1962-1965 Rockhurst High Part 2: My Classmates

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Mike

Here are the guys in our homeroom class whom I can remember.

I think that these guys were all in the class for at least some of the years, but I did not know them very well: Jim Cecil, Carl Cordes, Mike Griffin, Jim Hafner, Robert Hudspeth, Mike Loftus, Jim Murtha, Mike O’Connor, John O’Malley, and Mike Ulses. There was another guy named, I think, Mark McSomething.

I was pretty good friends with Chuck Blumentritt. Chuck, Joe Montanari, and I played golf at Blue Hills on caddy day once. The caddymaster got angry at us for some reason; maybe no guests were allowed. I also recall that Chuck later wrote a satirical play called Knifesmoke. The leading character was a saloonkeeper named Philip McGlass. I think that Chuck also played on the soccer team that was initiated in our junior or senior year. It was a club sport; in the sixties Americans did not take soccer seriously, at least not in KC. I think that Rockhurst only had four official sports in those years: football, baseball, track, and basketball.

I knew Michael Bortnick from when my family first moved to Prairie Village. His house was on Nall Ave. immediately behind ours. His family moved away a few years later. He was not at Rockhurst in our freshman class. I think that he enrolled when I was a junior. I had only a few classes with him, and he always sat on the other side of the room.

I am uncertain whether Jock Bracken was ever in our homeroom. He ran for President of the Student Council. His slogan was “Jock supports athletics.” I don’t remember whether he won or not.

Terry Cernech, my cousin, played on the varsity basketball team. I think that he also was associated somehow with a musical that was put on by Rockhurst High and Notre Dame de Sion, a girls school. I think that at one of those rehearsals he met his first wife, Debbie Lieschman, who, believe it or not, lived directly across the street from us in Leawood. Terry lived twenty miles away.

Dave Chappell was a good friend. I went over to his house a few times to play chess. He had a fancy chess set. It was difficult for me to identify the pieces. The queen looked a lot like a bishop. He used to say “Jethro Bodine is my ideal.” For some reason he decided to go into the Navy rather than go to college after graduation. He had a pronounced southern accent.

Pat Dobel was two-time state debate champion. He was also very good at extemporaneous speaking. He and his debate partner John Immele finished first and second in the overall GPA race. I don’t recall who won. He is on the faculty of the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

Bill Fischer was on the speech team, and he also acted in the school’s plays. He was easily the best actor in the Class of 1966. I remember him being very upset when Bob Dylan brought an electric guitar to Newport. He is on Facebook.

Gary Garrison was my friend from grade school and the Boy Scouts. At the 8th grade graduation he was one of the shortest guys, but he grew nearly a foot over the next summer. He has published two books and now lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

Michael Huslig, a very quiet guy, was one of the top students, especially in math and science. I think that he is now at Kansas University.

John Immele was also on the debate team that twice won the state championship. He was either first or second in GPA. As of 2005 he was associate director for nuclear weapons technology at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Bryce Jones was one of the guys that I hung around with, but I don’t remember any good stories. He died in 2019. His obituary is here.

Mike Kreyche took both Latin and Greek at Rockhurst and then studied the same subjects at the University of Arizona. He was the Systems Librarian at Kent State, where he published many articles.

Bill Locke was a friend from grade school. He played on the varsity football team at Rockhurst and was also on the two-time state championship debate team. He went to Notre Dame on a speech scholarship, but I never saw him on the collegiate circuit. For a while he was a barrister in London. His Facebook profile says that he is now a criminal lawyer in California.

Bill’s family lived fairly close to our house. One evening he and I decided to roll hedgeapples under cars driving on 89th St. When a car’s tire hit one it sounded like a blowout. One driver stopped to talk to us, I wanted to run, but Bill held fast. We said “yes, sir” and “no, sir” for a few minutes, and then he drove off.

What’s a hedgeapple? It is the fruit of the Osage Orange tree, which is very common in KC.

I remember that Bob Malone was pound-for-pound the best wrestler in our phys ed class.

Jim Mansour was easily the hairiest guy in the class. He played on the junior varsity basketball team. I think that he is a doctor.

