"The worst class ever…"
Torrey Orton
May 31, 2011 Memorial Day
Taft School Class of 1961 50th Reunion – 12-14 May, 2011
A Straight's View
We were the worst class ever we were told by the Headmaster at our graduation in 1961, or so I repeatedly heard from my classmates. I don't remember that moment 50 years ago. Nor did I remember a host of other events that came up in passing comments or explicit explorations by my classmates – even if I was centrally involved. Apparently, as JM regaled the diners on our first night, I was "killed" by a night time assault by HH in a 1959 precursor to Nightmare on Elm Street. Couldn't find the slightest trace of my death, then or now. So, maybe I should leave this summary effort to others with better neuronal qualifications.
Taft and me now
But, I can't. I have to write this for me on the way to creating my two continent 'home'. Some of that home is in the hands of you classmates of '61 who co-own my life from 1956 to 1961. I have to write to make sense of my now through the thens which underlie it. Taft was a home and I have to know it and them to know me. And anyway, I just have to understand. It's what I do. By fate's hand, my present home is also in the middle of a world historical event, I think.
What will be told here is mainly the story of my reunion. This better ring some bells for others of you, too, otherwise it's all in my mind (which is possible enough!). I'll try to structure the story through the main events – meals and associated functions. There are some themes which cross the whole domain, so they may be treated as such. People will be named by their initials. Fictionalising the real people who make the story what it is for me would seriously demean the reality. Initialising them should preserve privacy to the community of believers who can identify their owners.
Deciding what is really American is an important part of this reflection, so some of my choice of content will reflect what I think is really American, what is typical. That may be a matter of dispute for sure.
Paul C and us - The 50th Reunion Dinner
Continuing with the theme of what can I say with some confidence to be true, I think KG noted that the kids at Taft now seem happy. This was on the bus on the way to the first event – the Thursday reunion dinner. He was contrasting their state with ours in our times. He brought into view the theme for the night – sadness, anger, disappointment – which I later characterised as "depressed affect" in the present group.
The intensity of speakers' feelings revealed a range of still present hurts which I had not noticed enough in their time to remember now. They were not my hurts at the time, which were strong enough to make it easy to say I hated the place for a few decades after leaving in '61 and to assure the Alumni office I would not be contributing ever and to stop sending me encouragements to do so. Some of the hurt – JH, JS and John S – arose from treatment by the school authorities (symbolised and sometimes personally fronted by Paul C) which branded them as misfits, defectives of some sorts. Their misfit was that their learning styles (kinaesthetic, tangible, etc.) and activity preferences (making and doing rather than observing and contemplating) and natural temperamental exuberance (throwing snowballs at plough drivers from open dorm windows, looking out to celebrate hits and getting caught forthwith!) did not fit the school mission: to produce college entrants on the way to professional or service (teaching, religion) careers housed behind white picket fences. How many of our classmates who got "lost" or chose not to return were also injured in the same regime?
The treatment reflected, in turn, institutional assumptions about human potential which still dominate schooling and professional entry. A further turn is that the era of our passage thru Taft was the leading edge of a decline of traditional authorities and boundaries, an edge which overflowed with the multi-dimensional socio-political movements of the '60's. These institutional assumptions fed on our parents' history of Depression scarcity (or its threat) and the titillating rush of post-war recovery. Our parents, too, contributed for some of us to denials of real vocational preferences like 'if you choose Yale Art you pay; if you choose Penn business, I pay' as RL explained part of his early life course to me. 50 years later he's got his art studio.
Historical footnote: Some of us wondered what was happening in our times at Taft that warranted or encouraged the negative attitude which was emblematic* of those times. Was it some shift in the foundations of modernity (or last seismic shuffles of pre-modern structures), perhaps? Here are some '50's precursors with potentially high impact items in bold:
Art – Pollock, Smith, and predecessors back to Picasso
Music – Jazz, blues, R and R and predecessors back to the atonal, etc.
Theater – The Sandbox; Death of a Salesman and back to Becket….
