HIGH SCHOOL

1966. That’s the year I started High School. The sting of the Principal’s speech to my class on our graduation day bothered me all summer as I began to build my expectations for the coming year. As I was coming of age, great local heroes were firmly embedded in Omak High School lore and I was uncomfortable with the thought that my class was entering high school with this shroud of under achievement, or even worse maybe our class had the inability to achieve at all. The principal’s speech put such doubt in my mind that I dreaded the first day of classes and facing our collective ineptitude. I had always schemed of my place in high school history. I guess I was dreaming of some sort of glory or golden days spent on the stage of my home town, and being a high school legend was the way to achieve that goal in Omak. It seemed to me that I was about to learn that life was a lot tougher than it looked and that even if you did have some glory it was usually fleeting. I was about to learn what it was to build character. During the summer I spent a great deal of time with my classmates and we never shared our thoughts on the principal’s attitude towards us other than the occasional “we’ll show him.”

Before school started I went shopping for school clothes. I picked out preppy button down shirts, tight stretchy Levi pants and oxblood colored wing-tip shoes. I picked out a madras-dyed shirt so I could look hip part of the time. But I also wanted to look like a prepster taking a small chance on being hip. At least I would look good when I walked through those doors of the high school.

There were two sets of doors in front of the school. The main set of doors brought you to the receptionist’s desk and the principal’s office. T was where the action was. There was a big wooden bench there and I’d sit and watch anybody who was anybody march by on their way to small town glory.

The other front entrance was by the Library and that was where the counter- revolution of the 1960’s was beginning to take shape at Omak High School. The “hippie kids” gathered in the mornings just inside the door and to exchange their thoughts about love and music without having to be hassled by the football players and the other preppy guys who didn’t appreciate long hair. What better place to gather than in front of the library because the “athletes” hardly even knew we had a library. My dilemma was that I wanted to live in both of the world of prep school America and be a counter culture cool guy who saw the world in a different way. All of my machinations to succeed and thrive in a social situation were being heavily challenged that first year in high school. I loved wearing the preppy clothes and I was quite sure that most of the legends that had come out of my high school were preppy or athletes but I was pulled intellectually to the hipsters standing in front of the library every morning defiantly growing their hair over their ears and talking about Frank Zappa in hushed tones.

It wasn’t easy growing your hair out at Omak High School. Our principal roamed the halls in the morning to look for kids who he felt needed a haircut. When he found a student who had stepped out of bounds on the dress code for hair length he would brought them into the office and issued you a an hour-pass so you could get your hair cut. If you refused to get your hair cut the principal wouldn’t let you back into school. Since the principal classified my class as insurgents, not worthy of being in the high school, he spent a lot of time near the sophomore lockers that year seeking people to “whip” into shape. To counter attack these searches guys would do elaborate combings with gel to make their hair lie down and not look as long as it was to avoid having to get their hair cut. It was a challenge we took seriously. We also kept a gossip network going up and down the halls when we saw the principal prowling around. Then, a message would go out to a kid that the principal was looking for him and the kid would hide in a bathroom stall until the bell rang for classes. Even that didn’t work all of time as the principal would sometimes seek you out your class and escort you out of the classroom and into his office.

As the school year went on and 1966 turned into 1967 the cultural pendulum began to swing in the favor of cultural acceptance for longer hair. Longer hair was even beginning to appear in the adult world and especially on television. Celebrities were wearing longer side-burns and hair was beginning to creep over the ears of even country music stars. There was a Broadway play called “HAIR.” This only meant that our principal had to work harder to keep our high school in shape and not allow our dress code to fall into irrelevancy just because someone on TV said peace and love. Mr. Rowe became even more relentless about chasing us boys around to get our hair cut as the world went cool.

There was a barber in my father’s building and my brother and I would get our hair cut every two weeks if we needed to or not. I remember working with the barber to allow my hair to grow out in a “stylish” way so I could fit in with both the hip kids and the preps. Even the preppy guys were beginning to think about letting their hair grow a little so the way I sold my new hair cut to my father’s barber was that he could try out this new approach to cutting hair on me and I would sell it to other kid’s and grow his business. Mr. Hilyar just grunted at me and told me he learned how to cut hair in the Army and he didn’t need a 15 year old to help him run his barber shop. Still, he worked with me and the principal only pulled me out of school once to get my hair cut. It was my fault I got busted. I was bragging to one of my friend’s in typing class about how long my hair was getting (barely over my ears) and that I had no trouble getting past the principals inspection. I looked up to see Mr. Rowe standing in the doorway of the class with a pass already written out for me to get my hair cut.

Busting kid’s for getting a hair cut slowed down in my junior year. That year a senior boy that year began to grow his hair really long and he didn’t get any attention from the principal. While the rest of us hid from the principal Dirk walked right down the middle of the hallway with his hair flowing, right out in the open. His father was a lawyer and his parent’s used the argument with the principal that Dirk was going to be bald in the future and he needed to enjoy his hair now as it would be gone in a few years. I guess all of us could have used that argument but we never thought the principal would buy into it. I guess that’s what lawyers are for.

