Good Old Days?

I hadn’t attended a reunion since graduating from McCall in 1963. The fact is I left high school before graduating to join the air force. Since then I just haven’t had any interest in going to a high school class reunion. I know class reunions are suppose to be about renewing friendships, sharing memories of the good old days when we were young and innocent. It may have been a young and innocent time of my life but it was hardly about "good." It was more about "hard" days; days about doing without, days about just getting by, and days about just making do.
It was fun to see some of my old friends after so many years. Some had changed while others looked the same. I seemed to have changed the most. Maybe it was because of lot them have stayed in touch over the years and I hadn’t. Seeing and talking to them made me realize that I had changed in ways I hadn’t thought of. I became bored of talk about the old days, and the "remember when" stories. I was anxious talk about what has happened since high school.

For me, high school conjures up mixed emotions; some good, some bad but mostly bad. After the air force I went to college and became a shop teacher. High school shop class was where I found my calling. Working with hand tools, making things out of wood fascinated me. I wanted to know how things worked. At Grambling, a shop professor took an interest in me, became my mentor and during the next four years I learned and lived in the industrial arts building.


In high school there were teachers didn’t have a clue about how kids learned or how to teach them so they woule learn. My algebra teacher was an extremely smart man. He would spew out formula, write them on the board but never checked to see who got it. Quizzes and exams were his answers. If you failed his tests, you obviously didn’t get it. His motto was "I got mine, you get yours."


A school where you rarely saw the principal talking socially to students unless, of course, he was berating them in the halls or whipping them in his office. A school more like a larger version of a plantation; but instead of a plantation owner, it was a principal. It was a school where the school calendar was designed around when the cotton needed to be picked. A school where books, band and athletic uniforms where was handed down from the white school. A school building that was dark, had broken windows and was rarely cleaned unless the white superintendent was coming for one of his "inspections" or one of his "public verbal beatings" of good teachers.


I moved to Wisconsin, taught junior high school shop for three years, finished a master’s degree in school administration and eventually became a high school assistant principal. The junior high school where I taught was better equipped than my labs at Grambling College. I had an abundance of materials, supplies, books and tools for every one of my students, and more.
As an assistant principal my eyes were opened as how poor my high school really was. At my high school where I was an AP, we recycled books that were better than those used every day by black or white schools in the south. So it’s extremely difficult for me to relish in what is called the "good old days." I can only get angry when I think about the pervasive racial caste system which operated in the south between 1877 and the 1960s. Jim Crow was a series of rigid anti-Black laws. It was a way of life. African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens.


Nontheless, I am comforted and thankful that my father who quit school in 4th grade to help his mother farm, and for my mother who finished 6th grade had enough foresight and wisdom to understand the value of being educated. They both knew that education was the one vehicle that would pave the way to opportunities unavailable to them. If our nation is to remain prosperous and committed to equality of opportunity, we must make sure that all of our children, especially those in poverty, receive an adequate education.


I will be forever indebted to my parents for their sacrifices and hardships to make my life better. For that I am thankful for the "old days."