Graduation Night - 1968

Life at my high school was like living out a casting call for safe family entertainment. It was 1968 and my graduating class followed a script that had little to do with the world around us. High school was intended to be a social preserve guarding against the new and the uncomfortable. We were supposed to accept the archaic as if it were still alive and credible, adopt assumptions that no longer had a brainwave, and affirm values that were without a pulse.

The world outside was resolutely ignored, regardless of whether its challenges were good or bad. “The Feminine Mystique” had been published five years earlier, but Betty Freidan and the women’s movement were not happening at our school. When a student became pregnant she disappeared, gone without comment, her enrollment terminated, shamed forever.

It was a year of race riots. Newark, Chicago and Detroit were “a flambé” on the nightly news. In early April Martin Luther King was assassinated and the day his casket was carried to its grave classes were held without remark or interruption.

Nearly 500,000 troops were in Vietnam, and before 1968 was over another 14,000 American boys would be dead. That winter our debate team argued about compulsory labor arbitration, and the school newspaper was not allowed to mention the war.

It was easy to feel alienated in the high schools of that time, and I was not alone in wondering at the relevancy of it all. Most of that senior year is lost to me now. I have no memory if the football team had a winning season, what classes I took, or what grades I received. What I do remember is the night I graduated.

With a few friends I was off to the school sponsored graduation party. We arrived feeling nothing quite so much as skeptical, and yet hoping for something that might give this moment meaning. Few of the people we were close to came to that party. Of those who were there, the girls were determined to cry flamboyantly, while the boys self-consciously reveled in a grandiose moment. They were nothing like us. It was like watching home movies of a past that no longer mattered.

We were all expecting to attend the University of Utah that fall, and the campus of that school was only a few miles away. Someone suggested that we should see if something wasn’t happening there, “up at the student union.” Given our state of disaffection we wondered if the “U” wasn’t already the place where we truly belonged. With little discussion we walked out of our graduation party, and that was the last moment any of us spent at Skyline High School.

When we arrived at the “U” classes had already been dismissed for the summer and the union was practically deserted. We walked into the bowling ally and threw a few desultory lines, but bowling in a large and vacant facility wasn’t any fun. There was nothing for us here, and there was certainly nothing for us back at the party we had just left. Resigned to our situation we headed for home at the pathetically early hour of midnight.

I crawled into bed disappointed by my utter lack of nostalgia. I wondered, “Why hadn’t I been able to make a connection that really mattered? Had my time in high school been so poorly spent that now I had nothing to miss?”

For me the night seemed hopelessly insignificant, no different than a thousand other nights just like it. I despised the fact that I couldn’t feel a thing, and with sleep still a ways off I reached up to my headboard and turned on the radio. That was the night of June 4th and there had been a presidential primary in California. Bobby Kennedy was giving a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel and he finished with the words, “On to Chicago!”

A few moments later shots rang out. In the most unfortunate way, a Palestinian busboy had just succeeded in making that night unforgettable in a way that would remain forever painful.