In Iowa: Should old acquaintances be forgot

One of life's more sobering experiences awaits me Saturday - the 50th reunion of the East Buchanan High School class of 1966.

The attainment of such a landmark makes it hard not to notice that you've become a high-mileage unit with little trade-in value and a future of mounting repair bills.

Having in the ensuing five decades gotten bald, gray and flabby, I can only hope that my classmates, most of whom I have not seen since our 25th reunion, have not all become rich, handsome/beautiful and famous.

I also hope they will not - as I myself do on my increasingly rare glances at a mirror - fail to recognize me.

A look back through the '1966 Buccaneer” shows that 64 of us baby boomers graduated from the high school in Winthrop. At least nine members of the class - including Shirley Van Gorder, who was killed in a car crash before graduation, and Don Kremer, who was killed in Vietnam in 1968 - will not be attending.

All we boys had short hair and hairless faces, and most of the girls had a bouffant look reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy.

We lived sheltered lives, more or less oblivious to the changing times that Bob Dylan warned of two years earlier.

Like us, television was considerably more innocent then, with bare skin and profanity verboten before the advent of cable. It would not have been in character for Hoss and Little Joe and Andy and Barney, characters in two of 1966's most popular programs, to even think of any of the seven words comedian George Carlin said you could never say on television.

Most of us accessed popular music through the car radio and sang along with such frequently played tunes as Sonny and Cher's 'I Got You, Babe” and the McCoys's 'Hang on Sloopy” during the first semester and the Young Rascals's 'Good Lovin'” and the Mamas and Papas's 'Monday, Monday” during the second semester.

Literary events, of interest to an avid reader and aspiring writer, were dominated by the publication of 'In Cold Blood,” in which Truman Capote elevated crime reporting to an art and established a model for prose that flowed as clearly, effortlessly and sparklingly as a spring-fed stream.

Some beer was drunk, to that I can attest, and some of my football teammates were dismissed from the squad for breaking curfew, but I doubt if any of my classmates ever even smelled marijuana smoke before graduation.

Walter Cronkite, 'the most trusted man in America,” delivered the evening news on CBS, opposite Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC and Peter Jennings on ABC. Not that anyone my age was much interested in the news, which (then as now) was mostly bad.

The Vietnam War, which dominated the news, was the 900-pound gorilla in the room that we seniors never mentioned. Though the war was destined to kill one of our classmates, Don Kremer, and maim another, Arlinn Gushee, both of Aurora, we boys, if we thought about it at all, thought it would surely be over by the time we were old enough to be affected.

Had we been paying closer attention, though, we'd have noticed that U.S. troop strength in Vietnam surged from 184,000 at the midpoint of our senior year to 385,000 before the end of 1966. By December 2, 1968, when our classmate was killed, it had affected us all and would continue to do so for years to come.

We will remember Don at our reunion Saturday evening, and we will party like it's 1966 - until about 10 o'clock.