I attended my 50th high school reunion last Saturday. The turnout for the Class of 1974 was predictably underwhelming. Approximately 35 out of a graduating class of over 400. Even it was actually 40, that’s 10 percent. Well, I don’t know, maybe that’s a good percentage for these things. Or at least average. I’m no expert on reunions.
It just seems like a 50th year reunion is a really big deal. Almost like a 50th wedding anniversary. But in 1974, we’d reached the height of apathy in America. The class of ‘74 was the most apathetic class imaginable. We actually lost pep rallies to the lower classes, something unheard of. It was actually “cool” to not be active in any school activities. I didn’t go to the prom, although I almost asked a lovely girl, but chickened out. I chickened out a lot in those days. I didn’t go to homecoming either, so I missed out on the crowning of the “queen,” who was a big, popular football player. That was our class; not taking anything seriously, no sense of decorum. I guess we were pathfinders; as today, at America 2.0 homecoming dances and proms, you can see biological males crowned as “queens” regularly. The “queen” of the dance was actually at the 50th reunion. I didn’t talk to him. He wouldn’t have remembered me.
Can you pick me out in the photo? Hint: my wife says I’m the best-looking one.
Actually, what I found out to my displeasure was that no one seemed to remember me. At least the ones who came to the 50th reunion. I had looked at the list of those who’d RSVP’d “Yes,” and was interested in seeing some of them. Unfortunately, none of them showed up. I questioned why I had decided to go there. It was a long drive, and since it was at a brewery, it would have been natural to try some of their products. But as I said, it was a long drive, and I didn’t want to get my second DWI. I still bitterly recall the first, in 1978, when I was forced to pay the uninsured motorists fee because I couldn’t afford the increased cost of insurance. I can still see the demented ladies of MADD, who sat in the courtroom to pressure the judge to throw the book at all the young, blue collar drunk drivers like me. They have yet to frequent a courtroom where an NFL player, or an illegal immigrant, is charged with drunk driving.
I don’t know what I expected. I just went through the motions in high school. For the only time in my life, I was somewhat of an introvert. I found it incredibly dull, and struggled to stay awake in my classes. The social hierarchy made such an impression on me that it was a major influence in my writing Bullyocracy. Oddly, none of the really popular kids- the “stars” of my high school class- were at the reunion. Well, except for the football player who was “queen” of the homecoming dance. He and a few others segregated themselves outside, just like they still were commandeering the “popular” corridor at Oakton High. They didn’t mingle with the rest of the common riff raff of ‘74. There wasn’t a cheerleader in sight. I can only assume that the most well known jocks, and the hottest girls, all flamed out after high school. Didn’t age very well. Gained a lot of weight, like almost everybody else. Or still thought they were too cool.
My ego is such that I thought maybe a few of my classmates would approach me and mention my writing. I’m friends with several of them on Facebook, and my avatar and profile make it crystal clear that I’m a big shot published author of many books. One guy did mention that he’d read one of my books, but struggled to remember the title- On Borrowed Fame. Still, he said he really liked it. A few girls I didn’t know said “Hi Don” and hugged me. Maybe that was their way of saying they liked my writing? I was hoping to see the class valedictorian, who you’d think would want to be at this thing. I really liked her, and she was the only one who thought I was going to be a writer. We had many political arguments, but in my immature mind, I sensed there was a mutual attraction amid the tension. I obviously didn’t know what I was doing. As I sat there with my wife, I actually wondered, did I really even go to Oakton High?
Overall, the reunion was pretty disappointing. The “In Memorium” page, always a morbid highlight at these events, was decidedly incomplete. I added a few names that I recalled from the list of the 20th reunion, or heard about on Facebook. So who knows how many of my classmates are really dead? Maybe that’s why the cheerleaders weren’t there. You can’t blame someone for not coming if they’re dead, after all. One girl who I was looking forward to seeing had a mild stroke and couldn’t come. That was a stark reminder that we are getting pretty old. We’re 68, and life expectancy is inexplicably falling in America 2.0. It’s a “science” thing, you wouldn’t understand. I’m sure there were others that were simply too sick or incapacitated to come. I have seen some of these classmates on Facebook, and a few still look pretty good. I was hoping to see at least one late 60s hot babe at the soiree. My wife insisted that none of them looked anywhere near as good as I do. She’s probably prejudiced.
