For some reason in high school I never tried out for any of the plays or wrote for the school paper or participated in the yearbook. The only thing I really did to draw public attention to myself (and play on my strengths) was be a member of the Senior Skit, which was actually pretty good. This came at the end of the school year. It was a school assembly where we got to perform in front of the entire school. The jocks (football and basketball players) decided for their senior skit to dress up in women’s clothes, put balled up socks in their shirts for breasts and do a chorus line dance number where they kick up their legs and show their underwear. They assumed this would naturally be hilarious. And when they did perform, it did get plenty of raucous laughter.

Those of us who were a little more creative (and a good deal less vulgar) in contrast actually put on a real skit. Reg Belden held a meeting at his house to organize it. For my role, I came up with the idea of dressing like a hippie and reciting poetry. I wore jeans and a gray sweatshirt, I borrowed a blue beret from my mother and I cut a gray and white fur collar off one of her old coats and made myself a rather stunning goatee.

My poems weren’t all that clever but they got huge laughs. The first was "On Jack’s Run," a local stream notable for the amount of sewage running through it. I can’t remember all the lyrics but here’s a fragment that survived:


Subsequent lines referenced "brown trout" (turds) floating in the sewage polluted waters of Jacks Run. The supervising teacher apparently didn’t know what brown trout were, so that got through without being censored. It got a big laugh. But my masterpiece however was my cemetery poem:


This was by no means inspired poetry but the students, who were desperate for any hint of creativity, loved it. They roared and cheered. One old friend (Steve Chappars) threw a dead fish on the stage in our honor. The jocks were pissed. One of them came up to me afterward and angrily demanded to know why we did a skit like that (What he really meant was "How dare we do a skit that was a order of magnitude better than theirs.")

After the show I was standing in the lobby outside the auditorium and suddenly I realized I had four or five admiring girls clustered around me. That had never happened before. It was my first glimpse of the relationship between powerful males (which was how they saw me after my performance) and sexual attraction. Right in the middle of talking to all these girls, I remember, I asked one of them to go on a plane ride with me at Latrobe Airport. I had borrowed my brother-in-law’s white Thunderbird. So it was quite an impressive day.

The girl’s name was Nina Miller. She wasn’t a brilliant conversationalist or anything but she was sweet. We used to go to the drive-in movies and make out. That’s all we ever did. This was before the sexual revolution and things were much different then.

Graduation was boring. Pomp and Circumstance never failed to move me. Afterward we stood on the sidewalk outside the auditorium. I remember seeing girls were crying on each other’s shoulders. Not only was it the end of school it was the end of an era, the end perhaps of the best times of their lives. I never felt that way though. I was just glad it was finally over. I think a lot of people were having parties. But, as I hadn’t been invited to any and it never would have occurred to my parents to have one for me, we just went home.