). Of course not everybody who graduated with me in that baby-boomer times class of over five hundred students had a literary flare or could articulate their dreams in the most coherent way. But they had dreams, and they have today when we have all been through about seven thousand of life’s battles, good and bad, a vehicle to express whatever they want.

That was the case with a guy I barely knew in high school since he had moved away in the tenth grade before I had a chance to meet him since he said that at his new school he was on the track team there as I had been at North Adamsville and I assume that if he had stayed he would have been a member. He had earlier grown up for a time in the Adamsville projects where I came of age although I did not know him from there either, at least I don’t remember him from that time. This guy, a guy named Gary Tibbetts, who has as a result of permission granted by the webmaster been allowed to be part of our site although he did not graduate with us, has been regaling us with his very quirky (and sometimes purely off the wall) thoughts. Some classmates in response have commented that Gary should tone down or curtail his screeds but I have come to his defense. Not out of some free speech political angle, although that is a thought but because quirky guys should have their say too along with beaming grandparents, golfing aficionados and other hobbyists, and shop-until-you-drop devotees. So there.             

Of course as I have mentioned before in other sketches 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. Gary’s is in something of a different category but let my message placed on the generic class “Message Forum” page tell the tale:

[As mentioned above Gary did not graduate from North Adamsville with us but rather at Fort Pierce High down in Florida. He insisted that despite that fact he had stronger attachments to his years in the old town. Moreover as the comments on his personal profile by those who knew him back in the day indicate he was a colorful and well-known figure then. Particularly well-known for his antics at Adamsville Central Junior High School, one of the two feeder junior highs to North (the other being Adamsville North Junior High where I went).]     

“The Bard Of Adamsville Central Junior High School, Class of 1961-In Reply To Gary Tibbetts Message Forum #21

Sorry Gary I have done you, my fellow Adamsville projects boy (he of Figurehead Lane and me of Taffrail Road) a great disservice. Yesterday in response to Danny Valentine’s MF#24 (also a fellow Adamsville projects boy who I did know, and know well) I wrote a short note (MF#25) about the need to spice up this site. In short I proposed that we s-x the site up a bit and I asked him, maybe begged him, to tell us all about his experiences at the “submarine races” down at Adamsville  Beach in the old days. But see I had neglected to read your beautiful screed before his where you had already done your best to liven things up, and maybe made a few old geezers, well let’s say, hot under the collar as they thought back to those junior high days at Adamsville Central Junior High School (the same stuff went on at Adamsville North except we only had two years to do it rather than the three you got to wreck the joint and to tweak the girls, and they us).         

Believe me, my brother, I liked your automatic writing, shades of Jack Kerouac, maybe not On The Road but definitely sections of Big Sur, William Burroughs in Naked Lunch and mad poet Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.  You are kindred even if you have never read them- you are a “beat” brother no question and even though their time was before our time and we only caught a whiff of what was brewing you carry on in their spirit. More importantly you have caught the spirit of this site- to contribute to the collective memory of our class in your own way. Who better than somebody who fifty years later wants to and can give a, well, quirky meaning to those teen experiences. Thanks Braveheart.