Novel / poetry – Catcher in the Rye; On the Road; Lord of the flies; Lady Chatterley's Lover…Ginsberg's Howl
Social – Brown vs. Board of Education, Rosa Parks' Montgomery bus ride, Little Rock High School integration
Political – McCarthyism; Freedom rides (first in the May of '61); Fear of the bomb (Mutual Assured Destruction, and such)
And, we could acknowledge that post-modernity was previewed variously by Heraclitus, Zeno, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Whitman, Einstein (relativity), Heisenberg (uncertainty), Berg, Cage, and the movement towards various personal freedoms (to be at the table, on the bus, in the school, on the job) which were denied / blocked for large parts of humanity by traditional thought and structures; and in tandem was the rise of new enemies: USSR and PRC, with boundary skirmishes starting from Korea and sliding into Vietnam under our noses as we left school.
*one of my brothers mentioned a week later that every second word out of my mouth in those days was 'duh', now rendered memorably in Homer's 'doh'. He was Taft '65; my brother, that is.
Undiscussables
All human organisations have undiscussables. These are sometimes fundamental assumptions like an organisation's justification for its existence or parts of its history which conflict with that purpose. They may be undiscussable because we cannot retrieve them easily from the depths of personal and collective consciousnesses. In addition, however, the undiscussable may be pieces of organisation history which compromise its justification and are undiscussed because we are implicated in the compromising. Such matters are often actively suppressed by organisation members.
Undiscussables ramble around in the foreground and background of life, appearing in moments like the Thursday dinner and then reappearing in voluntary, but personally compelling expressions like R, J and B's respective post-reunion emails about PC. I hope this access to each other (and indirectly to all the '61ers because the total email list has been used to carry the expression) will grow an understanding of our era, both what we shared and experienced differently!
Talking to HDL after the reunion raised another level of need at play in the PC discussion: that we all need a map for life, and suffer when there's none available or those on offer are felt to be corrupted – wrong guideposts, mismeasured distances, undisclosed dangers…you know what I mean. His wife recalled that her older brother had similar 'attitude' problems in his prep school times (close to ours) and that she heard similar reports of many schools like ours. We were living in mapless times led by people who had only worn options to offer. The new leaders were often to look like no map at all, and that's part of the story of our lives since them.
JC
For me an undiscussed event is around a now "lost" classmate – JC – who got disappeared in a flash of bureaucratic excess driven by now inconceivably narrow values (about drink and smoke, and not even dope). He doesn't appear in our public class records, but maybe lives in some minds because a couple of people told me bits of the story on the side. My own involvement is conflicted. At the time, I made it clear that I believed covert alcohol consumption should have been left where it was found – hidden among the co-drinkers. On the other hand, I believed that once exposed to the school's policing system, processes had to follow their course. I did not, I now can see, have the guts to confront the system's being based on a hypocrisy, even though a legal one (we were "under age" for drinking)!! With this issue we were engulfed in one of the longest standing contradictions of our culture – the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate intoxicants. This was a bit beyond my competence!! But…. it cost JC a price I still do not know.
Ethico-theological footnote: I wonder who decided I was the one for policing Sunday church attendance for 1960-61? I dropped into the stone church Friday morning on a wander around town for old times' sake, finding my seat in the balcony still available. From there I had ticked three hundred forty (??) boxes for attendance records every Sunday of the year.
At least one of our since "lost" classmates benefitted from sleights of my recording hand. I do not recall feeling the slightest compunction about this dereliction since the duty was merely formal and never audited. So, the missing member's benefit from my derelictions were never in public view, though how not is another wonder. In a similar vein (wonder at not being caught), I smoked in my monitorial suite, Level 4 Old Building, on out of hockey season evenings, using the ashtray facility of the steel frame bunks for butts. The floor master was a smoker, too, thus immune from detecting fellow travellers. As for the lower-mids surrounding us…thus were the young given their first training in institutionalised hypocrisies. Who compromised Taft values more seriously – JC or me? I vote for me.