Joe Montanari was a pretty close friend. He was our homeroom rep on the student council in freshman year. For some reason many of the guys wanted to impeach him. Then we voted him back in. In 2021 he was president of Montanari Fine Art Jewelers in KC.

Kent Northcraft was the tallest guy in the class. He worked very hard on his basketball skills, and by our senior year he was one of the best players in the KC area.

Vic Panus, who usually sat directly to my left, was a real character. I remember that he once did a very tight forward roll in Mr. Stehno’s Latin class. When a guy from Junior Achievement tried to recruit us, Vic asked him this question. “How can I too become a J. A.?” He wanted to go to Spain because the señoritas were all beautiful, and the guys were, well, not serious competition. He debated with Vic LaPorta for a little while. In one practice debate he talked for a few minutes and then said, “Please ignore everything that I just said.” There are a lot more Vic Panus stories. I think that he is a lawyer now.

I think that Gene Ramirez joined our class as a sophomore. I remember that he finished geometry in two quarters, as I did. So, we were together with a few other sophomores and a bunch of seniors in the second-semester probability class. The seniors called him Rammo, and made fun of him. It was one of the very few disgraceful incidents that I experienced at the rock.

John Rubin was a friend from grade school. He competed in public speaking events, but I am not sure that he ever debated. He later worked on the Prep News. He was in all of my classes.

He was first elected to the state legislature of Kansas in 2010. His Wikipedia page is here.

Jay Ryan was a very good ping-pong player. He was also deadly accurate shooting a basketball.

Big Ed Schafer played varsity football. He also was a camp counselor at Camp Nash, the local Boy Scout camp on the Kansas side.

Pat Tierney was inducted into the Rockhurst Sports Hall of Fame in 2009.

Pat Tierney was probably the best athlete in the Class of 1966. He was a very good point guard on the #1 rated basketball team in KC. His goal was to play center field for the Yankees.

Mike Van Dyke also played varsity basketball. As of 2017 he was an attorney at Polsinelli PC in KC. He also has been active in the alumni association.

Dan Waters sat in front of me. He was in the chess club, and he usually beat me. I remember once that we played Stratego at his house. He put his flag in the front row where it could easily be captured. It never occurred to me that he would do something so outrageous. I did not think that of Dam as much of an athlete, but he beat me in the only 100 yard race that we had. I should have known better; his brother was a sprinter on the Rockhurst track team.

We were very good friends throughout the four years. We exchanged a few letters in college but then lost touch.

John Williams, whom everyone called Willy, sat behind me. He was also a very good friend and my debate partner during football season of my junior and senior years. The rest of the time he debated with Bill Locke and won two state championships. One night he called me, and we spent about two hours trying to determine if John Williams was the most common name in the KC phone book. It was second to John Brown.

He got married and had a kid while I was at Michigan. I saw him once in KC and once at a debate tournament at UICC in Chicago. He also had a band and was in theater productions. He became a lawyer and a judge. His obituary is here. It says that John Immele was his partner. They may have teamed up occasionally, but his primary partner was Bill Locke.

1962-1965 Rockhurst High Part 1A: Freshman Year Classes

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Mike

High school is different. Continue reading →

We were so lucky. Our class was the first freshman class at Rockhurst High in the new building at 9301 State Line Road. That meant that none of the upperclassmen were any more familiar with the layout of the new place than we were. Nobody tried to sell us an elevator pass. I made my way to my homeroom, #204, on a September morning in 1961.

Construction of the new school was still taking place during the summer of 1961.

Rockhurst has always been an all-male school. In 2020 Rockhurst High School is still in the same location, and it is thriving. The tuition is over $14,000 per year, as opposed to $300 in the sixties. There are now about a thousand students, an increase of roughly 25 percent.

St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Rockhurst is a Jesuit institution. The Society of Jesus was founded by a Spaniard, St. Ignatius Loyola. Pope Paul III approved the order in 1540. In the last few centuries the Jesuits became primarily known as educators. Rockhurst was certainly one of the best high schools of any type in the KC area.

