Be True To Your School

from this week in June, 2012  (I was 67)

                                    Be True To Your School

            I’ve been re-reading Bob Greene’s Be True To Your School,

a journal of his 1964 senior year in high school and his absorption

with the Beatles and hormones.  (Beatle mania was a much better

term than I thought at the time).  The book is as evocative for its

blind spots as for the nostalgic images. There is a class separation

in these Columbus, Ohio schools more apparent than in the ones I

knew in small towns on Minnesota’s Iron Range.  Greene is

unconscious of it, but he and his friends blithely drive Impala

convertibles and T-Birds, both new ’64 and classic ’56 models. 

They belong to fraternities and sororities. (In high school?) 

            There is no mention of the sense of national loss in direction

or loss of momentum caused by the JFK assassination, nor the turmoil

of the fomenting civil rights movement.  There is no anxiety over the

cold war, atomic weapons or our beginning involvement in Viet Nam. 

Still it is a touching and even historic memoir.  If you have since

followed his columns or books, you know Bob Greene was to learn

much in his next ten years of becoming a newsman.