As I said I spent a great deal of my time trying to live in all of the social cliques in my high school and it took a great deal of my time. It took so much time to be socially acceptable that I forgot I was actually going to school. I confused the need for an education with the need to find acceptance in any social situation. I was very comfortable being a chameleon changing myself for every social situation. All I concentrated on was being accepted and it didn’t seem to matter to me morally that I would be one way with certain kids and another way with other kids. It was all about manipulating your thoughts and words to succeed at all costs no matter who you were with.

Some dreams just never die. Throughout my childhood I held on to the fantasy that someday I would be a professional major league baseball player. I thrived on playing baseball in vacant lots, on little league teams and just playing catch with the kids next door. I followed the game in the newspaper every day looking at the box scores, calculating batting averages, runs batted in and the success of the pitchers. One of my greatest pleasures as a kid was on Saturday afternoons when my father and I would finish with the yard work and we’d then sit down to watch “The Baseball Game of the Week” with Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese. While eating our sandwiches and drinking ice tea we’d root for any team but the Yankees. My father would jump up from the couch whenever a great play was made and rub his hands together and shout “we’re going to win this game boy.” I had an uncle who lived in San Francisco and he sent me a Giants hat and I used to wear that hat around so proud to have that SF on my hat just to let people know I was a major league baseball fan. I am not sure why I kept clinging onto this dream of being a ball player because I wasn’t that good. I had not developed any baseball skills that were even above average other than my love of the game. I played on every team that would have me through the years and I kept hoping that next year my skills would suddenly go through a tremendous growth curve and I would then be on my way to the majors. I think that hopes like these are just part of the magic of the game of baseball. For nearly 100 years the fans of the Chicago Cubs have been saying “we’ll get them next year.” So I guess if an entire city like Chicago can believe in this denial of reality then it’s not so bad that a kid in Omak could believe in the same kind of magic. Unfortunately magic runs into reality from time to time and that’s what happened to me and my dream to be a major league baseball player.

In my sophomore year I turned out for the baseball team and for some reason the coach let me on the team and I was incredibly happy even though I was the last man on the bench. I had a neighborhood friend, Steve McCracken, who was a senior on the team and he would watch out for me and make sure I didn’t get down too much for being the youngest player on the team and to make sure I kept up my conditioning so when my time came I would be ready to play. The season went on uneventfully enough in the beginning of the season. We won about half of our games and even though I hardly played I felt part of the team and I didn’t even mind the weird errands you had to do for the older players because I was the youngest “rookie” on the team. I was just biding my time until I broke out my skills as an upper class man and became a high school legend in baseball. Someday it would be me who would be the big star. I’d be written up in the newspapers and scouts from the pros would follow my games. I kept that fantasy going until the day we played the team from Chelan.

Chelan was about 60 miles south of Omak and it was another small orchard town but it was built right on the shore of Lake Chelan. Their teams were always tough to play and this year they had a special pitcher on their team named Steve Klein who threw the ball very very fast and would often pitch a perfect game against teams in our league. I was really excited to see him pitch because I knew he would someday be in the major leagues. At least I was right about that. He ended up pitching for the hated New York Yankees.

The day of the game came and the line ups were made out and of course I wasn’t going to play. That didn’t matter to me that day because I wanted to concentrate on watching Steve Klein and making plans on how to hit him when I got to the majors. As the game progressed our team couldn’t hit anything Klein was throwing and it got so bad that when my friend Steve hit a foul ball off to the right of first base we all cheered him and the crowd clapped while he picked up his bat and went back to the batter’s box only to strike out looking at the next pitch. This went on throughout the game and I think Chelan scored 2 or 3 runs on us and then the ninth inning came and while I was deep in thought watching Klein warm up for the final inning the coach called my name and told me I was going to be the first batter of the inning. “Nobody else can hit this guy so it doesn’t matter if you can’t either,” is what I think the coach told me. Anyway my confidence was already shattered thinking I had to bat against Steve Klein. I took a few breaths, took a few practice swings and then said to myself, “Let’s get a hit so he’ll remember me in the big leagues.”  

The first pitch came in so fast I couldn’t even see where the ball was. Strike one! I stepped out of the batter’s box took another deep breath and reassured myself that I couldn’t see the ball because I was too nervous. Just step back up there and relax. Take a natural swing and hope you hit something. I have no idea where the second pitch was because I took a flailing swing at the air hoping I would hit the ball or at least look like I had a chance to hit the ball. My teammates laughed at my swing because it seemed so futile and I again stepped back out of the batter’s box and gave myself a pep talk. One more chance. He’ll throw it right down the middle to challenge me and all I have to do is get the bat out in the middle of the plate in time to hit the ball. Klein wound up and I prepared to swing but before I could get the bat off of my shoulders the umpire rang me up. Strike three. Three pitches and I had not even seen the ball. How was I going to be a major league baseball player? All of my dreams of playing baseball as a career were crushed and as I walked back to the dugout the next batter asked me, “Does he have much left?”

I didn’t go out for baseball in my junior year because this heavy dose of reality had convinced me that I was never going to be a major league baseball player. But as spring came around in my senior year hope for my dream surfaced again and I played baseball one last time on a school team.

