In 1986, before the 20-year reunion of the Class of 1966, classmate Tim Schreiner, then a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a guest column for the Aberdeen American-News. Below is the text of that column. We recently asked Schreiner how well he thought the column held up after 30 years.
"Some of it is a decent look at what the world was like in 1966 and the next two decades," he said. "But some of it is silly. I said, 'People don't change.' That's just not true. I'm amazed at how much my classmates have changed and succeeded at their chosen professions over the years."
Editor's note: Here is the column written by Tim Schreiner for the Aberdeen American-News on June 26, 1986, before our 20-year reunion.
By Tim Schreiner
I still think about the drive-in at Eighth Avenue and North Main Street in Aberdeen. That's where I learned that big mouths, big arms and big brains didn't necessarily come in the same package.
And then there was Aberdeen's Main Street, a two-way drag at the time, where I discovered that an empty gas tank was the root of all evil.
I'm going to pay homage to both spots, and many others, when I visit Aberdeen for two days this month for a reunion of the Central High Class of 1966.
The 1966 graduation program didn't count me as one of those "Most Likely to Succeed." High jinks and an overactive suspicion of authority weren't appreciated any more then than now. The only roll call I topped was the principal's "report-to-the-office" list.
My first day as a senior is the one I'll never forget. Five of us — all moderately good students — were sent home for having hair that touched the tops of our ears.
The hair episode was the first of a handful of temporary expulsions. Later the reasons would be bell-bottom pants, sandals with no socks and hair, again. Teenagers always know that hair drives older people crazy: too long, too short, rat-tail, mohawk. Arghhhh.
In 1966, guys shocked their parents by combing their hair down across their foreheads and grown out on the sides — Beatle cuts, they called them. Our yearbook was Central's first Beatle book.
The more daring girls brushed out their pageboys and began wearing the long straight hair that was creeping toward South Dakota from the coasts.
Hair was the battleground in 1966 — before Vietnam wounded us, before drugs zapped us and before life scared the hell out of us. Our philosophical arguments were still on the level of 3.2 beer versus high-point, or the best place we called the "Eighth Wonder of the World": a lonely shelterbelt turn-in south of Aberdeen where the three KSDN towers appeared as one.
The Class of '66 wore its jeans skin tight at the calf and cut about three inches above the shoes. We were the last Central-only high school class in town. The tuna-can lobbing at Central-Roncalli basketball games was a year away.
The world was no longer innocent enough for car hops at the Breeze Inn on North Main. Aberdeen had gotten big enough to interest hamburgers chains named Scotty's and AutoDine.
A chain called McDonald's had the nation's urban centers sizzling, but our city was still too small and the big names' lack of interest gave us an inferiority complex. To compensate, we went to dances in Leola and Watertown and make up stories about being from California.
It was a time that shook up the country, and we aged fast with the jostling. We started our sophomore year facing the traditional 1950s dilemma between college and military enlistment, and left school wondering if the nation's first stupid war would last long enough to take us. It did. We were forced to learn geography and politics never mentioned in Senior "Modern Problems" class.
When we graduated in the heat of June 1966, more than half of American adults didn't have high school diplomas. As part of the front line of the baby boom, we ushered in a new era in which America demanded a high school diploma. When we emerged from the Civic Arena with our certificates, most women didn't work outside the home. But education, feminism and divorce changed that. Now even a majority of women with pre-school children have jobs.
We were part of a huge transitional generation. Now we've made our own transitions to adulthood: among other changes we're balder, fatter and slower. We were just "seniors" in 1966. Now we're telephone workers, housewives, lawyers, janitors and writers. Let's hope we're smarter.
Some of us undoubtedly have invented new characters for ourselves, but those creations will disappear on June 28. You can't fool your high school classmates, no matter how long it's been. They know who you are and they're not about to let you change, even if it's for the better.
Ten years ago, at our first official reunion, I was shocked by how little I had in common with some of my high school friends. I was equally surprised by how much I found interesting in classmates whom I ignored a decade earlier.
It makes sense, though. High school graduation is the beginning of that time in life when you are never more out of control and yet you have to make most of the decision that rule your life. They say life gets more complicated as you grow older. But I don't buy it.
Most of the uncertainties in life are decided within a few years of high school graduation: career, spouse, city and relative financial well-being. So, mystery probably has left the lives of the Class of '66.
The best thing is that on reunion weekend we'll all be warm and friendly, because that's the way you grow up in Aberdeen and because the few who aren't probably will stay away.
After all, a reunion of high school classmates is as much a suspension of reality as high school itself. None of life's serious irritants will get in the way over the short weekend. No bickering. It's all in the name of '66, the two-digit thread that binds people with little else in common.