So, I started thinking back, to 1974. As a young radical Democrat, I loved Ted Kennedy, and Frank Church, and Birch Bayh. I was pretty naive. I had just started playing guitar, and writing songs. I had also discovered the JFK assassination, which as you all know would become a lifelong obsession of mine. I was a proud cigarette smoker. Marlboros. Later to become Camel Lights. If anyone had asked me not to smoke, I would have reacted indignantly. I paid 45 cents for these cigarettes! It’s good for everyone that I quit smoking in January 1989. I would not have responded well to the draconian crackdown on a fully legal product. In 1974, you could smoke cigarettes anywhere- stores, banks, even hospital rooms. As a young hospital worker, I would usually have a cigarette dangling from my mouth as I pulled a heavy food or laundry cart through the hallways. You’d ground your butt out on the floor. Any floor.
I was never on time for my blue collar job. Always late. We just filled out our time cards at the end of the two week pay period. I always got paid for the full shift. Now, I did make up for being late by leaving early. Sometimes 3-4 hours early. The supervisors let you go when your work was done. No one argued that this was “falsification of time.” No one lectured us that it was “eight hours work for eight hours pay.” I was really spoiled when I wound up with a better job in IT. I could never adjust to having to work an entire shift. In the 1970s, though, this was commonplace. The WWII generation, which was then in charge, was a lot more lenient and flexible than the grown up flower children would be. The one drawback was tucking my shirt in. I strongly protested that. Little did I know, the world would come around to my point of view. It just doesn’t seem as special when everyone tucks their shirt out now.
We smoked dope on our breaks. Sometimes, we smoked dope openly on the job. Understand, this was America 1.0. I paid little attention to any rules or regulations. I was fighting The Man from the moment I got my first job at Wagon Wheel restaurant. The personal liberty we had would astound any Millennial or Gen Zer. Free speech actually existed. I ranted and raved about anything I wanted, to co-workers and management. No one ever suggested I couldn’t. The only snag I ran into was when Safety and Security objected to my getting signatures from employees on a petition to reopen the investigation into the JFK assassination. That’s the only time management ever really said, “you can’t do that.” I chalked it up to the JFK conspiracy being so big that even those who ran the hospital were somehow involved. No one had heard of “hate speech.” There were no such things as “fact checkers.”
As an eighteen year old healthy cisgender, I was like a kid in a candy shop. There were 13,000 employees working for the hospital, and lots of them were young, attractive females. Cisgenders, just like me. I never once worried that some nurse would call human resources on me for trying to converse with her. I don’t know what young male cisgenders do nowadays. Pretend they’re gay so the girl they’re talking to won’t complain? You could compliment women in 1974. Now, it’s somehow offensive if you tell a cisgender female that they look good. In America 1.0, the women tended to look better, anyhow, and were flattered to be told so. Plenty of secretaries were openly sleeping with their bosses. And many of us weren’t above slapping a girl on the butt. I’m pretty sure that would be a crime in America 2.0. So, unaware of the statute of limitations, I’m not confessing to anything specifically.
Recently, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law which bans “Deepfakes” and “disinformation” online. This was in response to a clever AI generated spoof of the eminently spoofable Kamala Harris. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, showing that she never intends to retire from her lifetime of crime, came out in favor of criminally prosecuting Americans who are guilty of spreading “disinformation.” In 1974, California’s new Governor Jerry Brown seemed like a pretty cool guy to 18 year old radical leftist Don Jeffries. Two years later, I’d attend a benefit concert for Jerry Brown’s presidential candidacy (I definitely preferred him to Carter), featuring the Eagles, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt. Fifty years later, the retired Brown is preoccupied with “Climate Change,” and Ronstadt is celebrating her childlessness. Glenn Frey is dead. I’m pretty sure both Don Henley and Jackson Browne are “Woke.”
I bought my first car in the fall of 1974. A burgundy 1970 Datsun 510 sedan. Four doors. Half-assed air conditioning. A cassette player that, amazingly enough, I installed myself. Because I installed it, it was half-ass too. Even though I knew nothing about cars compared to many of my friends, I was able to change my own oil. And throw the old stuff in the woods, before they made that illegal. I flushed my radiator. Put it a new headlight. I changed many tires, because mine seemed to regularly go flat. I ran over a lot of nails. I wondered why so many nails were left in an upright position, in places where I could run over them. I chalked it up as just another incomprehensible conspiracy. I haven’t changed a tire since the early ‘90s. They don’t even give you a real spare tire any more. It’s definitely no fun doing it yourself. I don’t long for the days when I couldn’t just call AAA or my insurance company to handle it.