About half of the teachers in my day were Jesuits, almost all of them from St. Louis. Many were “scholastics”, i.e., Jesuits who had not yet been ordained as priests. We students called them “mister” just as we did the laymen, but they dressed in black cassocks as did the priests. There might have been one female who taught typing. I say “might” because, by a strange twist of fate, typing was never offered to my class. In 2020 there are very few Jesuits at Rockhurst. The theology department, with a total faculty of thirteen, has only one! There are more than a dozen female teachers, including two department chairs.

One person in my freshman class was black. He played no sports, and he was never in any of my classes. I don’t remember his name. The other three classes had none, and none of the subsequent classes (while I was there) had any. Rockhurst High in 2020 had a considerable number of black students. I don’t know how many were athletes.

In the sixties a considerable number of blacks lived in KC on both sides of the state line, but I have no idea how many were Catholics. At any rate, the new school was on the far southern edge of the city, ninety blocks from downtown. I doubt that there was overt discrimination, but most of the blacks probably went to KC public schools. They might have had trouble with the entrance exam.

The freshmen class was divided into six groups, as designated by six homeroom numbers, based on test scores. We all took classes in the same subjects: religion, English, algebra, health, world history, phys ed, and, of course, Latin. So, everyone whose homeroom was 204 had no classes at all with anyone from any other homeroom. In subsequent years only minor adjustments were made to the groups. By junior year the schedules were more varied, but at the end of four years I had been in classes with less than 25 percent of the 200 or so guys in the class of ’66. So, there were many that I did not know at all.

From day one it was obvious that the classroom experience would be fundamentally different from the educations that most of us had received from the nuns. The only thing that seemed familiar was that we sat in alphabetical order so that the teacher need not waste time calling roll every day.

Discipline was strict, but there were very few incidents. Nearly everyone who attended wanted to be there and appreciated the value of the environment and the education. Each of us was issued a demerit card. Demerits were punched by faculty or staff. If you were given five demerits in a semester, you got a “jug”, which meant that you stayed after school. I got a few demerits over the years but only one jug. That occurred when Mr. Rothermich, SJ, got annoyed with me for practicing basketball moves with my rolled-up stocking cap in the speech room after school.

We had a dress code that prohibited sneakers, sandals and the like, jeans, and shorts. Shirts had to have collars and buttons. The most popular style of shoe was black leather with pointed toes (roach-killers). Facial hair was out. No hair was allowed on the collar, ears, or forehead. That was fine for the first year and a half, but in February of 1964 guess what happened.¹

We were not required to attend mass every day, but we did write AMDG (Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam) and BVMH (Beatae Virginis Mariae Honore)

In the first religion class Father Bauman, the vice-principal, began by walking up and down the aisles asking various students a question none of us had considered: “The bible, book or books?” The right answer is definitely “books”, but I bet that a lot of devout Christians would get it wrong. The message was simple. We were not going to memorize the catechism any more; we were going to learn the basis for our common religion.

This is easier if you understand glopitude.

In the very first Latin class Mr. Kister, SJ, wrote the following sentence on the wall “The gloppy glop glopped the glop gloppily.” The purpose was to show that even in English, which is a word-order language, word endings are often used to identify the nature of individual words. Gloppy is clearly an adjective, glopped is a past-tense verb, and gloppily is an adverb. In Latin word-endings are everything. Mastering Latin is largely a matter of learning to look for and listen for word-endings. Once again, we were being taught to think and understand, rather than memorize. Latin was my favorite class for the first two years. It was edged out by Greek the last two years.

Seldom used, but easy to throw and catch.

Mr. Stark’s world history class was a little different. He made us memorize this six-phrase list: pencil, pen, eraser, assignment book, folder, paper. We were required to have them at all classes. Every so often he would require us to lay out all six items on our desk for inspection. A demerit was punched for each missing item. Fairly often an eraser would be launched by a student who had already passed inspection in the direction of someone yet to be checked.

Mr. Stark also gave a quiz every day. Everyone hated this, but I think that it was a good idea. I, for one, would probably have put off reading or just skimmed the assigned lessons until right before the test if he had not done so. When I taught at Wayne State, I borrowed this technique.