The antics of my classmates began to pick up in our junior year and it was becoming evident that the predications of the principal about our class were becoming self-evident. It was quite apparent we were not going to be setting the world on fire as a class. There were no great athletes in our class. There were a few serviceable players on each of the team sports but everyone in town was beginning to notice that there were more sophomores on the varsity teams than juniors and that the freshman team could probably beat any team made up of juniors. That’s ok in itself if we could produce something else of value but we were also lacking in scholars and charisma. Mostly we just stumbled forward and had fun as we went. As I look back upon those days I do realize that the most important thing was that my classmates and I were becoming real people. Although our high school glory would be elusive we were grounded in the reality that life is more a process than a stage.

Incidents of slightly criminal and sociopath behavior began to surface more often than not as we went along in our junior year. For the most part the activity was limited to missing auto parts, siphoning gas and acting out in the classroom but then there were also some strange experiences that would cause concern in the community. In order to tell this story I need to introduce one more of the social cliques in my high school. The Cowboys. These kids were living the dream of being a true to life cowboy. While I dreamed of the Lone Ranger and whistled the William Tell overture into the night and wore two toy six-guns on my belt one whole summer vacation the Cowboy clique at Omak High were real true life Cowboys. They wore jeans and cowboy shirts to school with shit kicking cowboy boots made by Tony Lama. The back pocket of their jeans always had a faded circle on the denim which proved they were carrying a can of chewing tobacco with them at all times. These kids were tough and mean and the last thing you wanted to do in the morning was to walk by their lockers with a smile on your face. Even though I was confused about wanting to belong to the hippies and the preppies I never ever wanted to be a Cowboy. I simply wasn’t tough enough to ride with that crowd. Cowboys would play sports and they made great football players because they really wanted to take someone out with a great tackle or block. In fact they lived for that. Organized violence is the correct term is for that behavior. I could never be a Cowboy because I didn’t want the violence I just wanted the glory.

Cowboys were mostly kids who grew up on small ranches or orchards near Omak and this lifestyle lent itself nicely to their values. But sometimes a city kid could take on the morals of the Cowboys and be just as tough as a born Cowboy. They wore their special clothes and mostly drove trucks with some hay or feed in the back and they went to the dances at the local Grange Halls. Country music and vodka and orange juice seemed to turn that social wheel. Vodka and orange juice was called cowboy lemonade and it was drunk by the tumbler full to quench that cowboy thirst. Cowboys dated girls, for the most part, who were a little wild. They were the kind of girls that would yell at you at a dance about how you were making eyes at them and then scream that their boyfriend was going to find you and rip your face off. A lot pushing and shoving would take place in those Grange Hall parking lots on a Saturday night over those girls. A Cowboy in my class was so tough that his horse stepped on his face and the scar only made him more handsome.

A townie in my class named Mike tried to get into the Cowboy clique by acting out strange psychological behavior in order to be accepted. Once he bought a sheep from one of the cowboys and tied it to the back of his car with a rope. He then poured gasoline all over the sheep and light the sheep on fire with a cigarette lighter. Mike then took off in his car dragging the flaming sleep behind him for miles and miles and miles. If I remember this right the Cowboys bet Mike he wouldn’t do it. When news of this incident got out the school did a minor investigation of it. I was called into the principal’s office and asked what I knew since I had been friends with Mike up to this time. It was the first I had heard of it and I was a bit shocked that Mike would do this. He had done other crazy things before but never to this degree. Nothing was done about the death of the poor sheep because Mike’s family was fairly prominent in town but it was a great mistake to suppress this cruelty. First of all every one in Omak was now sure our class was cursed and Mike never learned about the consequences of this irrational behavior. The next fall a group of us were out hunting birds with shotguns and Mike was with us. He was very sharp and he calculated that I was just far enough out of range to hurt me with a shotgun blast but close enough to be rained on by fiery shot gun pellets that would sting you severely if they hit you. Mike shot at me repeatedly and a fiery rain of pellets fell on me as I hid behind a rock. This was just too crazy for me to remain his friend anymore and I yelled at him as I drove away that he needed help because he was a crazy bastard. Mike committed suicide at 26 over a drunken driving ticket. Reality bites hard sometimes.

The girls in my class were a precious commodity. As it goes in many small towns the girls who were thought to be beautiful or had a lot going for them were already dating upper classmen or even guys in college. This left the boys in our class with much slimmer prospects. The girls that were still available were either very smart or difficult to be in a relationship with or girls that you weren’t interested in other than being friends. This left the boys in my class in the same situation as all the guys who came before us. We had to go prospecting with the younger women. I dated a few girls in my sophomore year who were in the 9^th grade and they made terrific make-out partners. They were old enough to want to make out but young enough to think I was a cool upper classman. Then one day, at the orthodontist, I met a girl who was really out of reach for me. And by out of reach I mean she lived 21 miles away in Tonasket and I had no idea how to get there on my own. She was pretty, smart and had a sharp wit and basically she talked circles around me. I was dumbfounded by her charm and was irrationally drawn to her. I had to find a way to get to Tonasket to be with her but that was nearly impossible when you are 15. Her name was Susan Farley.

