REUNION: GROWING UP WITH THE CLASS OF '68

1968 was not a good year for the U.S.A. Martin Luther King Jr. and then Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers launched the massive Tet Offensive, a surprise attack that severely shook the American public's confidence in whether Johnny was going to come marching home victorious.

Those were the toppers to a decade that started with the passionate optimism of JFK and the Beatles, and began to bleed in the middle with the end of Camelot and the darkening tunnel of Vietnam.

Amid all the turmoil of the '60s, Cape Girardeau in 1968 still resisted change. Hair length was dictated by the high school administration. Cheerleading was as close to sweating as girls were supposed to get.

After wallowing in Captain Kangaroo childhoods and drive-in adolescences, the 399 graduates of the Cape Central class of 1968 entered a world that seemed newly dangerous and uncertain.

Suddenly, males faced the post-graduation choices of going to college or war. For females, it was college, career or maybe marrying someone who would be sent to war.

The impulse was strong to remain on Sugar Mountain.

Twenty-five years after being loosed on the world and vice versa, the class of '68 regrouped last weekend for the traditional reunion. About 175 of the graduates showed up.

To twist an old saying, 25 years after high school, people have the faces and bodies and memories they deserve. There is a lot of handshaking with one eye on the other person's nametag. In some cases, an astounding metamorphosis has occurred. "Who are you?" is an appropriate question.

In most ways, ours is a typical class. It produced at least one and in most cases more of the following: nurse, oral surgeon, dentist, librarian, lawyer, academician, teacher, psychologist, sales person, physician, engineer, pharmacist, business owner, crime fighter, women's studies student, stockbroker, Air Force pilot, insurance agent, zoo marketing director, sculptor, banker, housewife, grandparent, cross-stitcher and vegetarian.

Back in 1968, we only knew we had good football and baseball players, and wonderful musicians.

Rock 'n' roll had broken out all over the country. Many of the teenage males in Cape Girardeau were in some kind of band or wanted to be.

From this class, fellows like Hollis Headrick, Jay Sheets, Mike McKinnis, Brad Graham, Jeff Baker, Gary Garner, Dickie Hengst and Walter Wilson hopscotched among bands named Sounds of Luv, the Soul Express, The Groupe, the Impacts, The Vulcans and the Great Society.

A few of them Headrick and Graham, for sure later became professional musicians.

The individual accomplishments of the class look good in black and white, but whether we are succeeding or not ultimately is a question each of us must answer ourselves.

Given the anti-establishment times we grew up in, it is heartening to see that some members of the class of '68 are taking civic responsibilities seriously. Two, Kathy Johnson Swan and Steve Wright, are on the Cape Girardeau Board of Education. Another, Steve Shaw, is the chairman of a Christian academy school board in Tulsa, Okla.

The heraldic light of fame has shone on no one in the class of '68 as it has on a plump aspiring deejay named Rusty Limbaugh who was one year behind.

But some people are famous enough in our own minds.

There was Sherry Thomas Barker, now a branch manager of a savings and loan in Wenatchee, Wash. Sherry was voted queen and I was king of our fifth-grade class on Valentine's Day in 1960. That's the first thing both of us thought about the instant we saw each other.

The universal tumblers sometimes seem to click softly into place at reunions. All these lives that began near the same source doubling back to see who in the world we might be.

The date Rodney Lipe brought to the 10-year reunion left with one of his best high school friends and later married him.

Fifteen years later, it's funny.

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Gerry Kaiser had showed up at the 20th reunion looking like a Marine boot camp's number one graduate. A golfer and piano player while in school, he had become a tri-athlete, a competitive one.

At the 25th, the sinew and muscle were not so pronounced. He said he's less interested in competing now and more interested in what he called "the quantum."

The word describes a change, I think, which has occurred to many at the onset of our middle age. The careers have been established. In most cases, the babies have been born and a few of the early babies are parents.

We are becoming freer to seek out the elemental.

One classmate has returned to her Presbyterian faith. Answers seem to be growing in others' gardens. The growing up never seems to stop.

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A certain sadness is unavoidable at reunions. Those who don't live here learned that Ralph Ford, a favorite teacher, had just died suddenly.

Steve DePriest, another of the class's fine musicians (French horn), wanted to know whether the funeral had already been held (it had).

He recalled the day he spilled peach cobbler on his pants in the cafeteria. There is little more embarrassing to a high school student than a stain.

Seeing DePriest's dilemma, Ford heated some water over a Bunsen burner and helped him remove the stain.

"I'll never forget he did that for me," DePriest said.

Random acts of kindness live on.

Along the way, 15 members of the class have fallen away. Nancy Lee died with her parents in a car wreck the summer after graduation. The Vietnam war that shadowed our early adulthood claimed Earl Tharp and Robert McFall.

Others died from suicides, diseases and wrecks. Kermit Melton died heroically in 1976 while saving three girls from drowning in the Mississippi River near Commerce.

And then there was Brenda Parsh, whose death at the age of 27 once and for all signalled the end of innocence for the class and maybe for Cape Girardeau as well.

The murders of Brenda Parsh and her mother Mary in the family home in the summer of 1977 are part of the city's history now.

We still don't know who did it. The class of '68 only knows Parsh was a golden human being, talented, smart, beautiful and genuine. Somehow, that seemed not to matter. It did to us.

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In the biographies assembled for the reunion program, it's clear what has been meaningful for the class of 1968 after all this time.

Life's constant verities births of children, marriages and friendships again and again are listed as classmates' outstanding experiences.

Many who graduated in 1968 delayed these to pursue schooling and careers and self-knowledge. Perhaps the better to understand these truths.