Mr. Stark, who died in 2008, was not my favorite person, but I appreciated his dedication. The one thing that I did not like was when he showed us slides of Greek and Roman ruins. Many years later I saw most of these in person, and even then I found them tiresome after a while. Looking at someone else’s photos got old really fast.

I never thought about this much, but I did not really like Mr. Stark or Mr. Ryan, the basketball coach who also taught American history, a required course for sophomores. I respected both of them, and I took all the history courses offered at Rockhurst, but I did not even consider enrolling in history classes in college. Many years later I became really interested in papal history, and by extension Italian history, and by extension European history. In fact I became obsessed with these subjects. I think that I could have been a really good historical researcher, writer, and teacher. Oh, well, that ship has sailed.

What I remember most about the algebra class taught by Mr. Sisler, SJ, was his peculiar lisp, which, I suspect, came from a slight German accent. One day he asked a question, and I volunteered an answer. He then wrote it on the board and said, “Mistuh Ravada gave us this run to twy” with all the r and w sounds reversed. Not many students sniggered, but everyone talked about it after class.

Nevertheless, he was quite good at teaching algebra. However, he disappeared after our freshman year. I don’t know where he went.

By far the weakest of our teachers was a priest, whose name was, if memory serves, Father Wallace. He taught English, and sometimes he actually dozed off in class. We read nine or ten books throughout the year. The selection was not that stellar—he had a penchant for westerns. He also made a mistake in ordering one book. He ordered The Great Impostor, the biography of Ferdinand Waldo Demara, when he meant to order a novel with a similar title. So, we wasted a few weeks talking about Tony Curtis. I don’t remember this priest being around in subsequent years, either.

I am not sure why, but we also read Mutiny on the Bounty, the non-fiction book by Nordhoff and Hall that has been made into several movies. I remember that after we had supposedly been reading it for a week or so, Father Wallace asked someone whether the sailors made it back to England. The guy whom he asked said that he had not finished the book. Eventually, when it was explained that the answer was on the first page, he had to admit that he had actually not read any of it.

Father Wallace

When we were assigned to write a short story, mine was about two twins named Judy and Jody and how they treated their dog. I wasn’t very proud of it, but my classmates voted it the best. I was quite surprised.

Phys ed was fun. Coach Tuchness, who died in 2014, had us do all kinds of interesting stuff: wrestling, marine basketball (no fouls called), tumbling, crab walks, and regular games. The best part was that he did not make us try to climb a rope. I was one of the few guys who could do a headstand out of a backward roll. I found out that my peculiar spider-shaped build with amazingly flexible wrists was ideal for both types of crab walks. In either type of crab walk race, I was unbeatable.

Coach Tuchness set up a wrestling match between Pat Dobel and me. We were both built like spiders. He was slightly taller and heavier than I was, but I really thought that I could take him. We wrestled for what seemed like a really long time, and once I almost flipped him. However, neither of us could pin the other. Coach called it a draw.

Rockhurst graded on a 100-point scale. I don’t remember any individual grades, but my average was over 90, which qualified me for “first honors.” The teachers at the Rock were tough graders, but I finished in the top ten of my class in all sixteen quarters. Where is my scholarship?

1. I found a copy of a yearbook from 1975 online. By then the hair standards had been considerably relaxed.

1961-1962 QHRS 8th Grade

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Mike

Last year at the Queen. Continue reading →

The enrollment at Queen of the Holy Rosary School (QHRS) increased dramatically while I was there. By the time that I was in the eighth grade, almost one hundred kids were in the graduating class. The school buildings still exist in 2020, but QHRS has been replaced by a new school called John Paul II School, which serves two parishes, Queen and St. Pius X. The athletic teams, known in my day as the Rockets, are now called (I think) the Huskies. I counted twenty-one 8th grade graduates in the 2020 class, only eight of whom were boys. The school’s website says that they compete in the CYO football league, but I don’t see how.

The great tragedy is that when QHRS was eliminated, so apparently were all of the records. So, this website may be the only extant source of information about my heroics on the gridiron.

Final report cards in 2020 were delivered via something called Educonnect. Father Ryan, who read aloud every student’s report card in every six-week period of all eight years that I attended QHRS, must have rolled over in his grave.