Friday lunch at the golf club
One of the great things in life is when a group's conversation steps up to a different level of openness and vulnerability. This happened at lunch Friday at the table I was at with NP, BC, JBS, JH, and spouses, as appropriate. Obsessiveness was the subject and personal vulnerability the currency of participation. Somehow, S talking about husband JH's predilection for order elicited an unscripted opening by N about his own ADHD and the work of his foundation to support kids in developmental straits. Discussion flowed around the table from that start.
I imagine this kind and degree of openness would be very unlikely in a table of people who had met by chance on a cruise ship or walk in the park. Having history can block, but also open. For me the reunion was a quick opening to a wide variety of topics at significant depths. Whatever my relationships with individuals, having history of some kind with all of them allowed talking interesting / serious matters quickly. And, where there was unfinished business of various kinds it all progressed more quickly, often because I did not know there was unfinished business on others' parts with me!
A walk in the woods
Also contributing, as almost always, to fulfilling talk were activities like the walk in some woods near Washington, Conn (home of The Gunnery, if you remember) with NP and BC. This had been organised in advance to ensure some real exercise amid the reunion celebrations. It also allowed some more richly fledged discussion of matters raised earlier.
The old guard dinner Friday night
Some people came and went that night, visiting solely for that event. I missed them in detail, noticing them in passing. The same can also be said for the whole reunion. About this time I was beginning to get personal detail overload and re-explanation download. And my attention was directed towards what was coming next – this: saying goodbye with awareness that so much was yet to be said and done, and never could be within the time available formally. I was starting to rush conversations…
Proselyte's progress…KB and me
Talking of unfinished business, there was a promised engagement with KB which was announced to each other almost at first sight on the first bus Thursday evening. It took numerous re-enforcements and promises of continuing commitment to talk before we got to the after dinner bar bash Friday eve. Amidst a swarm of existing conversations we pushed aside the distractions and headed into our main act, which had been foreshadowed by KB's religious moments at the public lectern.
There followed an hour and a half nose-to-nose engagement around matters of faith and its possibilities to unfold with/for me – a question I am open to entertaining, but not driven to answering. There was a moment of feeling the engagement to be more than an entertainment, which led me to suggest some continuing virtual exploration. Three challenges of faith remained at the end for me as they had been from the start: that the Christian focus is individual profession more than collective; that Christianity is one of the religions of the Book with no greater or lesser claim than the other two on personal credibility; and, that expression of Christianity's message, like Judaism and Islam, is often perverted by the distortions of creating and, more impacting, sustaining its organisational forms – the denominations. These three are mutually reinforcing.
This was a classically American experience for me, offering direct access to a most distinctive American characteristic – religion and religiosity – with which I have never been comfortable, nor successfully completely indifferent. My failure to achieve confident indifference has repeatedly been fed by acquaintance with stunning personal models of faith like KB over my life course.
For me the main glory of this event was its basis in a mutual recognition more than 50 years ago of hidden talents, even though at the time we (KB and I) could not have seemed, to others and ourselves, to be on more different paths. These differences are the drivers of our actual paths (leaving matters of fate aside), yet are underpinned with a similar sense of truth or value or something like that. I am seeing now that this sense of truth exists with a number of other class members, though some were not visible to me in the past, notably NP and SM. I take this as a remark about me missing their capacities.
A class observed
Having tried Friday unsuccessfully, I pre-engineered a class visit for Saturday AM, which we actually got to near the right time. It was Upper-mid AP English with a focus on Whitman. Three thoughts: I wish someone had taught me poetry that way 54 years ago. It would have advanced my feeble grip of the form by a decade. Second, the class process was wonderfully flexible by offering space for individual contributions and reflection in balanced amounts and distribution across a small group. Third, the kids contributed freely and easily in about the worst setting imaginable: a bunch of short-term visitors ranging from age 8 to 68 hanging around their ears. Plus, I learned a fine point about the third line of the first stanza of Whitman's "I sing myself". What more can be wanted?
One counter-point: two or three times the teacher appended cautions to the room about not judging anything…as if a judgment were a moral failing…all the while expressing judgments himself implicitly in his directing students towards various aspects of Whitman (and correctly so, as far as I could tell; he both provided direction when pathways were fading in the process and when points of fact were abused).
