Fifty years ago tonight 246 young people graduated from Watauga High School. It was a Friday, even! Fifty! Yes, 5-0! How can this be possible? Where have those years gone? And where have we gone during that time?
Where we have gone and what we have done is impossible to recount. But you know I am going to try!
We will start with where we came from. Ours was the second class to complete all four years at the county high school, opened in 1965 with students from all across the county: Appalachian, Bethel, Blowing Rock, Cove Creek, Watauga Consolidated had been the high schools… I think that is all of them. Watauga County, then as now, has only elementary and high schools. There were even more elementary schools involved (Green Valley and Mabel come to mind.) Many students had gone to school together for eight years (no kindergarten back then…) with the same kids who went to their churches, lived in their neighborhoods, often were their relatives. And suddenly we were all together in one big high school.
But you know what? My perception, at least, is that the divide was quickly bridged. I don’t recall thinking at any point about where anybody came from, which school they had gone to, and so on. Maybe I was naive. Okay, I know I was naive that age, but seriously! I was a “city” kid (Boone, 1967,… population about 8500!) but it didn’t take long before the “county” kids became my friends as well as my classmates. To this day, I have to think sometimes about where somebody came from, where they lived when we were growing up. Sure, there are people I have known since I was born; those are the friends who also went to Boone (United) Methodist Church (we weren’t “united” back then, and now that I mention it, Methodists aren’t exactly united right now, but I digress…): Greta, Sandy, and Douglas were there from the beginning. And then there are people like Tanya who was in my class at school every single year (every. single. year!) from first through eighth grade and in a good many of my high school classes and then (I’ll be darned!) if we weren’t in the same dorm at ASU our freshman year!
Who are we? We are children who practiced “Duck and cover” drills in our classrooms in the early years, preparing for possible atomic bombs. (Full disclosure: I do not actually remember doing this, but I have classmates who remember. I think I lived in a bubble. Did I mention that I might have been naive?) We saw (literally SAW, in replay) our President’s assassination when were in sixth grade. That I do remember, vividly. I was in Mrs. Elizabeth Randall’s sixth grade class. We had returned from lunch and Mrs. Pease, the librarian, came across the hall to share the news. (I also remember that I thought I should not have to go to my piano lesson that afternoon and my mother disagreed!) And before we would graduate, both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy would also be assassinated.
By the time we were in high school, the Viet Nam War was being played out across our television screens every evening. And guys who were older than we were already there, fighting and sometimes dying. And some of our class joined their ranks after graduation. I confess that the gravity of all that did not really hit me until decades later when I watched a performance by students at the high school where I was teaching. The spring play was “In Their Footsteps” which follows five young women in their service in the Viet Nam War. I wept throughout the performance and for the entire thirty minute drive home. Somehow, that night, I realized how horrific that time was. For those who served. For their families. And for our country.
We are children who had three television stations (if we were lucky) to choose from, on our one black-and-white console television. And on those TVs we watched shows where married people slept in twin beds, the word “pregnant” was not allowed (On “I Love Lucy” they said she was “Enceinte”!), mothers stayed home and wore aprons and pearls while they cooked dinner and cleaned house (although many of our own mothers actually worked outside the home), the Beatles stole the show, Lawrence Welk did his thing (not sure what to call that!), Perry Mason solved every case (while I polished my patent leather shoes with Vaseline), Sky King and his niece Penny took to the air….
We didn’t walk uphill both ways to school, as some of our parents claimed they did, but we did survive some pretty severe winters. The infamous winter of 1960, when we were in second grade, stands out. It snowed. And it snowed. And it snowed again. We missed weeks of school. But you know what? We survived. And I don’t think any of us suffered from that lapse. Yeah, we did go a lot of Saturdays. But we also moved on to third grade. And our teachers did what teachers do (and what they will do now, in the midst and aftermath of the Covod-19 pandemic) and they picked up the pieces.
A lot of amazing things happened during our early years. We lined up to get sugar cubes that contained the vaccine against polio. And now that disease is almost a thing of the past. Man first walked on the moon in the Summer before our senior year. And now people are spending months on the International Space Station.
Calculators? Ha! Computers? BIG ha! For some reason we didn’t even learn how to use a slide rule in high school (note to former teachers: we should have gone there!). But darn it! We sure did know how to use those trig tables in the back of the book. And we could interpolate all day long.
As students at Watauga High School, we were blessed with some really great teachers. I won’t even try to name them, but I will post two pictures…. one of a Spanish class (and I believe everyone pictured was in our graduating class) with the amazing Mrs. Eppley, and one of our two driver ed teachers, including one of the first female DE teachers in the state. I’m pretty sure we all had at least one if not both of these two fine teachers as we learned to navigate the interesting roads of Watauga County. And WHS also had a strong administrative team during our time. My guess is that every one of us who went on to teach in the public schools wish that we had had the opportunity to work for someone like Dr. Miller.
Now for a little trip down memory lane with some pictures… on the left, the box that contained my invitations and other graduation items and a cedar jewelry box we received from (I think) The Stone; on the right, our senior class officers (credit to The Watauga Democrat).
Above our final issue of The Powderhorn and the staff that put together so many great issues that year.
The yearbooks from our four years, and the staff who put together our final one!
And so here we are… it is nearly 10:00 PM on Friday, May 29, 2020 and we were probably wrapping up (finally) the ceremony in the gymnasium fifty years ago. Before I close this out, I need to add a final chapter to the story. I started with where we came from. So where did we go? After graduation, if you look at that final issue of The Powderhorn, we headed in many directions: work, military, marriage, college (the majority to ASU, not surprisingly). We became husbands and wives and parents; soldiers; police officers; doctors and nurses and lawyers; teachers and psychologists; store clerks, business owners, and so many other things. We became adults. And for so many of us, we have remained friends. We have had lots of reunions. Lately we have had quarterly luncheons with a handful of us gathering on Saturday afternoons. And one of these days we WILL have a grand 50th reunion party! So here’s to the party. And here’s to our future!
And that’s a wrap! Happy anniversary. 
bethdlayton 