The 2020 staff comprised twenty-five women and two men. In my day almost all the teachers were Ursuline nuns. We had a nurse, a Spanish teacher, and a math teacher who were lay women. Perhaps there was one more woman. There were definitely no men.

The JPII school website now mentions core classes and “specials”. At QHRS every class was a core class. When I was in eighth grade we attended mass at 8:00 every day. Our classes were religion, English, math, Kansas history, and Spanish. Ms. Jancey taught math, and Ms. Goldsich taught Spanish. The rest of the classes were taught by Sr. Ralph and Sr. Kevin. It seems reasonable to expect that we would have been taught some kind of science and/or civics, but I have no memory of either. Since we got grades in music and art, some time must have been allotted for them.

There was definitely no phys ed. We had two recesses, which I think lasted thirty minutes each, and a lunch hour. So, maybe we only had time for five or six classes.

By the way, there was no food served at lunch, but you could buy milk for almost nothing. I had a big grey lunch box, and I am positive that my mother prepared the best lunches.

What did I learn? I learned a technique for approximating square roots that I actually used in my first summer job. I learned a lot of trivia about Kansas that no one at the University of Michigan knew. I learned to count and to say a few phrases in Spanish. There probably was other stuff that stuck, but I cannot pinpoint any.

My eighth grade graduating class had close to one hundred students, but I only attended classes with half of them. We had two groups, dumb and dumber. I never took any classes with any of the students in the dumber group. If they did not participate in any activities, I might not know them.

We sat in alphabetical order in the same classroom all day long. The teachers came to us. So I will list the students in that order. Here are the boys that I can remember:

Ricky Ahrent was on the basketball team.
Bernie Bianchino was on the football team.
Tommy Bitner
Brennan Botkin
Andy Brown, who had asthma, played on the 1960 football team. I don’t remember him on the ’61 team. He might have been in the other class.
Bob Dalton was definitely not in my eighth-grade class. He might not even have been at QHRS that year. We had been very good friends several years earlier, when he went by Leo. His parents owned a set of greenhouses in which they grew flowers. I was shocked to discover that Dalton’s Flowers is still thriving in Overland Park in 2021.
I think that Joe Fox was on the basketball team.
Mike Farmer had red hair.
Gary Garrison was in Boy Scouts. He was also in my class at Rockhurst.
Jim Glenn was one of the linemen on the left side for the football team.
Tom Guilfoyle had a brother in the other 8th grade class and another brother in 7th grade. I think that Tom played basketball.
Arthur Gutierez. Nobody seemed to recognize that his dark complexion and last name might have indicated that his family might have come from a former Spanish colony.
Joe Hrzenak was on the football team.
Mike Kirk was on the football team. He was also in the Boy Scouts.
Joe Landis was on the football team.
Jim Neal was on the football team and Bauman’s Red Goose Shoes.
Denny McDermott was on the football team.
Mike O’Shea was on the basketball team.
Larry Pickett was on the basketball team.
Gary Renner arrived for the last two years. He was a pretty good friend. He went to Rockhurst, but he was not in my homeroom class.
Kent Reynolds was on the basketball team. He was the only person who was in the same class that I was for all eight years.
John Rubin’s Wikipedia entry is here.
John Rutherford was on the basketball team.
Mark Schoneman
John Skuban
Mark Smith
Mike Wiedower sat behind me.
Pat Wise played on the basketball team. His dad was the coach.

I had virtually no interactions with the girls who sat on the other side of the room. Here are the ones that I can remember

Pat Clooney was, I think, the girl who read the dictionary.
Linda Ernie
Mary Ann Furst
Mary Ann Gallagher
Antoinette Garcia moved before 8th grade. For some reason she was considered to have cooties.
Ann Grady
Anita Habiger
Patty Lally was my foe in the spelling bee in seventh grade. She must have been in the other class.
Christine Lutz
Mary Pat Maher
Mary Margaret Martin was big.
Barbara Miller was a very good singer.
Nancy Miller
Vicki Morris was very tall.
Mary Mulcahy worked on the News and Views. She called me at home once. I don’t remember why.
Kathy O’Connor
Gloria Shorten was the shortest person and the first girl to begin to fill out her sweaty.
Sally Shawberger
Barbara Yeado.