I had previously talked my parents into installing a teen phone in my bedroom. It was so great. I think I had my own line and I could get calls without my parent’s hassling me about who was calling me. I convinced Susan that giving me her phone number was a good idea and I started to call her all of the time in place of being with her. In 1966 long distance phone calls were very expensive and I was completely oblivious of this expense. I was on the phone with her late one afternoon after school and I heard my father’s car pull into the driveway. I just kept talking on the phone to Susan about nothing and my father started walking up the stairs to my room. He was holding the phone bill in one hand and he reached out with the other hand and yanked the phone line out of the wall while I was still on the phone. He started shouting about the god damn kid and the phone bill and then walked off with the phone and the phone line and the bracket that was screwed onto the baseboard. That was the end of the teen phone. I had it for about two months.

My romance with Susan became more difficult after that and I had to seek her out at her orthodontist appointments and at school sports games when we played Tonasket. These experiences did not lead to much romance. Then I struck gold. Don was the oldest boy in our class and he had just got his driver’s license and he was dating another girl in Tonasket. I was able to get a few rides with him up to Tonasket and our romance began. Susan was one year younger than I was and her parents were suspect of what I was thinking about. But soon they began to accept me. Tonasket was an even smaller town than Omak. I think it had almost a 1000 people living in town and many others who lived on apple orchards and ranches nearby.

My MacLean grandparents had homesteaded in the Tonasket area so by default I knew many people in town and the Farley’s accepted me. Susan’s mother kept a wary eye on my intentions but she paid more attention to me than my own mother. Seeing Susan on occasion was probably good for our relationship because we never grew bored of each other until much later. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for weeks at a time but when my birthday rolled around in 1967 I was extremely anxious to get my driver’s license so I could see more of her. I had once again manipulated my poor parents into another great idea. My father was about to trade his 1962 Mercury Comet in for a new car and I took advantage of this situation. I made his life impossible with constant conversations about the value of having a third car around in case of emergencies. What if Roger or I needed to be rushed somewhere and both you and mom are gone and I could drive us but we wouldn’t have a car. I went on and on and finally, for some reason, he agreed and the old Comet was going to become my ticket to freedom. I studied for my driver’s license like a crazy person. I took drivers education and paid for it myself. I studied the manual from cover to cover and was so confident that I would get my license on the first go around, a badge of courage in Omak, that I had arranged for a double date with Susan and another couple from Tonasket. We were going to eat and go to the movies. I was on cloud nine. I spent all week washing the car and polishing the chrome. That funny old Comet looked like a Super Sport Chevy to me the morning I took off to take my driver’s license test. I passed the written test with over 90% correct and then we went out for the driving skill test and I passed that as well. As I was walking back to the department of licensing office with the agent I had my heads in the cloud dreaming about the freedom I had just won when the agent said, “Now it’s time for the sign test.” Sign test, what are you talking about? I hadn’t studied for a sign test. No one told me about a sign test. “Yeah, this is a new procedure and you’ll do just fine.” No, you don’t see I just won my freedom. I don’t need to take any more tests. You had to get the signs right 100%.

As I was taking the sign test I knew I was doomed. I was so nervous about blowing this part of the exam when I was so close to absolute manhood. Hamburgers and malts served directly to my car window. Cruising down the road listening to rock and roll. Waving to girls and chasing after them if they smiled back. I was going to be a vision out of a Beach Boys song. “I get around.”

I knew I was doomed because I couldn’t keep the signs straight in my mind. What was I going to tell Susan? Sorry your boyfriend is too stupid to pass the driver’s license test. There were fat old guys who could hardly see who were driving cars and as I took the sign test I knew I was burying my manhood that afternoon. My worries were confirmed by the examiner. I had missed one sign and I had to wait a week to take the test again.

I pleaded and pleaded with the examiner but he didn’t have to listen to me like my parent’s did and he just said, “Next.”

I was devastated. I called Susan and gave the message to her mother who seemed perfectly at ease with my failure. In fact I think the tone was more like relieved. I sat in my parent’s living room most of that weekend staring out at the Comet like it was some sort of forbidden fruit that I could not enjoy. I grieved over the loss of hamburgers delivered on a tray at the A&W, seeing my friends driving around and stepping on the gas hoping the Comet would respond as I tried showing off by passing cars right and left. Signs, who needs to know what the signs mean. I needed action not direction.

As I write this now I realize I have spent my entire life concentrating on the action part and putting off the direction part until another day when it was too late. Some things just never change about me.

I finally did pass my drivers test and Susan and I began a romance that was built around Friday and Saturday nights driving to dances and parties. It was really just about perfect. I got to hang around with my pals during the school week and sometimes studied and then on the weekends I had this hot out of town date. Susan was a great high school girlfriend because she was not only pretty, fun and slightly mischievous but she also had one eye on the future and thought about important issues like politics, education and personal growth. The personal growth issue was the most fascinating feature of Susan’s personality.

Leonard Cohen had a song back in the late 1960’s called Suzanne. The lyrics were about how this mystic woman named Suzanne would take you into her world down by a river and serve you tea from China and deliver an understanding of the world in a wonderful way and you were caught up in her smile and wanted to never leave. That was what Susan was like and I loved that song. I didn’t know until later that I really never wanted to leave.