Saturday lunch, after a walk to the quad
Publically joining the Old Guard
It's funny to be admitted to something I never aspired to join. I do not think of myself as old (more than once a day), though I do think of myself as guarding many things and people. Being formally admitted to the Old Guard by Wally MacMullen highlighted this conflicted condition. Guardians take care of things and people, and many guardians are not old. So, the 'old guard' is a special state reflecting our all carrying into age the guardianship of others and being recognised for this human service. While on the surface we are being recognised for surviving and showing up, more importantly we symbolise the worths that are to be guarded – nothing personal, of course!!
This reflection invites another – the guardian monitor me working in various ways like watching out for a little lower-mid who looked a bit like my brother who was to arrive at Taft the year after I left and I would not be there to watch out for him (he made out fine after thrashing a resentful types seeking to revenge his dislike of me on him) as I had not been for most of his growing up ever.
JS, and me
He was startling and striking from the first moment of the first night – a man realised in his release from life duties honourably sustained for decades (the family store) until able to step into the true shoes of his self: competitor and teacher/coach. I should have known all those years ago when his mother and mine somehow connected at a Mother's Day hockey game in'60 – a most unlikely pairing driven by mutual recognition. I'm sure I did not provide as much recognition to JS then and I am pleased I could amend for that somewhat now. Reunion is both of the old and the new.
JH the boundless
Finally, JH the boundless…I can express my extreme pleasure at being even in the vicinity of JH, but I am not sure why he is such a source for me. Well, I am sure: It is his mindless rambunctious lovingness, so unsuited to an IT design predilection he could (and can) no more change than he can his rambunctiousness; he who alone among us comes back to the place of his youthful humiliation with a gift which can only be made from one who has paid a high price for its acquisition. Aw shucks…I can't say it anywhere near so well as he did so long ago …Shucks!! And my thanks.
Closing openings
For me the reunion was confirmation that we belong to the first (?) generation of the unretired rather than our predecessors, the "undead". Many of us are still growing in different ways, some visible in encounters above. So, overall, a sense of only just having started conversations, with so long to go that will never, except in a few cases, be continued or completed. Sadness for that and gladness that I know this, which I did not before reunion. It complicates my life by anchoring my present as foreigner (in Australia) in my past as local (in USA), neither wholly resolvable.
Undiscussables revisited – challenging opportunities
When I started writing this three weeks ago, what comes next I sketched shortly after starting. The questions just emerged seeming to suggest the last step of my explorations – a collection of guideline directions for continued living. I had not yet formulated my undiscussables discussion, but since they are all part of one consciousness, I am seldom surprised by what emerges, only its order, colours and weights vary.
Challenges arising from reflecting on who / what we are:
- What to "out" and what not to? This is the whistle-blower question, critical to open doors into spaces which otherwise are relegated to dreams and/or recriminations.
- Telling illuminating stories to the young (and still young old) – this is the offering of lived lives requirement.
- Who did we forget? Did we forget some because they were too hard to remember in their time? What would we have to do to ourselves to open ourselves to what was previously forgettable, and how could we test our openness??
- What of ourselves did we lose on the way from then to now? We only became ourselves by both doing certain things and not doing others; some we could never have done for lack of interest or talent; others were not open to us for reasons of fate or active refusal by greater powers, though talent and interest were available; others had to be let go but still could be recovered to some extent…like my putting some time into learning to sing (which I'm considering).
- What's the price of the losses and who's paying it? (the forgotten?) My analyst once suggested I had dues to pay to receive benefits I am seeking. If I figure that one out I'll post it. Something to do with seeking forgiveness and offering it to others??
- How can we learn the answers given the frailties of our grasps on our pasts, the demands of our commitments in the present and the growing limitations of our energies for understanding? Perhaps the hardest challenge to turn into an opportunity since it seems we are surrounded by unavoidable constraints guaranteed to increase with time! How can the prospect of weakness be a strength?
For once I am going to say these are challenges that should be framed as opportunities precisely because they are so easily heard only in their confronting configurations. Maybe not so worst after all….
My warmest regards,
Straights
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