According to a website that keeps up with my old high school graduating class about one in ten of the 450 of us who collected our diplomas from Mankato High in 1969 have died. We’re in our early sixties now so that’s not surprising. In earlier eras half of us or more would be dead by now so we’re lucky.
I remember the first, Wayne didn’t quite make it to graduation. He got drunk with his buddies out at a state park was left by himself in the dark and fell over a cliff and broke his neck. The second, Peggy, disappeared shortly after graduation and before I graduated from college a bunch of kids found her skull along a farm road and played with it for a while before delivering it to the police. She was almost certainly a homicide victim and remains a cold case to this day. A couple days ago the site reported that Gary W. died. From the few tributes on the page I gather that he died alone and in ill health perhaps from drink, perhaps from a broken heart. Fireball mentioned sympathetically that Gary’s small son had died years earlier and that he had taken it hard.
Any beef I had with Gary died before high school was over. At our twentieth reunion I sat across from him at a table and he told me he was a mason/bricklayer in Colorado. That’s not how we started out. I’d come from a pretty miserable junior high experience and high school would broaden my horizon’s immensely and convince me that I wasn’t a complete loser. Gary was in my homeroom in my sophomore year (ninth grade was still the last year of junior high in most of Minnesota then). Both our last names began with W’s as did most of the other kids in homeroom.
He took an early dislike to me and in phy ed class he would trip me when we played basketball a sport I had the height for but no head for. He had a buddy Glen who enjoyed harassing me as long as Gary was there to back him up. Needless to say I wasn’t enamored of either of them. At one of our report card periods he passed his around in homeroom smirking at all the F’s on it for everyone else to see. I was no great student but such an act struck me as one of bravado covering something up.
It didn’t help that he was already working on a beard something I’d have to wait for college to sport and afterwards for it to thicken up. It was worse that lots of girls found him cute. He had the aura and allure of a bad boy.
He signaled that his harassment was over at the end of our first year when he told a buddy of mine he voted for me for student council rep for our homeroom. I beat the incumbent, Mary W. after I gave a quirky funny speech about my credentials. I discovered I got almost all the votes when I went to turn them in at the student council office and was told they didn’t need my ballots. I counted them and its very likely I still have them in a decrepit rubber band in my mementos. Asked why he had voted for a kid he’d spent the better part of the year harassing he just shrugged and said he liked my speech.
My troubles with Gary were over but he continued to scrape the bottom of the barrel in school while I joined the debate team and gave off sparks of potential in other ways. In my junior year I was in a Debate class. It was called that but it really served mostly as a place where the eggheads on the team could hang around together in the last class of the day. I was actually the fifth or sixth best debater which limited my role on a four man (person) team. Our coach was a jerk of the first order and my wife who had him one year as her coach a couple years after me was humiliated by him. When she was only awarded a second place finish when he felt she had earned the top spot he had the bad grace to order the whole team to walk out of an awards presentation in protest. If he wasn’t ogling girls and making snide remarks about how short their skirts were he was handing out some other sort of sarcasm to keep his students cowed.
Perhaps the least professional thing he did before I quit debate at the end of my second year was read through the list of our classes IQ scores. This was not public information but he read through the list and telling us who was ranked where and following up by asking why these high IQ types weren’t on the team. I was both appalled and curious to learn the rankings of my fellow students. We did have a couple of the top kids on the debate team. I wasn’t one of them.
As he poured through the list he stopped and asked, why isn’t this kid on the team? He’d never heard of Gary W before. I was floored. My old nemesis was the second “smartest” kid in our very brainy class.
At the end of the last year of school I strolled through the student art exhibition. It was mostly the kind of kitsch that one might have expected to be submitted by the art teachers. I skipped art in high school. Wasn’t interested. As I looked over the entries I stopped at a remarkable oil painting. Today I only have an impression of earthy colors swirling in a partly representational partly impressionistic image. I faintly recall it looking like a Crucifixion. It was good enough to seek out the name of its creator. It was Gary W’s work. That IQ ranking suddenly made sense to me and I’ve carried that lesson with me ever since.
One of the half dozen classmates to have commented on Gary’s passing was another old friend of mine that I’ve regretted missing at the two reunions I attended. John H is the subject of one of my favorites stories about a girl we were both sweet on. I don’t think he knew Gary W well, if at all. I got the impression from his comment that like other’s of us from the class of 69 he may be feeling his own mortality and Gary’s passing gave him an excuse to give vent to this. He quoted the Elizabethan poet Donne, to wit:
” .. any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee..”
Amen, John, Amen.