Since I lived in Omak I was always leaving or I guess you could say I was always returning.

Susan was always trying to improve herself and leaving the Okanogan as soon as she could was the main focus of her life. I wanted to grow up and leave the Okanogan too but for right now I had it very good and my focus was to enjoy it as much as possible. I had a car, a girl friend and my father seemed to have an endless supply of twenty dollar bills to finance my weekends.

I remember one real defining moment in our teen age days when Susan and I were just returning from a date and we pulled up to her parent’s house. No matter how hard I concentrated on being on time picking her up or bringing her home I was always late. We pulled into the driveway very quiet, late as usual, so Susan could sneak into the house unnoticed and just then we heard on the radio that Bobby Kennedy had been shot. Martin Luther King had been killed just a few months before and that night Bobby Kennedy had been murdered you just knew in your stomach that the world was now a much uglier place and we were going to have to deal with this as adults. Both of us got out of the car and sat on the curb and stared at the stars. Susan was crying and I think I was too and we just sat there without saying a word and somehow we knew exactly how the other one felt. We talked a little bit but mostly we just stayed together in order to help each other sort out our emotions. Susan’s parent’s got up and looked at us through the living room window but just left us alone when they saw us quietly sitting there on that June night staring at the stars and listening to the river. I really loved listening to the river that night with her. It was calming but also you understood that the river was always changing and so was life.

We spent a lot of our teen-age years together talking about social change, books we had read and just plain making out like we had just invented it. She is personally responsible for delivering me to my twenties in a half-way mature state. I grew up with Susan and she was my best friend when I was in high school. I’m not sure we would have been as intimate as we were had we gone to the same high school because we didn’t have to go through the awkward moments when I would have to choose between being cool and being a real person around her. When we were together we had a separate life away from the social mix of our schools. I think we thought of it as our own separate peace.

Being apart during the week wasn’t for everyone as jealousy and misunderstandings could break up a long distance romance very easily. We just believed in each other for a long time and it seemed to work out. As time went on it became apparent that Susan was becoming a beautiful woman who needed more than me to fulfill her. I was not rising to the emotional level that she needed and during the summer of 1971 we decided to see other people. I took this as a chance to date all of the fast girls in Okanogan County and once I got tired of that I decided I would go to Tonasket because all I could think about was Susan.

I arrived a few hours after she had fallen in love with someone else and all I saw of her that day was the tail end of her car as she drove away. I called her the next day and said this is not how “things” are supposed to work out when you date other people. You are supposed to realize that your first love was the best and you fall back into each other’s arms for eternity. She laughed and said she was moving to Colorado soon and maybe I could come visit her. And oh by the way we’re getting married and no you are not invited.

What?

I loved her as much as I could as a teen-ager and when she walked out of my life for good when I was 20 I was devastated for over a year. The blessing of her completely leaving and never returning was that during that year I had to reinvent myself in a hurry in order to survive without her. I grew in my understanding of poetry, art and music and friendships that have sustained me all of these years.

I learned to love and be loved. Now all that is left to learn is to be accountable. I am slowly learning about that.

The summer after my junior year in high school I decided that a plan was needed for my last year in Omak to make sure that I was able to gather all of the glory of my time in the Okanogan. It was as if I had hired a marketing director to guide me through my senior year. I plotted out what needed to occur in order to get the most out of this time on the small town stage. I decided to concentrate on my studies, play on the football team and attempt to show some leadership in my class. My studies came along brilliantly as I made the honor roll consistently and made such a turn around in my grades that the aforementioned principle wrote a glowing letter home to my parents about how great I was. I can’t seem to remember if my parents ever responded to me about the letter. My sister had been salutatorian of her class and princess Omak and a cheerleader and the most popular and voted most perfect by her peers and probably she was just about the greatest so my parents probably just shrugged when they got my letter of recommendation. That was ok. Mostly I worked hard on my studies that year just to throw my parents off track. I wanted to keep them guessing about who I was.

Playing football was another subject. I managed to letter that year but the only two things I remember about that year of playing on the varsity was the kick-off and return squad which I really enjoyed being on. I actually recovered a fumble in a big game. I enjoyed the open field running in the kicking game and made a few tackles as well. The big thing I remember about that year was one practice we were doing tackling drills and I went head to head with our star fullback and we hit so hard that I blacked out and saw these giant golden stars spiraling into space for a very long time. I was out cold and I hurt so much I couldn’t feel the pain until the next morning. Even though my body was wracked with pain all I could think about were those stars and every time I closed my eyes that day all I could see were those stars spiraling around in my head. Needless to say I didn’t go out of my way to tackle that kid again in practice.

So let’s see. To begin my senior year I became a serious student, Richard Nixon was elected President and my father was happy and Credence Clearwater came out with their song Susie Q and I was happy. When I would drive up to Tonasket to see Susan the radio stations would weave in and out of reception and I would always be trying to find a station that played rock tunes and then I’d sing along like I was in the shower and I would have to keep the song going with my singing when the station would go out of reception and then let the real song catch up when the station was back on. I loved it when that song “Susie Q” would come on because it would get me in the mood to see Susan and it was also very simple to sing. “Oh Susie Q, baby I love you Susie Q. I love the way you walk I love the way you talk Susie Q.” Those lyrics matched my emotional level and I would just sing as loud as I could in my car and no one else had to hear how horrible a singer I was. Also, by now I was driving the MUSTANG and I must have been a vision of cool driving that car and singing my brains out all by myself. Passing drivers probably thought I was having an epileptic fit.

