***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of….. Good Friends    

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Recently I have avidly been perusing the personal profiles of various members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964 website as fellow classmates have come onto the site and lost their shyness about telling their life stories (or increased their computer technology capacities, not an unimportant consideration for the generation of ’68, a generation on the cusp of the computer revolution and so not necessarily as savvy as the average eight year old today). While on the site I came across a series of comments concerning a group of women, seven in all as far as I can gather, from the class who have by hook or by crook have held together as friends since high school days. I found that fact simply amazing and worthy of further comment.    

Of course I have spent not a little time lately touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies to communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later on a class website recently set up to gather in classmates for our 50^th anniversary reunion.  (Some will never be found by choice or as mentioned above by being excluded from the “information super-highway” that they have not been able to navigate.)

Like I have said before some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, those endless tales about the doings and not doings of the grandchildren, odd hobbies and other ventures taken up in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand commentary on. Some stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did, or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has naturally perked my interest.

There are other stories as well like the story of “the seven” that are also worthy of interest, although telling the story, or rather my telling the story has been greatly hampered by some code of omerta that the group has imposed on itself. Or so it seemed.  After first striking out when I sent a private e-mail to the one member of the group I slightly knew back in school, Theresa, who informed me that someone in the group would probably get around to telling the story sometime I did an end around and contacted group member Pauline who I knew not at all but who at least directed me to a central source, Delores, who did fill me in somewhat. Here is the e-mail I sent to Pauline:

“Pauline- Pardon me for the bother but I have been told that you were one of “the seven.” One of the women in our class who have stayed in touch all these years. I know that Theresa who told me that somebody from the group would eventually write something up, Paula, our super wizard website person Delores, and our class memory Joan from the reunion committee are members but I would be very interested in knowing how it all started who started it- it seems to have gone back to elementary school-which one?-Did you all hang together in high school?-what triggered you all getting together each month?-What do you do on those occasions?

Also I think you, actually all of you, should be filling up the Message Forum or the Memories page when Delores sets it up with your versions of this story. Tell us about your joys (kids, grandkids, achievements, funny things in school or life), places that you went together since I know you have taken trips together, your differences (I am sure not everything has gone well among you for that length of time), sorrows (deaths, especially in our generation-parents, things that went awry)- high school dreams that did or did not pan out. Not Oprah stuff although if that’ what you want to write about that is fine too.

I find the fact that seven women from one fairly large high school class have stuck together through thick and thin extraordinary. The closest that I have even come to that with anybody is my on and off friendship with Brad Badger the great runner from our class who I have known since Snug Harbor Elementary days. This story needs to be told in this age of Internet-directed “friendships” on FB, etc. Of course I have an ulterior motive on all this since I intent to write something about the “seven” from the outside perspective. The more I know the better sketch I can write about this grand group-Later Frank Jackman.”                   

Here is what I wound up writing, a sketch not everybody in the group was happy about:  

“On Friendship-“The Seven”-For Delores, Millie, Pauline, Paula, Karen,   Joan, and Theresa-NAHS Class of 1964

The story of the continuing active friendships of seven  of our fellow Class of 1964 classmates at NAHS has intrigued me since I first heard about it back in December. Personally I can think of only one relationship of my own that goes back to high school days. Forget about seven. I have asked around about this phenomenon as well and nobody else can come close to that number either. Amazing. 

I am a little light on details of how it all started, how it continued, and the specifics of what this group has done and is doing.  Fortunately I can make up a story (use some literary license, okay) and maybe they will grace this piece with some real details of their long- standing friendships. Thanks to Delores for some of the information below and see Paula profile page for recent photos of the honorees. Here is a little bouquet…

Hey, I have just confirmed my 158^th “friend” on Facebook today.  Well not exactly a friend but a woman who knows a woman I “know” whom I “friended” (by the way when did friend become a verb). That latter woman had been added to my “circle” after I confirmed for a man, somebody who actually is a friend of mine. Or rather a person that I do some political work with who has a huge network of “friends” and I now am part of that network. 

By the way many of those 158 friends I don’t know, have never ever met. Many are Brazilian who write in Portuguese and I don’t (I remember a little Spanish so I can roughly translate), and a number are somehow “friends” that are always pestering me to play some foolish on-line game that they participate in. All of this by way of introducing a rather strange idea these days- the idea of real in-person friends. A story about a group of friends, seven  women from the Class of 1964 at North Adamsville High (listed in the dedication), who have actually gotten together regularly and done stuff, and who have been doing that stuff together for at least forty-five years. Yes, 45 years.

