BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL [1] 6-22-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL [1] 6-22-24]

 

Jim Shaw called yesterday. He does so every couple of months. Never talks long—about five minutes. Just checking up on me, the way he does with all our classmates, doing his self-assigned duty as the linchpin for the Oakland City High School Class of 1955.

Helen loves our class. She has been to all our reunions, and the occasional meet-ups with classmates here and there. She knows them well, and they love and accept her as one of us. She has often said that if anyone asked her where she went to school, she would say, “Oakland City, Class of 1955.” [2]

More than anyone else in the class, though, she loves James Oliver Shaw. She recently wrote a letter to him, thanking him for her life, because without Jim, she and I would never have met. [3]

I had dropped out of high school and was working in a factory, because my family really needed money. I was not thinking much about the future, but if you asked me, I’d probably say that maybe I’d go to Oakland City College part-time while I toiled on the line at Potter & Brumfield, the way a lot of Oakland City kids did, maybe work my way up to the P&B office.

I was working nights so I didn’t see many of my friends. Sometimes I’d go into town to see if I could find somebody to hang around with, but they were already in some sort of schooling [nursing, business school, lab tech school, etc] or working days. One day, though, I ran into Jim Shaw on Main Street.

Jim and I were not close friends in school. We were friendly, but he lived in town and hung with the popular kids. I rode a school bus from the country and spent almost all my time on the school newspaper or band. Jim was in neither of those. We just didn’t have occasion to spend time together.

But that hot July day, on Main Street, we were glad to see each other. And he said those fateful words, “Why don’t we drive up to IU and see if they’ll let us in?” It sounded like something to do.

It was mid-July. Classes to start in only two months. But it was a different world then. They let us in.

That changed my world. I already knew that “the Lord has laid his hand on me,” but now I had a Bible in one hand and a text book in the other. I learned how to love God with my mind as well as heart and soul and strength.

But even beyond that, if Jim had not talked me into taking that ninety-mile trip up to Bloomington, I would never have met Helen.

Jim and I don’t talk about politics, but I imagine we are on different sides of the great divide in American society today. That doesn’t matter. We are eternal classmates. He keeps up with all the others who are still alive, too, and tells me of how Bob and Bob and Kenny and Marietta and Sharon and Jack are doing.

That’s how our class is. Grace Robb, one of our class sponsors, said that in all her years of teaching, she never saw a class as devoted to one another as our class. That’s why, whenever I see Jeanette, Jim’s wife, I thank her for marrying him. “If you didn’t take care of him,” I tell her, “We’d have to.”

John Robert McFarland

1] “Be True to Your School” is a 1963 song by The Beach Boys, with the refrain: Be true to your school now, Let your colors fly, Be true to your school…

2] It was actually Tolleston HS in Gary, IN, Class of 1956, where she was valedictorian.]

3] You have to write real letters to Jim. He won’t do email, because he worked for the post office, and he is faithful to those who are faithful to him.