***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of…..A Voice   

 

 

 From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

For those who have been following this series about the old days in my old home town of North Adamsville, particularly the high school day as the 50^th anniversary of my graduation creeps up, will notice that recently I have been doing sketches based on my reaction to various e-mails sent to me by fellow classmates via the class website. Also classmates have placed messages on the Message Forum page when they have something they want to share generally like health issues, new family arrivals or trips down memory lane on any number of subjects from old time athletic prowess to reflections on growing up in the old home town. Thus I have been forced to take on the tough tasks of sending kisses to raging grandmothers, talking up old flames with guys I used to hang around the corners with, remembering those long ago searches for the heart of Saturday night, getting wistful about elementary school daydreams, taking up the cudgels for be-bop lost boys and the like. These responses are no accident as I have of late been avidly perusing the personal profiles of various members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964 website as fellow classmates have come on to the site and lost their shyness about telling their life stories (or have 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 computer savvy as the average eight-year old today).

Some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, including 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 other 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.

Other stuff defies simple classification as is the case here in discussing providing a friendly space on the class website for those who in the old days were not vocal, did not then, and perhaps do not now, feel they have anything to say or who now may feel drowned out by those who do have something to say, endlessly have something to say at the drop of a hat and who maybe can articulate that something to say in a way that shuts off the less articulate. A real problem. I was in that less articulate category in high school so I know what it felt like to be shut out of any meaningful discussion because the deal was “rigged” toward the smart, the loud, the articulate, the brown-nosers or any combination of those.

The way this issue came up was though an exchange between Donna, our class site webmaster and an unidentified classmate who wrote anonymously (which is a privilege we have on the site since it is closed to all but class members) concerning a particular guy who was taking up all kinds of space on the site not only on his personal profile page (which is what it is there for and fine with everybody as far as I know)   but via private e-mails and the common areas of the site. Donna attempted to set the parameters of what is okay and the wounded party still was not placated but in any case here is the gist of the controversy which actually is illustrative of a problem on most “social-networking”-type sites:   

“Donna - I must concede although I do not think that the issue is fully resolved yet that I think you are closer to the core of what we are trying to do on this site, that good feeling idea, after I thought about it for a while on the veteran question. Your point about a guy like Tim Kerr talking about war wounds hit home. If they [veterans who now have their own For Those Who Served section] want to talk about the war [mostly Vietnam for our generation] they can use the section when you set it up or use their personal profiles like Jack Leary did on his long-term war-related injuries.      

That also brings to mind something else. I was working on a reply to a couple of private e-mails yesterday and a couple of the people that I talked to felt they had nothing to say, hadn’t done anything in their lives, etc. We have to reach out to those people because after 50 years everybody has some story and we want them on board. Also as noted before not everybody from our class is on the “information superhighway” so making this site user-friendly as you have is very good. This should take care of the “big tent” NA64 point I wanted to make.

 The last point is about our parents’ generation and specially about not knowing what our fathers did in WWII, etc. My father was a Marine and fought all the major battles in the Pacific that you read about in history books from that period yet he also never, never said word one about what he went through. I only found out about it from an uncle after he died. I can appreciate what you said about your father’s situation. I could relate a million stories about that same reticence from other fathers and also guys from the Vietnam period. What we can do maybe when the section is up to bring that up and see if others have the same kind of stories. Funny ours is a confessional age-24/7 confessional age yet our parents’ generation kept their own consul. I wonder who was/is better off.  Later –Anonymous”