Ellston High School Alumni Banquet
50-Year Honor Class of 1936
May 24, 1987

At our early high school reunions our conversations tended to drift into competitive games such as best jobs, classiest partners, number of bright children, new cars, homes, exotic travels and advanced academic degrees. At the 25th, we were quietly judging each other's style-lines, waist-lines, hair-lines, age-lines, and of course, some phony lines. But at the 50th, we gracefully accepted all of the above and spent our time remembering how it was way back in 1936.

We were before the pill and population explosion, which inexplicably went hand-in-hand, so to speak.

We were before television, penicillin, polio shots, antibiotics and frisbees; before frozen food, nylon, dacron, Xerox, and Kinsey. We were before radar, fluorescent lights, no computers or condominiums. A chip meant a piece of wood, hardware meant hardware, and software wasn't even a word.

We were before pantyhose and drip-dry clothes; before Hawaii and Alaska became states. We were before Leonard Bernstein, yogurt, Ann Landers, plastics, hair dryers, the 40 hour week and minimum wage. We got married first and then lived together. How quaint can you be?

In our time, closets were for clothes, not for coming out of, and a book about two women living together in Europe could be called, "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay." In those days, bunnies were small rabbits and not serving drinks in night clubs; and rabbits were not Volkswagons. We were before Grandma Moses, Frank Sinatra and cup-sizing for bras. We were before Peter Pan collars, and thought deep cleavage was something butchers did.

We were before Batman, Grapes of Wrath, Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer, Stuart Little and Snoopy; long before DDT, vitamin pills, Vodka in the U.S., and white wine craze, disposable diapers, Jeeps, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Jefferson nickel; and before students took a term off to search for their image.

In high school, we thought fast food was what you ate during Lent. We never heard of Cheerios, frozen orange juice, instant coffee, MacDonald's, FM radio, tape recorders, electric typewriters, word processors, electric music, disco dancing - and that's too bad!

In our day, cigarette smoking was fashionable, grass was mowed, coke was something you drank, pot was something you usually cooked in. We were before day-care centers, house-husbands, computer dating, dual careers and computer marriages. American schools were not desegregated, blacks were not allowed to play in the major leagues, Made-In-Japan meant JUNK, and "making out" referred to how you did in an exam.

If anyone in those days had asked us to explain CIA, Ms., NATO, UFO, NFL, SATs, JFK, BMW, ERA, or IUD, we would have replied, "Alphabet Soup!" We were NOT before the differences in the sexes were discovered, but we WERE before sex change. We just made do with what we had. We were the last generation to be so dumb as to believe that you needed a husband to have a baby.

Submission by Karma Dixon, February of 2014