I have struggled for nearly a month to put words to a shared high school experience I enjoyed in the mid-1970s. In 1973 at the conclusion of our Freshman year, our last year of Junior High School, a tornado tore through Jonesboro, Arkansas (my hometown), and destroyed not only a lot of homes and businesses, but also Jonesboro High School.
My class, the Class of 76, never really had a home on the hill that had hosted JHS for many years. Our three years, or in my case two years, were spent at the Craighead County Fairgrounds. We parked our cars in a field that flooded every time there was a heavy dew. We were inundated by all manner of insects and odors. It was, after all, a real fairground complete with livestock pens and exhibition halls. We called it Heifer High. Our classes were held in makeshift classrooms in the exhibition hall or in portable buildings hastily set up for our use. There was one bathroom for each gender on campus. I don’t remember any supplemental port-a-potties. I am pretty sure the mere existence of Lake DeSpain violated a number of health laws. There was no dining facility on campus. At ‘Heifer High’, classes for some began at 7:00AM and for others didn’t end until 5:00PM.
This was a high school experience unlike any other, before or since. By necessity, we enjoyed an amazing degree of freedom. Some of us rode the bus (driven by some fine, upstanding young men like Meatloaf) to P.E. at what is now the Earl Bell Center while others drove cars. Sometimes, we made it to P.E., and other times we drove around listening to The Allman Brothers, The Who or the Stones. Not everyone had or needed a lunch break, but those of us who did were able to drive off campus to Pasqualies, MinuteMan or some other lunch spot. Sometimes we came back after lunch, and some times we would end up driving around listening to Joe Walsh, The Grateful Dead, or Grand Funk. The keeping of accurate attendance records was not a strength of the school during our years at the Fair Grounds. Seems that if you ‘knew’ someone who was an ‘office assistant’ for work study, you could cut an astonishing number of classes and still show perfect attendance.
On Fall weekends in ‘73, after the first frost killed off the mosquitoes, we sometimes had impromptu parties at Craighead Forrest. This was the golden age of Miller Ponies, a small, 8 oz. beers that came 48 to a case. There was a lot of music and a few illegal smiles. Later in the year, some of us found great sport in spot lighting rats at the dump, putting Tide detergent in the Fountains downtown, or stealing the population sign at Black Oak. Life was a celebration, and we, well some of us, partied all night long. When Jimmy Buffet famously wrote, ‘We are the people our parents warned us about’, at least in my case, he was talking about us.
In high school many of us had our first real encounters with romance. As I look today at our yearbook, we were a very good looking group of kids. We were bright eyed and optimistic. We were young, and innocent, and very passionate about life, love and music. In high school, beautiful young couples formed and exploded with the frequency and intensity of fireworks bursting in a summer night sky. Some of us found lasting love, and others found their first love, but all of us found that love is an amazing adventure and though heart aches are real, they are neither fatal or eternal.
On Friday of this week, I’m returning to Jonesboro for my 45th High School reunion. I have not attended a single reunion prior to this one. I am looking forward to seeing old friends who I haven’t seen for so many years. Though we are not the young and innocent anymore, I suspect we haven’t changed that much through the years. I know this post does not do justice to the Class of 76. I am pretty sure that we still know how to have a good time, and I know our music still rocks.
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