It seems hard to believe that all that was 50 years ago. A half century. That was my line to those who I talked with at the reunion. “So, how have you been for the last 50 years?” Or the slight variant, “So, how have you been for the last half century?” I don’t feel much different now, at 68, than I did when I was 18. I weigh about the same as I did in high school. That should count for something. I don’t smoke any more, and very rarely drink. I don’t dare compliment any women, let alone slap them…well, you know. While we had hale and hearty discussions 50 years ago, about race, religion, politics, sex- you name it, I hesitate now in bringing up anything like that in personal conversations. Thankfully, I have Substack, and my podcasts, where I can still be as politically incorrect as I want, without fear of repercussion. I’m going to use my free speech as long as we have it. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, as we used to say.
It never occurred to me that I could be fired for my beliefs in 1974. Social media didn’t exist, but no company would have thought they had the right to terminate someone for anything they did on their own time. Eventually, my company would become a “smoke free” campus, and like others, mandated that only non-smokers need apply. So they could fire you for smoking on your own free time. The ACLU certainly didn’t protest that. No wonder I threw out my membership card long ago. I’m not recommending that people smoke cigarettes. Or allow their children to bounce around in the back of a pickup truck. That is so 1974. Or not wear a seatbelt. Or aggressively try to “rap” with women. But you once had those rights. You certainly had them 50 years ago. On the other hand, you didn’t have the right to “transition” to any of the now known to be infinite number of genders.
And it isn’t just the loss of civil liberties that people in 1974 took for granted. It’s how unattractive Americans have become. The average woman today weighs what the average man did sixty years ago. I don’t remember a single person in my graduating class having a tattoo. Maybe some of the girls had early versions of “tramp stamps.” I certainly wasn’t going to get a chance to see them. Compare the photos below. Am I hopelessly shallow and superficial for preferring the 1970s look? I haven’t been to the beach in years. I’m scared to go now. What if they have an under publicized “Fat Day” during my vacation? Yes, “Fat Beach Day” is a thing now. That would be scarier than Wednesdays at IHOP, when everything on the menu is half price for senior citizens. I think everyone should be accepted, and no one should be bullied for their looks. I wrote the book Bullyocracy, after all. But we shouldn’t be encouraging unattractiveness.
I’m so dependent on the internet. I don’t know how I’d live without it. I panic when our Third World power grids go down even briefly. In 1974, of course, the internet was just a twinkle in the Pentagon’s eye. And television was horrible, for the most part. I watched The Waltons. I didn’t like most of the 1970s movies, either. Too many car chase scenes. Disco was about to take over the culture, and I’ve made it abundantly clear what I think of disco. But there were “progressive” rock stations that played album cuts by most of the artists I liked. I listened to a lot of music in 1974, at home on my expensive stereo system, and on my half-ass car cassette player, when it worked. And I was playing my own guitar, and writing my own songs. Lots of protest songs, as you might expect. Elvis Costello was still a computer operator, as I would become in 1989. Our birthdays are close, too. Elvis and I have a lot in common.
If you lived in 1974, 2024 seems incomprehensibly different. Faster, frenetic even. More crowded. Lots of people who don’t speak English. Remember, the term “Hispanic” hadn’t even been invented yet. So you know the people weren’t here. Way more rules, and now “mandates” to obey. And much less freedom. If you have to leave work early, even for a real emergency, you won’t be paid for the whole shift. But you would have in 1974. There were very few “Karens” in 1974. We experienced a shocking lack of diversity. No “cultural enrichment” whatsoever. But the music was great. Obesity was rare. Tattoos even rarer. Overall, it was a better quality of life. So, to my fellow members of the class of ‘74, consider those fond memories. Maybe we didn’t create a better world for our children. If you’re reading this, you probably should have said hello to me at the reunion. But you can still leave a comment here.
Since graduating in 1968 I have been to zero class reunions. I figure those in attendance would be pretty much of the same clique that I was never a part of. Ya know, the "incrowd", the cool people. My popularity was in the bottom 5% anyway. I mean, how do you catch up on 50 years of stuff? Ridiculous.
I was going to let them have it, for all the stuff I endured in high school. I listened to the Doors on the way there, after having drunk about 3 glasses of wine. I was going to take the microphone from the band, and give them the "Jim Morrison rant" (look it up). After I got there, a guy gave me another glass of wine, and I literally passed out. Such was my fiftieth.