"A NEW AMERICAN GOTHIC"
THE SECOND CHAPTER
In Search of Salmo Salar Sebago
It was “All in the game” and we were ready to “Catch a falling star” in the spring of ’58. Songs of the year on billboard, school was over, loves loved, and new ones anticipated. Graduation from Westfield Senior High School in New Jersey an era ended.
Elvis was inducted into the Army. Gigi, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Defiant Ones were hot movies of the year. Khrushchev became the premier of the Soviet Union and De Gaulle the Premier in France. But who knew. Laurie London told us we “Had the Whole World in our Hands” and the Everly Brothers said “All we had to do was Dream”.
To write about ones high school class is a chore not taken lightly and one repeated over the years by many authors with varying degrees of success. This however, is not a story about a high school senior class. This is about two high school seniors embarking upon a life long adventure neither expected, but by which both have been amazed. Let it be said that I was and am not an “A” student as the song goes, nor a student of the English language. But I was a kid who was capable of transcending the cliques within the student body with a reasonable degree of aplomb.
Our class, not unlike most, was defined by the “Jocks” and what we now call the “Geeks”. The “In Crowd” and the “Out Crowd” were other significant descriptions. It is truly amazing to find these designations were virtually gone as early as the thirtieth year reunion. I guess because I played varsity baseball that I was in the “Jock Crowd”, but also a bit of the “In Crowd” because I dressed preppy cool. I think that I was also a member of the “Out crowd” too because I did'nt drink, never went all the way, or owned a motorcycle. I did own a ’51 Ford coupe, metallic green, and that “In crowd”.
The car was customized as was the style of the time and I can remember trying to put after burners on the twin exhausts with the help of my friend Abe. He held the spark plugs to the exhaust pipes and I thought he said to go ahead and try it by turning on the ignition. The resulting shock caused him to jerk his head up in a crashing collision with the bumper. He was under the vehicle at the time. Abe still remembers that for some strange reason.
Even though the graduating class was large, there were smaller cliques as defined by a number of different things. In my case our group was defined by the neighborhood in which we lived. Whychwood was a small area of Westfield, NJ which was a bedroom community serving the New York City market. Our fathers commuted to the City every day, mothers kept the home, and we went to school. We walked to high school until one of us was old enough to drive, seventeen at the time. It would have been so un-cool to ride our bikes.
We played sports after school or worked at part time jobs or both. In my case I worked part time in a sporting goods store, The Sport Center, all four years of high school. I worked three to six every day and nine till six on Saturdays. During the Christmas holidays we were open each night of the week until nine o’clock. When I worked until 9:00 PM, I ate dinner across the street at Jarvis’s drug store which also had a pretty good restaurant. School was over at 2:30 in the afternoon each day, so there was not a lot of free time for things like studying, dating, hunting, fishing, and baseball. But we all seemed to get it done including the requisite hanging out with friends at places in town like “Shades”, a soda fountain type place.
Innocence was never lost back then but high school hopes were always high. If a girl were to get pregnant, a real scandal would result and one out of 250 or so was a rarity. Graduates were headed for new lives, but most were destined to drift apart from their buddies after graduation.
A summer of final togetherness was necessary before the ritual of college began. In other instances, jobs began and the reality of life was an earlier intrusion.
The nucleus of my crowd included the likes of Tom, Rick, Kenny or “Worm”, Bob or “Bobby”, Jim, Frank or “Abe” and me “Skip”. Normally, after graduation a week at the Jersey shore was the norm. Seaside Heights, NJ was the spot. This trip was really like what the college crowd today calls Spring Break. It was a right of passage for most of our colleagues. However, the parents of my immediate friends were much more visionary than us. We were restricted to home base and not allowed to play with the rest of our class. No drinking and womanizing for us. This really confirmed our “Out crowd” status much to our parents delight and our disgust.
I had introduced my friends to bow hunting and fishing in school so a replacement trip to my parents place on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay seemed in order. Fewer girls, and no drinking, with my mother as a chaperon. This fit the other parent’s idea of a week’s after graduation celibate celebration. We had a good time fishing, crabbing, water skiing, and chasing girls in places called Rock Hall and Piney Neck. We caught more fish than girls thankfully, so it was still a time of innocence.
The Maryland trip was the seed for a lifelong experience. An experience which would establish the precedent for two of the graduates carrying them forward to a forty plus year tradition. A tradition not duplicated by many people within a lifetime of experiences.
