Class

of 1975

Almost four decades separate us from our high school days.

It’s been 35 years since we walked out the door of Central High School into our futures.

Tonight we find ourselves

thirty five years older

looking back at these long-

haired, bellbottomed kids.

What were those three

years of our lives all

about?

Perhaps Charles Dickens best describes the complex

nature of high school with the opening words from his book

A Tale of Two Cities:

"It was the best of times,it was the worst of times;it was the age of wisdom,

it was the age of foolishness;it was the epoch of belief,

it was the epoch of incredulity;it was the season of Light,

it was the season of Darkness;

it was the spring of hope,it was the winter of despair;we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ...”

For some of us, high school was the best

time of our lives…for others it was like

having a root canal that lasted for three

very long years.

Most of us take a stand somewhere

between the two and remember those

years as bittersweet.

With the wisdom of time, we know that kids of all generations face challenges in high school – we were no different.

Our world was colored by issues of health, wealth - or more often poverty - drugs and alcohol, love and love lost – and anxiety about everything from will I do well in sports? Will I pass this class? should I try out for the school play? and always…what should I do for the rest of my life?

Yet, we were the class of 1975…After thirty

five years, I wonder…was there

something about our high school

experience that was somehow different

than that of others? Did our experience

as children of the seventies shape our

lives in some unique way?

Like high school itself, the decade of the

seventies was complicated and filled with

contradictions.

The writer, Tom Wolfe,

described the

seventies as the Me

Generation – a time

when Americans

seemed to leave

behind the social and

political activism of

the 1960’s and

replace it with a new

seemingly selfish

focus on individual

wellbeing.

I wondered about this – so I went to three

of our former high school teachers and

asked them to compare students in the

1960’s with student’s in the 1970’s.

Were we selfish and self absorbed?

Paul Goodnature taught Humanities at Central High School. He thought students in the 1970’s were less aware of social issues than their contemporaries in the 1960’s. “The war and the draft kept students on their toes in the 1960’s,” Goodnature said “but the assassinations and wars of the 1960’s just seemed to produce a tiredness in the 1970’s.”

Lila Aas, English literature teacher at Central said “students often had

a lot of opinions, but were reluctant to say them. Frankly, they lacked

passion.” She did go on to say that participation in extracurricular

activities – such as theater – remained strong throughout the decade.

Leo Aeikins, German language teacher at Central, remembers an academic decline throughout the seventies at both a college and high school level. In fact, nationally, the S.A.T. college entrance exam scores fell 16 points between 1970 and 1974 and in just one year, 1975, our senior year of high school, SAT scores dropped yet another 10 points.

Yet, there was a lot to celebrate about the

much maligned seventies as well…

Technological

advances showed

the way into the

future with the

invention of the first

RAM chip by Intel in

1970, the Apple I

single-board

computer in 1976

and the video game

'Space Invaders'

released in 1979.

Popular Culture, Fashion,

Music, Film, TV, Books and

more shaped our generation

and those generations to

come in significant

ways…what would the world

be without the Rocky Horror

Picture Show or Classic

Rock?

And in spite of Tom Wolfe’s Me Generation

mantra, as we look back at the seventies

we can see that social activism in the

larger world did not stop as the sixties

sizzled out. In fact, the cultural changes

in the seventies literally reinvented

America.

Our children and

grandchildren live in a

better world because of

the steadfast work of

the environmental

movement, gay rights,

feminism, civil rights

and of particular

importance to us all

here tonight – the gray

panther movement and

the AARP – all

organizations that grew

strong in the 1970’s.

We did have a fair amount of social

activism in Albert Lea during the

seventies as well…maybe you

participated in some of these activities…

…the

efforts to

clean up

Shell

Rock

River.

The Walks for Development

to end poverty.

Boycotts on behalf of

the Farm Workers of

America

Solidarity for the Pine Ridge Lakota at the second

Wounded Knee …

And of course there was many good works

going on at our high school as well.

This is a picture from the 1975

Tiger of my wife, Jolyn

Thompson, giving blood when

the local Red Cross came to the

high school. The women laying

next to her is Janet Mathison – I

think the guy with no head is

Wade Henrichs…

What you can not see is that I

am laying two cots away giving

blood – all in an attempt to

impress the beautiful Jolyn.

When the nurse told me to rest

quietly after giving blood, I had

to be the tough guy – stood up

and keeled over in a dead faint

right at Jolyn’s feet.

It was not my proudest

moment…

So what’s this all about?

I think the bottom line is that our generation – the seventies – doesn’t

look too different from the decade we are in today. We have fuel

panics, over-population, ecological disasters, climate change,

recessions, nine year old wars, conspiracy theories and paranoia.

And the good news is (in the words of the immortal seventies singing

legend, Gloria Gaynor), we have survived…we are still here.

So tonight we come together to celebrate

with each other.

We celebrate those great kids we were 35

years ago – and the adults we have become. We

celebrate friends who are with us still – and

raise our glasses to the memories of those who

have left us. We celebrate and honor our school

staff - those principals and teachers and lunch

ladies and custodians and secretaries who

mentored and encouraged us and sent us out

into the world with their fingers crossed that

we wouldn’t muck it up.

We celebrate the memories of those three

years and are grateful for their part in making

us who we are today.

One last thing…

I wanted to share with you all my favorite pictures

from our 1975 year book.

I didn’t do many extracurricular activities while in

high school – actually, I didn’t do any…but I’m

especially proud of my stint as a male

cheerleader during a pep rally in the gym.

My squad members are Matt Hoffman, Robert

Wagner, Larry Kihlstadius, Dave Berg and Me.

What an ending!