Here’s how it started. One young girl, Pauline,  met another, Karen, in elementary school, the old Wollaston School, on the playground playing jacks, one won, the loser cried, the winner came over to console the loser and they thereafter were fast friends for life (no one can remember who won or who lost such are the vagaries of time but no matter). Then came dreaded hormonally-driven junior high days at Adamsville Central Junior High and those two formed a friendship with Joan to gain added shelter against the raging hormones, bothersome boys, and what to do about that “crush” two of them had on one of those same bothersome boys.

At North the group snowballed, picking up the remaining four through attendance in the same classes (some business classes) and this or that school club or event. At North this enlarged grouping came together to try to survive those still raging hormones, figure out what to do about those now not so bothersome boys, and, most importantly, what to do about that “crush” two of them had on one of those now not so bothersome boys. On the whole the group was on friendly terms at North. Maybe not every day in every way girls’ “lav” Monday morning talk- friendly but more than some passing “Hi.” (Or some such equivalent term used to acknowledge another’s girl-ness. Guys gave the ubiquitous nod.)

Then came graduation and the seven were swept away with the winds of change. Swept away to go their separate ways and look forward to more school, work, romances, and marriages. Or so they thought. Later, the year after graduation, 1965, the group came together again at a Christmas party hosted by Millie and that original mist of time from elementary school on thereafter extended itself to the present. There you have it.

Now was what the group met over lunch or some other occasion about some world-historic event, discussing matters of great national and international import. Well, maybe in passing, as those events impinged on their lives and they worried about their love ones going off to war, losing jobs, trying to get home loans, stuff like that. But what drove them was the stuff of ordinary human clay-at first school hassles, going to the Cape on summer weekends, new jobs, trying to move up the ladder, dates, finding some "Mr. Right."  

Then came marriages, marriages hopefully made in heaven, but as was the ethos then made hopefully to last forever. (There is now a famous, class famous, photograph of one of their number's wedding, Paula in 2005, so hope springs eternal.) Unfortunately the group was not exempt from the modern societal norms and not every marriage lasted as long as the friendships. The coming of  children (I will not even hazard a guess at the collective number nor will I grace this sketch with all their names and those of grandchildren for fear of running out of cyberspace) who were a joy (mainly) and animated many a luncheon table hour. Thereafter the telephone wires burned constantly with glad tidings, mainly kid-centered, and sometimes sorrows as parents passed on.  

Later as the kids went out on their own and had their own sets of children for grandmas to fret over, they had an excuse to shop away the hours again and to make Oshkosh By Gosh and the like very profitable. More ominously they talked of new pressing issues such as that tell-tale faraway look on a middle-aged husband’s face which caused alarms to ring. (It is okay to mention this male genetic defect I have had that faraway look myself, three times). That is where the bonds of friendship held firm as they gathered around to protect their own. But that vagrant look on his face passed.

A little later more mundane alarms took center stage as the first signs of that raging illness that catches us all reared its ugly head.  The medical appointments schedule replaced the kids' activities schedule in holding the place of honor on the refrigerator door. The group too began to speak more often of how husbands had become less attentive, more interested in Sunday television sports or strange desires to hit the golf links, although still pledging eternal love. 

By then though with time on their hands and some unused dough now that the kids were no longer a constant drain on the household economy they traveled, travelled by boat, by air, maybe took an automobile trip and investigated those places that they had really meant to see when they were younger but, well, his job got in the way, the kids cried for Disneyland (and in their turn the grandkids), and the time just flew. They travelled to the now obligatory Florida to catch some sun for frozen Northern bones and when they hit fifty four of them for some unfathomable reason (unfathomable to me who gets nervous and expects civilization to expire when a streetlight goes out or when I am more than ten miles from the ocean) went to the Canadian Rockies together. 

Those are the ways the group spent its time together, hanging tough, as one of their number said "through thick and thin" and without a recorded argument if you can believe that. And here they, the “seven ,” stand as a monument to some pretty old-time values on a globalized earth gone berserk with “interconnecting,” interconnecting for some purpose, some purpose that I have not quite caught on to, and they probably have not either.

They meet still, to share the latest gossip, to show endless photos of grandkids and trips taken (photo-taking the one blessed thing made easier in the world these days), to plan the next trip to the islands and to occasionally look wistfully at the calendar and wonder where the time went. Know this though in about one hundred years from now when future generations are “connecting” on VirtualRealityBook or some such “social networking” system if they look up the old-time meaning of the word “friend” on some stratospheric cloud archives they will find this very important example of what it was like when real friendships mattered. Hats off to the “seven.”

Excuse me, my 158^th “friend” just sent a message.