Of all these people, I have only had subsequent contact with three: Gary Garrison, Gary Renner, and John Rubin, who all went to Rockhurst High School, as I did. I also saw Barbara Yeado perform in a musical put on by her high school and Rockhurst. I think that my cousin Terry Cernech was also involved in it.

I partook in almost every available extracurricular activity.

I often served at mass (i.e., was an altar boy), sometimes at the mandatory 8 am mass, sometimes at 6 am. The best duty was a funeral or wedding; sometimes there were tips.
I was “editor” of the school newspaper, News and Views. Sr. Kevin actually did most of the work, but I did write a poem and an editorial. I also remember interviewing some guys who were trying to involve the school in some sort of scheme. I also learned the five W’s plus How with a Wow in the lead.
I played alto saxophone in the school band, which was led by Rocco DeMart. The only other band member whom I remember was Sammy Caccioppo on trombone.

The easiest safety patrol job was the crosswalk on 71st St. Hank Bauer, the baseball player, lived in one of those houses right across the street from the school. — The easiest safety patrol job was the crosswalk on 71st St. Hank Bauer, the baseball player lived in one of those houses right across the street from the school.

I was a captain of the safety patrol. Before and after school we would stop traffic on Metcalf and 71st St. to let pedestrians cross. Many kids walked to school. Metcalf was a very busy four-lane state highway. We wore white belts and carried sticks with flags of yellow and green, not stop signs. My mother did not like the idea of children being used to direct traffic, but no one was ever injured on my watch.
I played football and basketball. There are separate blog posts for these adventures.
I was in a choir that gave a concert for parents. I was not allowed to whistle. I just pretended. We sang, among other things, “Donkey Serenade” from the movie Firefly. It has remained one of my favorites. Jack Jones’s fabulous rendition is here:
I was also in the boys’ choir that sang “O Holy Night” on Christmas Eve. It was led by Fr. Finnerty. I was astounded that they let me participate in either of these choirs. My worst grades were always in music and art.
I was a patrol leader in the Boy Scouts. Our group was named the White Buffalo patrol after the Indian legend featured on an episode of Rin Tin Tin. Mary Ann Gallagher’s younger brother was in this patrol.
I was in a Great Books Club that met occasionally. I don’t remember any specifics at all.

I took the bus to school. When I had to arrive early or stay late I rode my bike or walked unless it was bad weather. If I had to serve the 6:00 mass, my mom drove me and picked me up. I doubt that I ever expressed my appreciation for this.

We had an election for the meaningless title of president of the class. QHRS did not in any way resemble a democracy. It was a monarchy; the queen was Sr. Dominica, the principal.

As usual, I was nominated by the boys’ party. I don’t remember which girl defeated me. I don’t blame the dozens of girls who voted against me. I was definitely “stuck up.” I had little use for them, and I did not care much what any of them thought of me.

We put on a panel discussion of the United Nations. I remember that someone in the audience asked why the US contributed so much more than other nations to it. I suggested that it might be because we were the richest country. My answer got a round of applause.

Everyone got to participate in one debate that was judged by the class. The topic for our match was whether to eliminate homework. My teammates were Linda Ernie and Joe Hrzenak. We each gave one speech. Joe went first, then the negative, then Linda, then the negative, then me, then the negative. Our plan was to replace homework with more time at school. Our argument was that help from teachers was better than help from parents and siblings. I can think of several good arguments against this approach, but the negative did not present any. They just read their prepared statements that praised the value work done after classes. Nevertheless, we lost the vote of the students. Despite the result, this activity sparked my interest.

I started listening to pop radio at some point. The stations were WHB (710), which produced a Top 40 list that was available at record stores, and KUDL (1380), which produced the Great 38.

