The End of an Era

Not there was any doubt in my mind, but it is official that I’m old.  The Bellevue School District is tearing down Sammamish High School where my husband and I, along with his six brothers, went to high school.  When my brother-in-law Tim, who is a reporter for KIRO radio in Seattle, sent out an email to the family with a link to the City of Bellevue’s office of land use pages telling of the two and a half year process the school district has planned for essentially tearing down the school in stages and replacing it will a three story brand new building I was gobsmacked.

 

My parents and I moved to Lake Hills, a post-war housing development in East Bellevue in 1957 where I started first grade in a not-yet-finished elementary school.  My classroom had 40 of the baby boom generation in neat rows.  Elementary schools weren’t the only ones being built.  During second grade my mother drove me past the building site where Sammamish was under construction.  “That’s where you’ll go to high school someday,” she said happily.  Like many of the greatest generation my mother was optimistic.  She was living the post war dream of living in a new, albeit modest, ranch house in one of the developments that sprang up when WWII vets returned, finished school, started careers and needed someplace to raise their families.  Bellevue, WA, a bedroom community to Seattle, fit the bill.

There was another side to the optimism of post-war America—the threat of nuclear war.  Because my father worked for Boeing Flight Test on the B-52 program he went to Eniwetok for six months in 1956 and again for five months in 1958 as part of the Boeing crew helping to test the atomic bomb.  Americans thought that the United States was invincible and that our superior technology could overcome all obstacles.  The Space Age was around the corner and the sky was the limit, but because of my father’s work the optimism was tinged with the reality that the Cold War was in full swing. 

Overt things such as my father’s plan for what to do in case of a nuclear attack told me that the world wasn’t such a rosy place.  Yes, I understood where to walk to at the lower edge of the elementary school grounds where my mother would pick me up.  She understood that she and my father would keep the tank of our 1952 Ford at least half full.  My father believed that we would have time to get out of range of Boeing, the Bremerton Naval Facility and Ft. Lewis, which he believed were potential targets, and we would be able to drive to my grandparents’ beach house on the coast.

There were things I wasn’t supposed to know about.  One of the networks (and I’ve never been able to track down which one or the name of the program) aired a television program of what to expect in the event of a nuclear attack.  I’d been sent to bed, but was able to see the television through the crack the door was left open and sat on the floor and was horrified by what I saw.  The grown-ups were going to kill us.  I became convinced of it.

So when my mother drove me past the building site for Sammamish High School in 1959 I paid scant attention.  She couldn’t fool me.  She might be my mom, but she was silly if she thought I was ever going to get old enough to go to high school much less grow up.  I don’t know if I’ve ever grown up entirely, but I did attend Sammamish High School from 9^th to 12^th grade, graduating in 1969.  The first year I still didn’t believe I needed to worry about growing up.  By my junior year it occurred to me that I might.  By my senior year it was panic time, but that’s another story.  Now they are tearing SHS down to make way for a fancy three story building.  The upside is I’ve outlasted it!

Class Reunion 2011

The ten year reunion it was essentially just exactly like high school. (photo courtesy of Jodi Ruddenberg)

I wasn’t going to post a blog today. I don’t have time. We are getting ready to go back to my beloved old house on the Long Beach Peninsula. It’s been a wonderful weekend and if I don’t write about it I will be sorry and by the time I have regular Internet access the blush may be off the bloom so to speak, but I doubt it.

Saturday was magical. After not having any reunions for twenty years, our high school class of 1969 has taken to having them yearly. We have a lot of time to make up for. Last year was wonderful, but too hot. This year the crowd was smaller and the weather was Baby Bear perfect. The smaller crowd meant that I was able to talk to everyone save one who sneaked away when I wasn’t looking.

Prior to one intrepid classmate taking the bull by the horns and organizing our 40th reunion we’d only had two. The ten year reunion it was essentially just exactly like high school. Everyone stood around with the same folks they had stood around with in high school. It was all rather ill planned from the motel in Issaquah, where we did not grow up, to the Vienna sausages on tooth picks and the fact that our dance music came from another group in a room next door. They opened folding doors and we got to see the back of the band. It was miserable.

