Happy Father's Day!

Ground floor. Look at all those specialized classrooms, gyms, pool, theater...

 I've been helping my mom go through dad's belongings and I lost track of time going through a box of his old high school things -- class notes, tests and that sort of thing.  His high school was a good one, or maybe it was just typical of a mid-1960s high school.  It offered an amazing variety of classes and had pretty stiff requirements.  For example, in order to graduate you had to take three years of math, three of science, three of language, four of PE (Physical Exercise, I think), four of English, three of history, two of economics,

...bookstore and large library, study hall....

three of social science, four of your choice of mix and match band, choir, music appreciation or art studies.  There were plenty of electives, too. The languages offered were French, German, Spanish, Russian and Latin.  The math offerings included trig and calculus, the sciences included ecology, archeology, and paleontology.

A few courses dad took that caught my eye were Asian Civilizations, Russian History and Poetry and one that seemed to be about current world events but I didn't notice the title.  

Dad was a doodler and had atrocious handwriting, but at least he had been taught cursive. I can hardly read his notes, but it didn't seem like he was much of a note-taker anyway.  He probably just read the text books and books from the recommended reading lists and only jotted something down if it caught his attention.  The reading lists for the classes were pretty good.  I noticed titles by George F. Kennan, John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer and even Võ Nguyên Giáp.

There were 70 questions.  Dad missed two.

I think dad got bored in his Russian History class. I imagine he thought it would be mostly about the Tsars
battling Mongol hordes and whatnot but it seems mostly to have been about the Communist Revolution, Marxism and the sort of political stuff that dad hated.  He was totally not into any sort of politics, foreign or domestic.  He wrote down some  pretty snarky definitions of the terms he had to study, defining the proletariat as fascist agents, Rapallo as a Nazi pact and the Gosplan as a fascist plot, for example.  Actually, I don't even know what those last two are. Wait, no -- I remember reading Ernest Hemingway's news report about Rapallo when he was a foreign correspondent. Oh, that was the 1920 one between Italy and the leavings of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but there was another one in 1922 between Soviet Russia and Germany, which must have been the one referred to in dad's class. I just looked that up. N'mind.  But anyway, he got an A for the course.

 One of the classes dad took was about the world situation and seems to have been pretty serious, demanding thoughtful engagement by the students.  It had a lot of recommended reading and even required the class to fill out voting ballots to decide various issues.  It interested me to see the sorts of questions the teens decided.  One was should the US withdraw from NATO now that Europe was back on its feet and fully able to defend itself -- not into isolation but in order to create a new pact with Europe.  There was also discussion about withdrawing from the security treaty with Japan now that it had recovered from the war and might not even be a trustworthy ally.  By the time he entered high school, dad had lived in Japan as a dependent, his father, my grandfather, being a naval aviator forward deployed to

Atsugi. (I'd live on base there, too, as a child, when dad was forward deployed there, as I would be as an adult.) Atsugi was the Japanese naval air force base from which the last combat missions flown by the Japanese sortied from -- after the surrender.  Japanese fighters attacked a B-32 reconnaissance plane checking to see if the Japanese were adhering to the terms of the surrender agreement. One of the crew members was killed, the last man to die in the war.  When my dad lived in base housing there, there were still tunnels full of Japanese war gear.  They were fenced off but kids could find a way to get in them and score sake bottles, gas masks, helmets and wooden crates with Japanese kanji on them as souvenirs.   Atsugi NAF was also where Lee Harvey Oswald was stationed as an Aviation Electronics Operator with MACS 1.  That may have been fresh in dad's mind as the Kennedy assassination was then quite a recent event, as was the Cuban Missile Crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall.  Fun times.

The Viet Nam war was a topic of special interest, especially since many of the students would soon find themselves in uniform serving there.  It's rather a wistful remembrance of the time that it was never considered that the US might completely lose the war and that it would last a decade after these kids debated among themselves what was to be done. We'd take care of this situation in a few months or a year or so at most. Lose the war?  That could not be possible.  Of course, now we are used to such an outcome.  It's hard to imagine today the profound shock to the country of the events of the spring of 1975.

Dad always liked poetry, not the melancholy and wistful stuff I like, Dickinson, Millay, Teasdale, Wylie and so on.  He was into Shakespeare, Longfellow, Benét, Tennyson and that sort.  He could recite long passages from narrative poems like Evangeline or Idylls of the King to entertain us when we went backpacking off trail and camped out deep in the Mineral King back country or wherever it might be.  I can still remember sitting by the embers of our campfire, a few sparks twirling up into the night, a chill stillness surrounding us, listening to him dramatically relating the Song of Hiawatha as an increasing glow over the mountain crest beyond the trees showed where the moon would soon rise.

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
At the doorway of his wigwam,
In the pleasant Summer morning,
Hiawatha stood and waited.
All the air was full of freshness,
All the earth was bright and joyous,
And before him, through the sunshine,
Westward toward the neighboring forest
Passed in golden swarms the Ahmo,
Passed the bees, the honey-makers,
Burning, singing in the sunshine.

I often fell asleep listening to the stories, not always understanding the words, but loving the voice, the tone, the emotion, all intertwined with the occasional call of a night bird or the hooting of an owl, the yipping of coyotes or a distant scream that dad would interrupt the story to tell us not to worry about because it was only a panther and it wouldn't bother us. I'd wake up the next morning snug in my sleeping bag after having dreamed of Indian villages, maidens and warriors, primeval nature and man.  Already mom and dad would be awake, sitting outside together in the bright sunshine, drinking campfire coffee as they breathed in the sparkling air.

And the smoke rose slowly, slowly,
Through the tranquil air of morning,
First a single line of darkness,
Then a denser, bluer vapor,
Then a snow-white cloud unfolding,
Like the tree-tops of the forest,
Ever rising, rising, rising,
Till it touched the top of heaven,
Till it broke against the heaven,
And rolled outward all around it.

Anyway and whatever.  Happy Father's Day, dad!  Happy Father's Day!

Love you!