I can't even really recall what date that we actually decided we were going to meet at Norb Warnes house. I only remember that it was late in the summer of 1988. And I can't even recall anymore who the original committee consisted of; I only remember there was 8 of us that came together. I shared an original 8 1/2 X 11 with Norb Warnes that I'm pretty sure had those names on there. But Norb still has it so I can't review it to mention the names here. And as time moved along and the work had to get done, it whittled down to the 3 of us. It would be Norb Warnes, Joe Barrile, and Lou Marconi. To put together a 1989; 20 Year Reunion, there was going to be some work to do because there was no current data-base to work with---since there was no active alumni apparatus to draw information from. I decided that besides being the treasurer, I was going to take on the responsibility of securing directory information so Joe could get the announcements out. I had two things that I felt confident to be working in my favor. The first was that we were still young!!!! So I was hoping that the parents of the Fallon Class of 1969 graduates were still alive and, for the most part, living where they were---in 1969. Or that they weren't bashful and was still listed in the phone book. The second factor was most critical. I knew I was going to be racking-up phone calls so I was going to be doing that---at Laughlin's Towing!!!! I worked nights and week-ends there on a part-time basis in the mid-1980's. I was often there---especially on the week-end; alone. I was never asked, but the phone bill had to be an interesting one!!! I mean---I'm calling Patanella in Illinois!! I'm catching up with Reinhardt in California!! I got ahold of Dan Christiano in Arizona, I got Dan Privitera in Akron (NY!!!!). And the list goes on!!! What helped in getting the calls 'buried' is that Laughlin also ran a 'rigging' business and his salesman was often calling prospects and vendors and jobbers---all over the country.
But something else was starting to occur. I was beginning to feel a FIRE in my belly; a desire to want to express in writing, what was churning in my heart, my mind, my soul. In effect, besides being the treasurer, and the grunt developing a data-base, I now started writing 'some' notes. After a while, these notes starting taking on journalistic paragraphs and pages with insights and perspectives. I'm thinking, there is probably one or two of you wondering if I was using one of those Marble-Patterned Composition Books!?!? No!!! I was using a 3-ring binder, instead. If I didn't like where the content was going, I just popped it out and started over!! But I was still gun shy. Being so non-descript in High School, I wasn't sure about my ability to express myself with confidence and I sure-as-hell wasn't sure yet--about how those around me were going to review it. The writing started taking on visits to the Downtown Erie County Library. I was also sourcing material at the Buffalo State College Library. Since I was a Lifetime Member of the Alumni Association, I had use of the Library there, for free!!! It is just so amazing!!! Back then---you wrote your notes and typed your detail on an electronic typewriter. Since there was no word-processing apparatus, you wanted to get the manuscript exactly right---then you paid to have someone type it. Now---when I Web Log, I just type along; let my thoughts go---and my mistakes!!! Correcting is so easy!!!
I decided that I was going to CHRONICLE our Bishop Fallon High School experience in an essay and present it to the community in a Pamphlet format. Joe Barrile helped put the written matter into a nice Cover-Paged Pamphlet---and it was decided that THE CHRONICLE would be the Memento for the 1989; 20 Year Class Reunion. Up to today, it has been authored as Anonymous. Now You Know The Rest Of The Story.
“ A CHRONICLE ”
The decade started out innocently enough, no doubt. Sure, there were a few distractions that might have had us pause for a moment or two, but nothing staggering enough to undermine that idyllic serenity.
On the international scene no doubt there was the East-West mind-game played between two Super Powers called the Cold War. There was the rising of national consciousness in Africa. Existing was a dispute between the wealthy landed-gentry and the disenfranchised in Cuba, the confusion over who had the right to claim landed, and immigrant status in the Middle East, and there was this petty misunderstanding between a despot and a dictator in Southeast Asia.
On the domestic scene there was a fringe sub-culture of disenfranchised intellectuals known as the Bohemian movement manifesting itself in such personages as Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Coincidental to this was some flexing of “expressive” muscle on a couple of college campuses on the West Coast. As well, there was a black woman in Alabama who wanted to sit in another part of a bus other than where she normally did. There were children, black children, in Arkansas who received special attention because they were going to a school different from the one they did the year before.
For the most part, however, we as a people and culture were pretty wrapped up and consumed by a burgeoning middle class prosperity and lifestyle, nurturing another wave of the blossoming baby boom and enhancing suburban sprawl. For the mainstream of America, “The Dream” had become a reality. Our parents were working hard, but they were also finding they could have time to enjoy life and still put something away so their children wouldn’t have to face the horrors of a depression as they had to.
Such was the near Camelot typesetting as we youngsters were making our way through the early years of the 1960’s and grade school, leading up to our converging into the hallways and homerooms of Bishop Fallon High School in the Fall of 1965.