Things were a little better at our 20th reunion. I was delighted to see so many familiar faces, but at this point people were anxious to impress each other with their accomplishments. We did grow up in Bellevue and the expectation was that everyone had been to four or more years of college and were highly successful. I hadn’t, but that didn’t stop me from having a good time, but even I held onto some of the high school sensibilities. I found the dentists and lawyers insufferable in their need to impress and I became hysterical when a cheerleader and one of the women from what we called the “sosh” clique discovered that they’d come in the exact same beautiful cream colored suit. I thought it was a Kodak moment and nearly rolled on the floor. Not very mature, but would have made a great scene in a movie.

I’ve written previously about my experience at our 41st get-together, about how none of that stuff matters anymore and this year was even sweeter. It was gratifying to watch a couple of people who had never been to a reunion and who had agonized about attending, come to the realization that we are just a bunch of old people, mostly grandparents, who have a shared history. We were a diverse bunch—a plumber, a musician, a Sufi, mechanics, teachers, artists. We spoke the names of those who are no longer with us with the knowledge that at our age there will be more and more on that list.

I felt thirsty to hear everyone’s stories. Some I hadn’t known a whit in high school and now I wanted to know everything from what it had been like in high school for them to what they are doing now and hope to do. One woman, so dear to me in junior high, had left at the end of our sophomore year and my heart sang to see her.

There were tears and a lot of laughter.

I must not have been alone in this hunger for connecting with our roots because this year people lingered all the way through the evening until darkness, mosquitoes and park closure sent us on our ways with promises to get together again before another twelve months have gone by and determined to find more of the missing.

The Poverty Unit

Most of my adult life I have had to struggle financially. After having and paying for a place for my family to live, putting food on the table while stretching dollars has been the most important skill I acquired. More times than I can count I’ve stood in my kitchen and blessed Mrs. McLean who was my home economics teacher my senior year at Sammamish High School in Bellevue.

Home Ec was not my favorite subject in school. Art was. But in those days a certain number of Home Ec credits were required for graduation and while sewing was torture, cooking was more appealing so I signed up for Creative Cooking with Mrs. McLean. She was young, hip--a bit of a beatnik--and fun. Dressed in sweaters and straight skirts, she claimed that if she ever had children she'd name them "boy" or "girl" and let them choose their own names. Despite the fact that Home Ec was generally the realm of the girls, we had two boys break the gender barrier at Sammamish that year and sign up for Creative Cooking.

Whether or not Mrs. McLean looked into her crystal ball and foresaw the decade we were graduating into or if her own life experience was the source of her curriculum in the form of the Poverty Unit I do not know. Certainly there was nothing about our own suburban Baby Boom childhoods in Bellevue that would have led her to believe that we had our would have need of the lessons we learned in the Poverty Unit, but the gift she gave us was to be able to create a meal, more or less palatable, from what we could scrape up.

Mrs. McLean’s method was simple. She started us out with the fewest ingredients possible. What can you do with just flour and water and a little fat? We looked at each other puzzled. Surely she wasn’t serious. We came up with something akin to a cracker. That was the first day. Over the course of the unit, Mrs. McLean added basic ingredients to our supply list and our creations took on the qualities of recognizable food.

For most of us it took a stretch of imagination to envision ourselves needing the skills we were learning. Certainly for the daughter of a Boeing engineer it seemed like the last lesson I would be in need of, but in two short years I would be a wife and mother with a low enough income to qualify for food stamps for the first time, but not the last, and the confidence that Mrs. McLean instilled in me helped me not be afraid when I stood in a kitchen with little food in the cupboard, praying the mailman would bring the child support check.

Many of today’s youngsters in my community are used to eating out or buying processed foods which will quickly drain a wallet. Getting the most out of my food money is as much of a job as the one I go to five days a week and I’ve brought out Mrs. McLean’s Poverty Unit and dusted it off at some point during nearly every decade of my adult life. She’s with me again in this economic crisis. I just hope that there are other Mrs. McLeans, preparing other young people to feed themselves and their families.

Now I have to climb down off my broom and have our family squish into my little Neon like circus clowns so we can tool down I-5 to a family wedding in Portland. Thank the goddess gas prices have taken a momentary dip to make the trip possible, but then, when family is there, so am I! Thanks to Mrs. McLean I can stretch our food budget far enough to get gas to Portland.