Inside the minds of high school grads

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As the high school year nears its end, the students surely have a lot on their minds.

Don’t ask me exactly what that is today, but I can say a thing or two about what my fellow grads and I were carrying inside our heads 64 years ago as our big day drew near.

Should I join the Army? I knew guys who graduated on the weekend and headed down to the recruiter’s office Monday morning. For some, in those days of an active draft law, the thinking ran “I should just get it over with.” For others, a few years in uniform was seen as a great way to see the world while honing your personal priorities — which might include becoming a career soldier or sailor.

Can I get my old summer job back? With college tuition locally hovering around just $500 a year, a decent summer job could put you through a year of higher ed. Today it is likely more prudent to take summer advanced classes to shorten the years of piling up — ye gods — a debt burden such as small cities used to accumulate.

Is lower-cost higher ed the way to go? Our area back then offered good non-college alternatives.

Downtown Wilkes-Barre alone had an office-practices school, an art school, music schools and several hair-styling schools (women’s and men’s) that could launch a young person into a paying career. Decisions, decisions!

How will I ever get all the autographs? With high school yearbooks distributed in the spring (not later, as today), there was a mad rush on Class Night and in the hallways to get as many classmates as possible to scribble something — however illegible — in the book. To this day, though, I’m a bit leery of finally deciphering lines which might turn out to be “Good riddance to the biggest pest I ever met” rather than “Those smudges are my tears over parting from you.”

Who’s my date for the prom? Much of your groundwork was probably already done. With weekly dances the rule in high schools of the time, a senior prom was more of a capstone on a whole year of socializing than the cosmic once-in-a-lifetime happening it is today.

Can I ride my part-time job into full-time? I don’t know how things shake out now, but in the “old days” a lot of high school kids worked daily after class or on weekends, whether in a department store, a garment factory, an auto repair shop or a commercial office. After graduation, many parlayed these gigs into career or entrepreneurial success.

Will I remember forever all my old teachers? As it usually turned out, the answer was “maybe a few.”

What will my most useful course have been? Had someone asked me that back in 1960 I’d have nodded sagely and cited the one in which Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” was analyzed in detail. Actually, it turned out to be touch typing. Whether I was preparing military intelligence reports or writing city council news stories, the keyboard ruled.

Will my high school pranks come back to haunt me? Probably not! More than 60 years after the fact, no one has ever confronted me about the novel I made up once when I was stuck for a book report. Actually, it was pretty good, all about a poor young golfer who worked hard and won the Masters Tournament. Thank heaven for “Sports Illustrated.”

Hey good luck to all the soon-to-be grads. Hope you learned typing — real typing!

Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history and genealogy writer. Reach him at [email protected].