Between the dawning of the decade and the halfway mark, we saw a man reach near invincible stature as he defused a dispute that had global conflagration written all over it. We distinctly remember what we were doing on that infamous day, approximately one year later when this same man was reduced to mortal frailty by way of an assassin’s bullet. We saw a Black man display inspirational leadership qualities preaching a message of racial equality and brotherhood through a peaceful agenda.
As well we saw the replacement President of the one fatally shot, decide to escalate dramatically our military involvement in a dispute over ideologies in a small, backward, but supposedly strategic, strip of land in Southeast Asia, and we saw a group of four young men from Liverpool, England sing and play music that, all at once, pioneered, rocked, shocked, and inspired the second wave of baby boomers to a new way of thinking, behaving, dressing, and expressing themselves. While we, now as students of Bishop Fallon High School, for the most part existed and conducted ourselves in a rather cloistered environment, the “changes” going on around us were becoming more and more evident.
Certainly, Camelot had eroded. Disillusionment had replaced that sense of harmony, homogeneity, and tranquility. Having been awakened, the black movement was now a real and vocal factor beckoning for attention. While probably a little too vocal in some quarters for what the Centrists felt comfortable with, the message had repercussions that could impede the progress considered moving a bit slower than desired.
Inspired by the evolution of the popular music, reinforced by relaxed tolerance levels brought about by the flexing of those expressive muscles in Academia during the late Fifties and early Sixties, there had occurred a passing of the torch, so to speak, of a rebellious code of dress and behavior to the high school aged adolescents across the land. This situation infused with a nationally sponsored effort to integrate schools racially, helped to feed the fires of expression, dissension, frustration and violence. Colleges and high schools were becoming more and more the testing grounds and sounding boards for a number of issues that had social and political significance. One was beginning to wonder if reading, writing, and arithmetic had any usefulness at all in these scholastic environments. On the local beat, while Bennett, Lafayette, Grover Cleveland, Emerson, East, Seneca, and Burgard High Schools were all having their problems with racial agitation and social commentary, Bishop Fallon High School was tranquil by comparison.
While certain persons of the student body, individually or collectively, may have wanted to express social and political commentary, the Oblates and the Lay Teacher Body at Large, either by accident or design, seemed to know how to recognize a potential trouble spot and defuse it by steering the energy into a more acceptable form. Activities like the Spirit Committee, Prom Committee, Student Council, Student Court, Library Council, Radio Club, Mission Club, Senior Activities Committee, World Affairs Forum and Science Club all seemed to have the desired effect. And of course, if these methods didn’t help to facilitate control and direction, some good old-fashioned corporeal punishment was never entirely out of the question. When it did appear in the isolated instances, its impact was “enlightening”.
As those four years ran their course, between the Fall of 1965 and the Summer of 1969, nurturing our “College Preparatory” educational development, events outside our hallowed walls would prove to be some of the most impacting and significant as any in our nation’s history.
By 1965, after an incredible burst of energy reflecting a string of amazing “firsts”, the United States, with the rendezvous mission of Gemini Seven and Six-A, was beginning to reverse the trend of Soviet dominance in the Race for the Moon. The NFL and rival AFL set up to have the two Champions of the 1966 campaigns play against each other in the first Super Bowl. Radical violence took to a new scale and dimension with the eruption of Watts, the black ghetto in Los Angeles. General Motors earnings broke all profit records. Sandy Koufax dominated as the Dodgers won over the Twins in the World Series. Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was murdered. “Sound of Music” was movie of the year. And “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, by the Rolling Stones, was Pop Music’s hottest single of the year.
By 1966 the uncertainty and unrest was even more evident. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union became the first ALF-CIO union affiliate to question President Johnson’s Vietnam Policy. Our sexual behavior patterns and their explanations are published in Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response. Buddhist monks were resorting to self immolation protesting government policies in South Vietnam. Richard Speck savagely murdered eight nurses in a Chicago dormitory. Cleveland, Chicago, and Omaha all had their taste of urban race rioting.
The summer had given rise to a new and auspicious label in Academia --- Student Power. The rise of the separatist “Black Power” movement had closed off the young white students to meaningful support. So these young, predominantly middle class intellectuals, eager to prove they had a social conscience, rejecting the materialistic pursuits of their parents, concentrated their energies on influencing and expanding the “New Left”. By 1968 Eugene McCarthy was to become its most visible standard-bearer on Capitol Hill. Helping to fuel the fires of the already pretty controversial war in Vietnam, Sergeant Barry Sadler released a somewhat idyllic ballad about “The Green Beret”. Law enforcement, already feeling itself handcuffed by social pressures, internal affairs scrutiny, and laws implemented in lesser courts, had to reckon with the Miranda Decision which forced law enforcement personnel to advise any suspects in their custody of “rights” before proceeding with any kind of interrogation. On the lighter side, “A Man for All Seasons” was movie of the year and the Monkee’s “Daydream Believer” was Pop Music’s big recording of the year.
