Friday December 3, 2004 – Senior Year High School 1963

Friday December 3, 2004 – Senior Year High School 1963

I went to high school my senior year at Clover Park High in Lakewood, Washington, a suburb or Tacoma. I graduated June 7th, one of over 400 others. It was a Friday and I was saddened to be finished with something I had longed would, end since I first entered school twelve years earlier. My senior year had been quite tumultuous, as I had transferred from Austin High School in El Paso, Texas when my dad was transferred from Ft. Bliss Army Base in El Paso, to Ft Lewis, which was just south of Tacoma. Three years of getting to know your way around school all gone and suddenly having to find your way in a new school in a completely new place. Peter, Paul and Mary were singing “Blowing in the Wind” on the radio. I could relate.

Clover Park was known for its academics program, a complete set of advanced placement courses for a student body that was full of bright kids all wanting to go on to college. I knew the last three months before graduation that I was bound not to college but to a hitch in the U.S. Navy. I was determined to learn a bit about the real world rather than go on to college, though I knew I would one day return to college after my tour was over. I was convinced to join the Navy by what I had learned my final year in school. A retired Army colonel, who taught a class in current affairs opened my eyes to a world he had experience first hand, among the Bedouins of Saudi Arabia, as a military attaché in European capitals. Here was a man who had experienced what we were reading about in our readings book, In that class, we read The Ugly American, by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. It led me to another book Lederer wrote called All the Ships at Sea, a collection of sea stories by a master storyteller. The Navy got a recruit from that story.

I had two other classes that year that turned my head. One was English, taught by a lovely woman, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, though at the time I was completely smitten with. She rekindled an interest I had in poetry, particularly Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Carl Sandberg, and many others. She sparked an interest in Greek drama and philosophy that had me reading works I had overlooked before. She also introduced me to the short works of the great writers on America back then, John Steinbeck, Earnest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Stephen Vincent Benet among others.

I mentioned Benet because of his short story “By the Waters of Babylon” which we read as a classroom assignment. It told the story of a young man coming of age in a fictional land that exists some time in the future. The young man embarks on a journey of discovery and comes upon the ruins of a once great civilization, with towering building, amid empty streets overgrown by nature. As he explores the ruins of one tall building he comes upon the body of a man in a room filled with books and what was once fine furnishing and the material trappings of an affluent life. The skeleton is dressed in a suit and is sitting in chair, the sockets of its eyes staring blankly at the large tall ceilinged room surrounding him. And the boy realizes the plight of this man watching his civilization crumble around him. I was about to embark on my own journey of discovery. Now this many years later and well into the journey, the story continues to have a remarkable poignancy.

The other class that turned my head was journalism, which I happened to take because I wanted to write for the monthly school paper. My professor was an avid Earnest Hemingway fan and I remember a large framed black and white portrait of the author hanging over his desk. The author had claimed the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 and had shot himself two years earlier in 1961—his contemporary, John Steinbeck had won the Nobel Prize a year later.

I had begun to read Hemingway in my sophomore year completing The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and The Sea. I learned about the man from my journalism professor as he would expound on the writer during one of his tangents: Hemingway wrote religiously every day, typed standing up, loved blood sports—bullfighting and boxing. By the time I graduated, the professor and his favorite author had inspired me to write several stories that the professor thought worthy to make the paper—not remarkably, I remember none of them.

I had one other class that year that still sticks in my mind, largely because of how much I didn’t enjoy it. It was physics and it was right after lunch. Our professor was a gray hair old guy who had mentally retired but continued to teach to keep himself occupied during the day. I liked the guy. He had a natural charm and a winning smile when he spoke to us but the business of teaching physics he left to another professor, this one was projected from a 16-mm film that he played Monday, Wednesday and Friday and on Tuesday and Thursday we had lab. The on-screen professor was a well-known professor at the University of California at Berkeley and he had filmed an entire high school physics class complete with lab assignments and exams. Our professor was there to answer questions and to administer the test. Being right after lunch made it tough to stay awake in a darkened room watching a black and white film of an uncharismatic speaker teaching a subject I had to will myself to be interested in. I managed to pass but with an unremarkable grade.

The great irony is that in the fall of that year, I would enter a Navy school in which the very physics our Berkeley professor was teaching would suddenly have great significance and importance. By then I was wishing I had applied myself with greater zeal to the lectures and associated labs.