My attempts to show leadership in my class seemed to fall short no matter what I did. By the fall of 1968 nearly all of the 5 boys that our principal had put on notice that they would never make it through high school were gone. I decided there was nothing I could do individually to raise our bar higher so I just went with the river and just went on to enjoy my classmates and prepare myself for a new life in college where I could start all over because no one would no who I had been or where I was from. Who in college would even remotely know where Omak was.

Right before our senior year began there was controversy in the school district over whether the senior English teacher, who was basically the cultural fount in Omak, was going to return. This teacher was a dynamic force in the high school as he produced school plays such as the Mikado and sponsored musical events performing at the school. It seems that this gentleman had grown a beard and let his hair grow over his ears and, of course, the principal and many parents felt he needed to groom himself in a more conforming manner before the school year started. There may have also been some questions over sexual identity but that was just coming through the grapevine that circulated among the students. He preferred what? Since it was 1968 the teacher resigned and moved to San Francisco and the school was left to scramble for a replacement. I was greatly disappointed because I had made it one of my goals for my senior year to be in the senior play and now all of that ambition was going to be denied over a beard.

A new senior English teacher was found a few days into the school year and he was not up for the task. He was an older man and he didn’t have the tolerance for my class. There was an incident at Halloween where his house was severely egged, causing great outrage, and I believe this teacher resigned before Christmas. On the first day back from the Holidays in January we had a new senior English teacher and little did I know that this unlikely woman was going to change my life forever.

Mrs. Was a graduate of Barnard University in New York City and she probably was not even 26 years old. Her husband was a horticulturalist and they had just arrived in the county a few months before and, how shall I say it, they stood out. She tried to dress conservatively but you could tell she was a Greenwich Village student type and I suddenly had a new interest in Senior English. And even though she may not have showered as often as the rest of us a fresh air was blowing in our English class. She rearranged the class schedule and what students were in what class and I found myself placed in the senior’s honors class. She also established a reading program where a student would be given a point a page for reading books on a suggested reading list. If you read any Shakespeare play you received double points. Since I was a budding entrepreneur I immediately started to read Shakespeare and although I thoroughly enjoyed myself I began to fall behind in the point contest because it was slow slogging through Hamlet. So a few weeks into the class I decided I needed a new approach and I went to my teacher to consult about what to do. She looked at me with a smile and said if I were to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace she would give me 4 points per page. Again I took the challenge knowing little about how this challenge would change my life forever.

I began to read Tolstoy every night at home and after a few sittings I was totally wrapped up in losing the Napoleonic Wars along with the Russians and having my life transformed by the great changes in Europe and the loss of love. My mind was completely spun around that book and I found it difficult to communicate with other people and I lost touch with my friends and parent’s. I was walking around Omak in a daze and I really had no one to help me process the ideas in the book. I went to my teacher and she would at least listen to me and reminded me that the book was just a story and this helped to a degree but for weeks I was lost in the book and just kept reading. It’s good that I took that attitude because with over one thousand two hundred pages a reader needs persistence to consume Tolstoy. From that moment on I became a reader of great literature as a way to develop my consciousness. Tolstoy lead to Dostoevsky and then to Gogol. It is just like me to be lead to a life of great literature because I needed to improve my score in a contest.

Reading Tolstoy was the height of my intellectual boundaries in my senior year. As the school year moved along I began to devolve into what they used to call “Senioritis” in Omak. By March I had decided what college I was going to. I decided to go to the only school that wrote a letter to me. The school could have been on the back of a matchbook cover for all I cared. I began to lose focus on what was important to me and one night I did one of the craziest things in my life. I had just left Susan off at her parent’s home and as I was leaving their house I had begun to think about the urban, or should I say rural legend, of who had driven the fastest time between Tonasket and Omak. It was exactly 21 miles from town to town and I think the record was something like 19 minutes or so the legend went. It was late on a Saturday night and I thought what the heck let’s see how fast I can get to Omak. I think I thought that this might be my moment of glory. I took off like a crazy man in the Mustang and got my speed up to an average of 90 miles an hour and was passing big trucks and everything else on the road at that time of night. I was screaming down the highway without a car on my mind and made it to Omak in 21 minutes. I was so disappointed that I had not beaten the record and I pulled into my parent’s driveway without an idea about what was just about to happen. I got out of the car and shut the door and before I had walked 10 feet towards the back door of my parent’s house there were 5 state patrol cars with their sirens on and lights swirling. It seems that they had been chasing me for miles down the highway but I was going so fast darting in between traffic that I had not even noticed them. This was a great moment for the police in Omak to have caught me because my father was a part time traffic judge in Omak and catching me for the many things I had done wrong that night was quite the prize for those policemen. I had no defense and I just stood there like a goof when they began to write out the many tickets and my father stumbled out in the dark in his robe and told the police to throw the book at me. My father went to court with me and encouraged the judge to be tough on me but I think the judge felt sorry for me and he only gave me 3 months probation. This meant I could drive at work but for no other reasons for 90 days. My social life was destroyed, all for some car legend, but I did gain some respect from the car guys in town. I remember walking home from school on one of those days while my license was suspended and a greaser in a Barracuda drove by and honked his horn and raced his engine as he went by. I was accepted know by an all new crowd.

