Blame it on high school

Being Roundup Ready 


Blame it on high school

I recently acquired my own graduating Class of 1965 Great Falls High School yearbook,  "The Roundup" - reflecting our sports team name, The Bison.  We were definitely "Roundup Ready."  Except for me.  I only appeared in it as part of a blurry group picture of National Merit Scholarship Finalists - although I never even applied for any "scholarships," and thought it was insulting and degrading to do so - like hitch-hiking, which I also considered "begging."  I was a fair student, if I liked the teacher, but I was there to learn, not get "good grades" or "scholarships", which one might naturally assume has something to do with intelligent study rather than money, but that is not the case.  In short, I was a "rebel."  

My grandmother did pay for a senior picture from the Nebel Studio (having both studied German, we knew what "Nebel" meant), but I never submitted one to the Roundup, nor did I reserve a copy  for myself.  I'd had bad experiences with my sophomore and junior Roundups, with no more than 5-10 signatures of (mostly elementary school) friends and associates.  You see, I was not socially "well-adjusted."  I did not have a successful adolescence. In fact, I was not "well-adjusted" at all. 

I found the Roundup I recently purchased at an antique store, and since it was water-stained, as though it had been in a flood or something,  I only paid $8 (2012 dollars) for something which had cost something like $45 (1965 gold standard dollars, when the price of silver was $1.29/oz - now $30+).  In those days, you could buy a real $20 gold piece for $48-50, and silver coins were still in circulation at face value.  So, the depreciation on this  year book (and undamaged ones usually sell for about $20 today) was something like 99%.  The 45 silver dollars (or other silver coins) or $20 gold piece used to buy it would now be worth over $900.  Imagine a kid asking his parents for $900 to buy a high school yearbook!  

Only medical procedures (and some military contracts) have inflated that much.  I just read that the going price for infant circumcision is now $400-600 (in addition to other pediatric care), and I imagine it was $5-10 back in 1965.  My whole birth cost (doctor and hospital) was just over $100 in 1947.  The same amount of care, including 2-3 days in hospital (which was then routine) would now easily cost $15,000 most places.  

I've probably spent 10 hours or more perusing this yearbook which I had previously only glanced at in libraries or friends' houses.  I found that I knew hundreds of people, with a half-dozen or more being present "Facebook" friends and comrades-in-peace and justice.  If FB wasn't seen as a "Jewish" project, there would no doubt be many more.  

Last night, I  saw a very good episode of "Freaks and Geeks" from 2000 - one of the best accounts of teen-age life (this  looking back to the 1980's) ever made.  I've also recently seen several John Hughes teen films from the 1980's - Hughes having recently passed on.  "Pretty in Pink" is absolutely right-on as an account of class conflicts in high school, and it was this that made me an enemy of large "consolidated" high schools.  The Molly Ringwald character is very close to a female version of me, and I wonder if that wasn't intentional, although I don't know any of the film-makers or actors.  

I remember one girl, Tracy ----, daughter of one of the largest landowners in Cascade County, who I knew as a sophomore (and who went on the Norway Summer School trip in the summer of 1963, which subsequently defined our high school class "elite" - everyone who went mentioned it in their senior picture comments), and then disappeared from GFHS.  I also remember the sophomore boys in the locker room scheming about seducing her - the most prominent one being a Mormon of Greek descent.  I imagine that her father placed her in the local Catholic high school for that very reason, and I later heard that she died young as a drug addict. And this a person from the highest elites whom I wouldn't have dreamed of asking out or "fraternizing" with.  The one "date" I had in highschool (as a sophomore) was with the sister of my sister's best friend, and I never repeated that trauma. 

There was a huge Catholic-Protestant rivalry going on in those days, difficult to even visualize, today.  And there was also a class stratification in this mostly working-class and small business town which, if it exists today, is well-concealed and never talked about.  The rich people mostly departed long ago, or send their kids to private schools.  Central Catholic High School, which then had some 600 students in Great Falls, actually closed for more than 20 years, but has re-opened in this century, and now has more than 100 students, with high academic achievement.  

The strange thing about 1960's public school life for me was that I was both an aristocrat and leading role model, yet a total outcast in my own mind - hating school and nearly everyone in it.  This I now attribute to the fact that I was an "adult child of alcoholics", but I didn't learn about that syndrome or condition until I was in my 30's.  Although my family was prominent, the men were mostly alcoholics, while the women had married into the working class and remained responsible church-goers and conformists to the status quo, without any intellectual or cultural pretensions whatsoever.  They did maintain the puritanical, Protestant attitudes of blaming the victims, however, and whatever happened to me had to be my own fault, since I was obviously "gifted" and the favorite of our grandmother, who promoted me as the sole male Stephens of our generation, and thus in line to inherit a 1200 acre ranch along the lines of primogeniture and entail (which no one else had ever heard of, of course).  

I've often wondered how much our civic condition has to do with environmental factors in Great Falls.  We were home to large metal smelters and refineries for more than 70 years, which peaked during World War II and were still dominant in the 1960's.  The fact that I spent my first 6 years 30 miles downwind from Great Falls, in the foothills of the Highwood Mountains, is of little help, since we have determined that the heavy metals pollution might, if anything, be even worse there than in Black Eagle, where the Anaconda Smelter was located.  

Teenagers tend to form into gangs, which may be engaged in drug trafficking or some other predatory behavior, but are mostly concerned about controlling the sex lives of their sisters and other females in their territory.  And we know that heavy metal poisoning leads to all sorts of mindless, aggressive behavior, as well as autism, madness (the "mad hatters" used mercury compounds in their trade), etc. Surely there is more than an average amount of this in Great Falls, and those of us in my generation were especially susceptible to it. 

Unfortunately, the same veterans of war and heavy industry still control the school system and local politics, and if possible, they want to re-establish the rule of Heavy Metal and other fascist institutions - especially in the schools, libraries, and other parts of the "cultural infrastructure."  No doubt this has a lot to do with the fact that we were home to the first nuclear-armed Minuteman strategic missile base - Malmstrom - which  still exists a half-century later with the same mission.