Field Day was always the highlight of the year for me. We stayed outside all day! One year I was playing left field in a softball game. For some reason I did not have my baseball glove, which I ordinarily brought to school every day in the spring. Someone hit a popup down the third base line. I took off for it at full speed. At the last second I pulled off my cap and caught the ball in it on a dead run. They should not have allowed this, but, after a big confab, they did.

My most ignominious defeat came on the 8th grade field day. In the broad jump competition I won the boys’ half; Ann Grady won the girls’ half. I then had to jump against her, and I came up a fraction of an inch short. I should have congratulated her, but I did not. At the time I did NOT blame my shoes, which were orange (?) and leather. I don’t know why I wore them. Maybe I had no sneakers, which were called “tennis shoes” in KC in the sixties.

De La Salle High School tried to recruit 8th grade boys by sponsoring a math competition. QHRS always participated. Ms. Jancey one day made an off-the-cuff list of boys in our class who she thought should participate. She named everyone except for Joe Hrzenak, the universally acknowledged worst student, and me. I was going to go anyway, but the contest was canceled because of snow.

Rockhurst High School did not need to recruit. Instead they gave a test to determine whom they would accept. At least twenty boys from QHRS took the test, but only four of us were accepted. Rockhurst gave ten scholarships based on test scores. None of us got one, but three of us (Rubin, Garrison, and I) placed in the top (of six) classes.

QHRS also gave a scholarship. We had to write an essay on why we should get it. Mine argued that the prize should go to Joe Fox, whose father had recently died. The winner was John Rubin, who essentially said that if he won, he would chain himself to his desk and avoid all human contact for four years. It made me gag.

If I had been there, she would not have even gotten one.

Co-ed parties were strictly prohibited before 8th grade graduation. Somehow John Rubin got a papal dispensation for a Halloween party for six of us. I discovered there that my big mouth was a tremendous advantage when dunking for apples. No one else could grasp an apple in their teeth. I captured all the apples and won by acclimation.

Sally Shawberger threw a party soon after graduation. I was invited. Since I had my last cosmetic surgery on my lip scheduled for the same day, I was rescued from this prospective nightmare. I think that this fortuitous scheduling might have been recompense from God for attending church at least six times a week for eight years.

I played some golf and mowed some lawns over the summer. In 1962 the family moved from 7717 Maple in Prairie Village to 8800 Fairway in Leawood. The new house had a MUCH bigger lawn, and it was within easy walking distance of both the Ward Parkway Mall and Rockhurst High School’s new building on State Line.

The red rectangle is the mall. The blue rectangle is Rockhurst.

The event that I most remember was when I was minding my sister Jamie, who was six years old at the time. Suddenly I started gagging. Eventually I was able to pull a strip of gauze that was three or four feet long out of my throat. I had no idea what it was, but I felt OK when it was over. Jamie was horrified.

On her arrival my mother told me that this was padding that they put in my nose when they operated. She said that the doctor had told her that this would happen. I don’t know why she did not warn me.

The chicks really go for a guy with an OA sash.

I went with Troop 295 to Camp Nash for a week, as I had the previous summers. This one was memorable because I was chosen to join the Order of the Arrow. It was fairly dramatic. The whole troop was gathered in a big circle around a campfire one night. The scoutmasters walked around the circle and stopped behind one of the scouts. They then slapped him hard on the right shoulder three times.

All of those selected were then brought to another campfire where they were told the Order’s password, which is called “the admonition”, and apprised of the initiation ceremony. Each selected scout was escorted in the dark to a separate place in the woods and given a blanket, an egg, two matches, and a canteen of water. They were told to make a camp, sleep, cook the egg, and eat it. In the morning each had to find his way back to his troop.

I thought that this was very cool, and I was proud to be able to bring the extra match back to my to our camp. Thank goodness that it did not rain. It seldom did in Kansas in the summer in those days.

If you want to know the secrets of the society, you can learn them on the Internet. However, you must know the admonition, AND be able to key it in with all lower-case letters and no spaces or hyphens. I remember the admonition, but no one told me how to spell it, and it is not a bit obvious.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Rockhurst High

1962-1965 Rockhurst High Part 2: My Classmates

1962-1965 Rockhurst High Part 1A: Freshman Year Classes

1961-1962 QHRS 8th Grade