The fortieth anniversary of my high school graduation is coming up this month, so I’ve been feeling nostalgic for 1982. The pictures posted above were taken in my parents’ backyard in June 1982, a few weeks after I graduated from high school, and more recently at a store in Draper, UT. I like the juxtaposition of the two photos – same person, same pose, same attitude, forty-year difference. That’s my 1971 Dodge Charger I’m leaning against in the photo from ‘82. Spring 1982 was a good time in my life. Not only was I anticipating graduating from high school, I had the general expectation of great things just over the horizon that only a seventeen-year-old can feel so defiantly and yet be so oblivious of what life might really hold in store.
One memory in particular stands out. I had a P.E. class from Coach Mecham, the wrestling coach at Wasatch High School. Mecham was a fairly young guy, mustached, in his late twenties, originally a farm boy from Montana. He had that compact wrestler’s build and was friendly to a point, but you knew you didn’t give Coach Mecham crap. I didn’t think Mecham liked me very much because I had quit the wrestling team the previous year. At the time I quit the team I was recovering from a severe bout of the flu and trying to juggle academics with a job bagging groceries at Days’ Market after school. Something had to give, and wrestling was what gave. I wasn’t very good at it anyway.
Coach Mecham let us have a class baseball tournament the last month of school. He divided us into teams, and we agreed that the losers had to buy the winners milkshakes at JoAnn’s, a restaurant near the high school. JoAnn’s was home to an eight-foot-tall fiberglass statue of a chicken that stood in front of the place. That chicken would play a pivotal role on the night of our high school graduation, which is a story for another time.
We spent the last few weeks of our senior year playing baseball during PE class. My specialty was hitting the ball as hard as I could and running like hell to first base. If anyone stood in front of the base, I was just as likely to knock him over as try to get around him. What I lacked in finesse I made up for in brutishness. It worked; I usually got a base hit, even if I didn’t score. What can I say? We were a bunch of lower to middle class seventeen and eighteen-year-old boys growing up in a small town in Utah where education wasn’t a high priority, but sports were. I remember in one of the games I was up at bat and the guy playing shortstop on the other team started to talk trash. I believe the words he used were “easy out.” I hit the ball straight at his head, probably not intentionally, and he had to duck in order to not get hit in the face. Coach Mecham, who was umping the game, admiringly said “Nice hit.” I felt pretty good about that.
What makes me nostalgic about the whole experience is that not only was it a lot of fun, but it was also emblematic of a whole different era in education, one that is probably long gone. Nobody walked away angry about the results of the tournament. Somebody had to win, and somebody had to lose; that was life. As I recall I was on the losing team and I gladly drove to JoAnn’s to buy one of my friends on the opposing team a milkshake, during school time of course. Coach Mecham probably didn’t expend a lot of energy in planning the tournament – I’d bet he doesn’t even remember it – but here I am forty years later thinking about it. As a teacher I look back on that time and wonder if anyone will feel nostalgic about being in my class.
I wrote earlier that education – at least in academic areas – wasn’t our highest priority in May 1982. Like most high school seniors, we had other things on our minds. One of my friends lost his mother that spring, and another good friend was learning to adjust to life in a wheelchair. We didn’t go to the best school (by modern standards), but then some of us weren’t the best students, either. We did have some teachers who gave a damn, and who persevered despite the lack of money and other resources.
Looking back, the majority of us who went to school together in that era are successful. There are teachers, doctors, nurses, artists, attorneys, and newscasters among us. We didn’t have laws like No Child Left Behind to force somebody else’s version of success on us, nor did we have a bunch of right-wing politicians dictating what was appropriate for us to learn and what wasn’t; we discovered success for ourselves, and we actually learned American history, warts and all. I kind of miss that, and I hope my daughters are finding success without some fascist politician or educational bureaucrat defining what success – or failure – is for them.