May of 1952, the year I graduated from high school, is a blur in my memory. So many new and unexpected “firsts” happening too fast. Several weeks before, I’d happened to see a notice on the bulletin board outside the principal’s office, announcing a competition for Merit Scholarships to the University of Iowa. Nobody had ever talked to me about the possibility of attending college but having heard that several of my friends were planning to do just that, I thought that, with my consistently good grades, I could probably do as well as they would, given the chance. I walked into the office and asked for an application. The secretary sent me in to confer with the principal who seemed determined to talk me out of it before he reluctantly handed over the necessary forms.

I completed the application, went to the courthouse to have it notarized, and put it in the mail. Very shortly afterward, I received an invitation to take the exams in Des Moines just a few weeks later. One of my classmates, Bernard Slofer, who had transferred from Solon a few years earlier, had also been accepted to take the exams and my dad drove us both to Des Moines on the appointed date.

A school-bond issue was up for a special election that month and a group of students had been recruited to put on a demonstration to get the voters out. I had been appointed to produce placards for the group. I stayed up late the night before, trying to finish the signs but suffered a severe abdominal pain and had to give it up. I felt guilty for letting the group down but the pain was relentless and by dawn I was bundled into the car and on my way to the emergency room. A few days after my release from the hospital, a letter arrived informing me that I had been awarded a Merit Scholarship. I was ecstatic and excited – my future had changed because I hadn’t allowed myself to back down in the face of the principal’s discouragement. I missed almost a month of school, getting back to classes barely in time for the traditional senior activities. My future was different now. I was different. No longer doomed to spending a couple years working in the five-and-dime or one of the grocery stores during the day and with my dad at the miniature golf course in the evenings until I might marry one of the local guys I’d known most of my life. Now I could dream about four more years of investigating the wonders available in college classes and realize my longtime hope to somehow become a teacher.

The senior class traditionally took what was dubbed Skip Day, which involved skipping school for a trip to some interesting out-of-town destination, depending on the limitations of the class treasury and the imaginations of the class’s elected officers (neither being particularly inspiring.) We went by school bus to Omaha, Nebraska, visited one fairly interesting site – the art museum – and several so humdrum that, today, none of us can remember what they were.

Our last few days of school were taken up with mostly celebratory activities. We exchanged wallet-size graduation photos, wrote silly sentiments in each other’s yearbooks and proudly paraded across the assembly-room stage to receive various athletic and scholastic award certificates and those heavily-embroidered letters to be sewn on our letter-sweaters and jackets (a bit too late in the school year to impress anyone but ourselves.) Participation in sports for a certain number of years guaranteed an athletic letter. An
academic letter, known as an “Honor-K” (K, for Knoxville) was fairly rare and included membership in the National
Honor Society. I received one but had been elected because I had earned the scholarship, too late to be included in the Society’s initiation ceremony. The honor had also been too late to be included in the yearbook and the fact was never published anywhere that I know of.

All that was left to do was to walk across the stage and receive our diplomas. Ours was a simple and brief ceremony preceded by lengthy speeches and followed by the sobering realization that the word “commencement” means “a beginning” and not “an ending.”