In 1967 a Federal Court convicted heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay or the Muslin conversion of Muhammed Ali, of violating Selective Service Laws by refusing to be drafted. Disagreement in the Middle East ignites a military confrontation between Moshe Dayan’s Israel and Abdul Nasser’s Egypt. Israel embarrassed Egypt and the whole United Arab League with the ease it displayed in reducing the opposition to submission. It was, somewhat mockingly, referred to as the Six Day War. Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first black justice to the Supreme Court. The Haight-Ashbury version to student power and the youth movement; the flower children, had their anthem made to order in the form of Scott McKenzie’s “Are You Going to San Francisco?”.
Another song that provided additional significance was the Loving Spoonful’s “Summer in the City”. No doubt, the summer was going to be a hot one racially. In June Newark, N.J. got the dubious distinction of having the worst rioting and looting since the eruption of Watts in 1965, only to have that surpassed in July by the worst riot in the 20th Century erupting in Detroit’s 12th Street ghetto area. The riot is quelled only after the National Guard and 2,700 Army Regulars were sent to the area. In the four day disturbance 33 persons are killed. With an otherwise unblemished resume’ the U.S. Manned Space Program suffered a catastrophic, and potentially demoralizing, setback with the deaths of Apollo astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in their spacecraft while rehearsing for an upcoming flight at the Cape Canaveral launch pad. With the men still strapped into their seats, faulty wiring caused arcing turning the capsule into a searing inescapable furnace.
Social statements were even making it big time in entertainment. “Hair” was a smashing hit as an Off Broadway Play. Sidney Poitier is the Black Protagonist teacher trying to get respect in a hostile, white, working class high school setting in “To Sir with Love”. On the Pop Music scene Lulu’s “To Sir (With Love)” is the year’s number one hit, and movie of the year is “In the Heat of the Night”.
Then came 1968. In some areas, this was the watershed year. Some of the phenomena that were already in progress would come to a head this year. By now Vietnam is a controversial issue at home and abroad. At this point, the costs were escalating, the pace was lingering, there were mounting human losses on both sides, peace talks were virtually non-existent, morale was low, and after all the years involved, still no fronts existed in the guerilla war. So, as in years past, the soldiers on both sides were looking forward to another reprieve from this jungle nightmare in the Tet Truce, the couple of days set aside to celebrate the Vietnamese culture’s New Year. This time it would be radically different.
During the dawn of the first day of the Tet Truce, 30 January, amid the smoke screen of huge fireworks displays, rockets and artillery usher in the Viet Cong’s launching of the largest and best coordinated offensive of the war. Fighting is intensive on both sides. By 10 February the offensive is largely crushed. Militarily, Tet is decidedly a U.S. victory; but psychologically and politically it took its toll. Confidence in our involvement was eroding. By the end of March President Johnson would concede that he too no longer had the answer when he shocked the nation by announcing that he would not seek re-election to the presidency. Also, during March an event was unfolding that would ultimately become one of the war’s most publicized atrocities. A platoon from Charlie Company, American Division, slaughtered between 200 and 500 unarmed villagers at the hamlet of Mylai-4.
On the domestic scene it’s still more of the same. One pleasant distraction is the Winter Olympics. While the handsome French favorite Jean Claude Killy steals the show with his skiing successes, Peggy Fleming captures everybody’s heart with a performance that has her walk away with a gold medal. The Summer Olympics however prove to be the antithesis with a high element of tension and derision as exemplified by runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ raising of clenched “Black Power” fists while on the victory stand during the playing of the National Anthem. With one of the decade’s ugly scourges rearing its ugly head again, an assassin’s bullet determined that Reverend Martin Luther King would not make it to another planned peace rally of SCLC in Washington, DC during March. And the New Left’s rising star hopefully residing in the White House was diminished dramatically with an assassin’s bullet taking the life of Robert Kennedy in June.
Students from Coast to Coast are involved in sit-ins and confrontation politics. Columbia, San Francisco State, and Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley are the most publicized. Gary, IN and Cleveland, OH are the urban racial hot spots for the year. Philip and David Berrigan, both Catholic priests, burn draft records stolen from the local Selective Service office in Catonsville, MD. The North Koreans seize a “spy ship”, the USS Pueblo. On the international beat Czechoslovakia attempted to liberate itself from the Iron Curtain but is crushed by Soviet military power that is swift, effective, and eager to send a message that any additional attempts will be handled in similar fashion.