I survived the night of the police cars and eventually got my license back. Just in time for the senior parties. On my personal check list for making insuring I was getting the most out of my last year in Omak senior parties ranked very high on my list and I wanted to make sure I made the most of these moments of glory.

I’m not sure how it started but the traditions and legends of the last weeks of high school for graduating seniors in Omak were mythological in proportion. Legends of heroic beer consumption and partying were embedded in the lore of attending Omak High. Seniors were allowed a great deal of latitude in behavior in the last six weeks of school and my class and I, in particular, did our best to spend that capitol and leave nothing on the table. We were ready to leave our mark.

Our class began to have senior parties about three weeks before graduation. We would meet at homes of parents who were either gone or parents who would indulge our behavior thinking if they, the adults, were around we would modify how we acted. I don’t think we ever changed our attitude. We were graduating, many members of the class were going to the armed services or they were or had gotten someone pregnant. A classic collection of small town classes in the 1960’s. One party I remember very well because I was sitting on the front porch of a house that was just out of town and the apple trees were in bloom and the weather was warming up and I sat in a big Adirondack chair enjoying the smells and the warmth when the word went out that Jim Martin had died a few days before in Viet Nam. Martin was just two years older than I was and his sister Connie was in my class. I grew numb in my stomach hearing this because I knew many other people at this party were going to be exposed to the same danger in Viet Nam themselves. Connie was so upset she got into a car with some friends and they took off into the night with her sobbing and crying trailing out the window of the car as they sped down the driveway digging up the gravel as they fishtailed down the gravel driveway. We had all drunk too much that night and in the morning it was all over school that the car that Connie was riding in had gone into a ditch on a canyon road. Everyone lived through it but it dampened our party spirits for a week or two. But as we built up to graduation we could not be denied more reckless behavior.

The night before graduation we began the party to end all senior parties. Earlier in the day we had our final run through for the ceremony the following night and as we began to leave rehearsal the word was out that the party that night was at Don’s house. Ironically this house was right next to the school’s football field and track field and just a short walk to the school itself. When I arrived at about 7:30 pm there were already two boys passed out in the hedge that separated the house from the street. The guys just laid there spread out like they had just landed from outer space. Naturally I wasn’t even fazed by this. I had grown to expect people passed out at our parties. Binge drinking was invented in Omak I believe. I entered the house and there was beer everywhere. Bottles, mugs of beer and kegs were strewn everywhere. Girls who had always been very conservative and upright were wandering around drunk and very friendly. Most of the guys had been drinking way too much and were pretty much incapable of forming proper sentences. My parents had made me stay home until 7 pm writing thank you notes to everyone who had sent me a graduation present and I was completely sober when I arrived at the party. For some reason that night I only drank a few beers and stayed very far behind everyone else on the drunken behavior scale. It just seemed that I needed to watch out for everyone else so we didn’t fall into some evil hole or something like that. As the night wore on many kids drifted over to the football field and either ran around the track or sat in the stands huddled together telling stories. Quite a crowd gathered in the pole vault pit as one of the girls in the class decided to leave a lot of boys with a very good memory of that night. I just wandered around through the small crowds that were milling around the different parts of the field checking everyone out and it began to dawn on me that this was our final time together. That alone was sobering to me. Finally time has brought us to this moment and we will graduate and move on. As the night wore on it seemed to me that we should all be getting arrested because of the size of our party but for some reason the city of Omak understood our need to party and our night turned into day. Since most of us did not leave the party we all drifted up to the school in the morning and started to clean out our lockers and say goodbye to people. The other classes were still in school for another week so seeing a bunch of hung over unkempt seniors must have seemed hilarious. Right before the morning bell rang for classes one of the seniors was drinking out of a two-person drinking fountain with a not so well-liked English teacher who was fixated on Mutiny on the Bounty for all of those years and the senior decided to spit out his drink on the top of Mr. Brandt’s head. While this was especially entertaining for all of the seniors and underclassmen the poor senior’s parents had to spend the entire day trying to make sure that Ron graduated with the rest of us as he was immediately expelled from the school by the principal with only a few hours before he was to graduate. I don’t know what punishment was handed out but somehow at the last moment Ron graduated with the rest of us. After that frivolity I laughed myself all the way to the Mustang and threw my books in the back seat and drove home to catch up on my sleep. Later in the afternoon I needed to catch up on all of my romances because I would be out of commission with the ladies that night because we had another party after graduation that was sponsored by the school and only class members could attend.