In a year laced with civil disorder and protest, no doubt the crown jewel and most publicized events had to be those centering around the Democratic National Convention 26-29 August. In the convention setting there was one thing getting frustratingly clearer as the agenda moved along; that the Daley Machine was in control of the destiny of the outcome. Forces on the inside and the outside would inevitably clash. Both inside and out, some of the clashes were verbal and some were outright physical. Inside Dan Rather and Mike Wallace, both broadcasters, got manhandled by Daley cronies. The crowd favorite Eugene McCarthy and other candidates and supporters were embroiled in lengthy debates punctuated by prolonged demonstrations. Outside, the week of mounting tensions and intermittent violence, coupled with the growing realization that the Daley Machine was squeezing the McCarthy/McGovern advocates out of the picture, had youthful anti-war demonstrators confront and engage police and National Guardsmen in a full scale riot. Of those arrested, eight of the ringleaders will go on to be indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to incite a riot. As folk heroes of the counter culture, they will become affectionately known as the Chicago Seven; with seven of the eight ending up on trial. If there was any time that was ripe for a “New Left” candidate it was right now.
By the next election though the socio-political forces impacting our society would be beating a different drum. What the Convention materialized was a very middle of the road Hubert H. Humphrey. Not able to galvanize with the new-left , Humphrey is outdistanced by Richard M. Nixon and a suggested silent majority. The movie of the year was “Oliver”. The number one Pop Single of the year was a little out of character for what was regularly on the charts. While there was a steady diet of “Soul” music, the Psychedelic sound, and folk-rock, the whimsical “Hey Jude” by the Beatles is the year’s hit.
Finally, there was 1969. The closing year to an amazing decade; the Senior year of our studies at Bishop Fallon High School. This too was a year full of some “amazing” and significant events. In its third edition, with the first two having been lopsided affairs favoring the NFL, on 12 January 69, Joe Namath follows up his brazened “prediction”, made earlier in the week, by leading his New York Jets over the smug and cocky Baltimore Colts, 16-7, in the Super Bowl. This represents the AFL’s first victory in this bragging rights encounter. Richard Milhous Nixon is sworn in as 37th President of the United States. “OH, Calcutta”, a new off-Broadway musical, takes expression of the theatrical art form to new limits by featuring nudity. A popular favorite, Mario Andretti, wins the Indianapolis 500. The Chicago Cubs, perennial doormats, under Leo Durocher, are making the most serious run for the National League Pennant since 1945.
Following a trend of show business stars getting into politics, Shirley Temple Black becomes a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. An estimated 400,000 youths of the flower-power persuasion turned out to listen to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair at White Lake, N.Y. for a three day weekend. The youths lived and grooved on music, love, trust, and harmony. An event that has unanswered questions to this day had serious political consequences for Senator Edward Kennedy. On July 18th, the car he was driving runs off the highway in Chappaquiddick, MA. and plunged into a pond, killing passenger Mary Jo Kopeckne.
By fulfilling a promise made by John F. Kennedy at the beginning of the decade, and seeking to realize the dream of mankind since the beginning of time, three Space Explorers embark on a mission for the Moon. On 20 July, teaming with Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft Columbia, Neil Armstrong becomes the first human being to step onto the Moon’s surface. The drama is consummated with Armstrong’s brief but meaningful remark, voiced as he was stepping from the lunar landing module, “…that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind.”
The New York Mets, clown princes of the National League dramatically surge past the Chicago Cubs in a late season rally, GGGRRR, and go on to defeat the Baltimore Orioles in a World Series chock full of clutch-hitting and dramatic play making. Millions of Americans paused to express dissatisfaction with the U.S. action in Vietnam during Moratorium Day, 15 October. Observances occurred in virtually every town and city across the country. “Midnight Cowboy” is the movie of the year. “Aquarius”, by the Fifth Dimension is the year’s sweeping favorite on the Pop Music scene. And of course the year’s significance, to some, was of a sexual flavor, with the suggestive inference the numbers had. School administrators were quick to make sure that when a “69” was worn, it was designating our graduation year and nothing else!!!
In passing through this segment of time there was a degree of profundity in the coincidence. Chronologically we were at the crossroads of another decade; another time reference point. As Graduates we were at the crossroads of our lives. There we stood, together, with so much already behind us and yet so much still ahead to look forward to. In an era that was so dynamic, so diverse, so confusing, still so incomplete and unsettled, we also realized we were going to have to step forward nonetheless. In stepping forward through the next twenty years, each one of us must have had as dynamic and diverse an experience as those years we grew up in. It was our destiny.
Editor’s Note: “A CHRONICLE” prepared by an anonymous classmate
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Hickok
The Promise