I had two or three romances going on at the end of the school year. There was Susan and then there was an underclass girl I had been having an affair with for a few weeks undercover and then there were a few girls in my class I was fooling around with at our parties. I was very careful checking in with all of these girls to track where they were going to be that night so none of them would find out about the others. After a few phone calls I was set and I drove off to the graduation ceremony. I’m not sure my family attended the ceremony. I don’t remember seeing them at graduation but I may have just missed them in the excitement of the moment. Or maybe they just didn’t attend. All went well at the ceremony and everyone in the crowd got a great chuckle when the principal called out my name CHARLES HENRY GRIMES III. It was such a formal name for such a backwater town.

After the ceremony my friend David Reid and I carefully packed our winter coats with bottles of beer and we walked into the sponsored senior party with at least a case of beer clanging around in our coats. I made this banging noise as I moved about and the teacher who was our class advisor took one look at me, shook his head, and said something like this is your last night of glory so just get in there. I hardly even remember the night because I spent most of the evening laid out underneath one of the dining room tables at the Elks club. Ironically I think my father was the president of the Elks that year. He must have been very proud of me.

Two days after graduation I lay in bed until 11 am on Sunday morning and I woke up to remember that I was supposed to be at Susan’s at 11 am for a picnic to celebrate my graduation. I ran downstairs with only a pair of cut off jeans on and holding my shirt and shoes. I threw them into the back seat of the Mustang and sped off to Tonasket 21 miles away. I still hadn’t learned my lesson about speeding and I was going very fast. I was listening to the baseball game on the radio and I decided to have a smoke. I reached into the glove compartment and I accidentally turned the wheel and because I was going 90 the power steering overreacted and the car began to swerve into the other lane. I turned the wheel back too hard and the car began to turn the other direction and then just flipped over. I skidded down the road upside down at a tremendous speed and then landed on top of a giant concrete culvert that was beneath the road and was there to move water along away from the road when the river would flood. The roof of the car on the driver’s side was smashed down into the seat and so would I have been if I had my seat belt on. Because I was in such a hurry I had not put the seat belt on and after the car stopped moving I found my self upside down in the back seat of the car with out even a scratch. All of the glass in the windows and windshield had been broken and as the tires spun around aimlessly the baseball game was still playing on the car radio. I thought I was dead because I had no idea that you could live through what had just happened. I put my shoes on and kicked the door open and stood beside the highway staring at the car and expecting the angels to be picking me up at any moment. As I pulled my shirt on another car drove by and stopped and asked me if I was all right. To say the least I could not believe I had done this. The other drivers took me home and I was in a fog. I could hardly remember where I lived and when I walked into the house my poor mother was terrified. How did I get home without the car? What has happened to you? She called my father and he came home and nearly blew a gasket. Fortunately my mother wanted to take me to the Hospital and the three of us headed off in my father’s car. I was admitted to the hospital and I asked my mother to call Susan and let her know what had happened to me. Thankfully my parents left me at the hospital and the attendants there gave me some sedatives and I fell asleep in my room. News travels fast in a small town and all of the girls that I had been romancing decided to all visit me at the Hospital at the same time that afternoon. When you are a high school Casanova you have to keep moving around so you don’t get caught sneaking around but when you are on sedatives in the hospital you are bound to be found out. I awoke from my sleep and Susan was there. Her friends had driven her down from Tonasket and they had seen my car being towed by the wrecking truck. They were all scared that I was crushed to death and were relieved when they saw that I was in good health. Just as I was basking in this adulation two other girls walked into my room and the day became very awkward as I had to try to keep all of my girl stories straight while all of the suspects were in the room. Oh yes, Susan this is Linda and we sat next to each other in French class. We studied very hard together. Needless to say I broke a lot of bonds with Susan that day, to my regret, but it was kind of exciting to think that all of those girls wanted to see how I was.

My parent’s were very upset with me over my reckless driving and I decided to play up my aches and pains to stay in the hospital for a few extra days. I must have had quite a concussion as well because the nurses were giving me a load of sedatives.

The state patrol burst into my room later that day and tried to get me to admit to reckless driving and they were going to ticket me unmercifully. Fortunately our family doctor happened by my room at the time and told the police they couldn’t charge me because they had entered my room without permission or something like that. That was good because the punishment my father gave me was even worse. I wasn’t allowed to come home for six weeks. I had to stay at a friends house all of that time and finally one day my brother called and said I could come home because I had to get ready to leave for college.

The last few days I was home before leaving for college were the rodeo and carnival weekend. I got to finish off tormenting my father with one of the most outlandish of my accomplishments. Late on Saturday night I stumbled around the gambling tents in the Indian encampment and with the sound of the stick game chanting and beating of drums I began to search for my car. I had been drinking and when I went to where I thought I left the car I got in and couldn’t remember where I had left the keys. After I searched around a little I found them in the ignition and was very happy about that. I drove the car home and left it in the driveway. Early Sunday morning my father awoke me yelling at me wanting to know where the Mustang was. I told him calmly with the pillow over my head that the car was in the driveway. He said no it wasn’t. I got up went to the window and my dad was right. I had driven home a car that looked like our Mustang but was really someone else’s car. Luckily my father knew who the car belonged to and by late in the morning that fiasco was fixed. I left for college the next day. I can almost guarantee that my parent’s were relieved to see me out of the house and still alive.