Last Saturday was Graduation Day for many of the high schools around the country. Today, I’m going back to 1973. June 6, 1973, to be exact. Graduation Day for the DeKalb County Board of Education. For roughly 275 of us at Walker High School, it was the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. My friend Melanie Bagley posted a copy of the cover of our Commencement Exercises Program earlier this week. I remember it well.
My parents were building a house in Clayton County, and while the house was being built we had moved from Gresham Park to Spanish Trace Apartments on Flat Shoals Road. For an eighteen year old boy, moving into a predominately singles apartment complex with two pools and a clubhouse was like moving to Heaven. The last two weeks of school for the Seniors was a breeze. We would show up for Baccalaureate and Graduation rehearsals, take any tests or exams that needed to be taken, and then were pretty much free to go. That meant, for my friends and I, hitting the pool at Spanish Trace.
For graduation, we walked in pairs alphabetically. However, due to a glitch in the grading system that was entirely my fault, I was left out of the original lineup. The glitch was cleared up, but the lineups were already set. One of the guys in the “B” section had graduated early and decided not to walk. So, I was inserted into his place, walking next to Tony Bailey and in front of Melanie and Randy Bagley. After the Graduation Exercises had concluded and we were all officially alumni, a group of us guys piled into Doug Holmes’ SS396 Chevelle, went to The Pumphouse in old Underground Atlanta, and drank “several” pitchers of beer. Back in our time, Graduation was on the last day of school, which in 1973 was on a Wednesday. This was because of make up days due to the infamous ’73 Ice Storm. Hence, we all had to be at work or, in Doug’s case, a job interview the next morning. I was working for the DeKalb Board of Education as a Custodial Engineer. Meaning, I was on a crew that went around cleaning schools, mostly stripping and waxing floors. It was part time at night, but kicked in to full time the day after Graduation.
I worked on the crew with a bunch of guys who went to Shamrock High. I remember walking into the Service Center for work the morning after Graduation. I was a little fuzzy, but one of the Shamrock guys, Jeff Moore, was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. He had his head in his arms, which were crossed around his knees. He lifted his head when I walked in and weakly said, “Hey, Jimmy.” He looked like he had been run over by a truck, his eyes resembling a Tennessee road map. I asked him what happened and he mumbled something about a Graduation party and two in the morning, then buried his head back in his arms.
We were working at an elementary school in Clarkston that week, and when we got there, our first order of business was emptying the trash cans. On our first trip to the dumpster, Jeff got one whiff of it, shook his head, staggered off and tossed. He then stumbled back into the school. We went back inside and were working when a teacher showed up with Jeff, whose face by this time was a mixture of red and green. “He was in the bathroom,” she said to Mr. Peel, our boss. “He’s sick.” She was genuinely concerned, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that he was hung over like a dime store Indian. She took him into the infirmary and put him on one of those fold up cots. The remainder of the morning, we would walk by and all we could see was his feet hanging off the edge of the cot. Poor Jeff had come to a sorry pass…
We woke Jeff up at lunchtime and went to eat at Dairy Queen. Mr. Peel, a Navy man who apparently had experience in such matters, tried to get him to eat a hamburger and drink a vanilla shake. The milkshake, he explained, would coat his stomach and the grease in the hamburger would soak up the alcohol. Jeff took a nibble of the burger and a sip of the milkshake, shook his head and pushed them away. After lunch, Mr. Peel dropped us all off back at the the school, then took Jeff back to the Service Center and sent him home. The next day Jeff showed up at work, fresh as a daisy and ready to go. “I felt better after I went home and got some sleep,” he said, ” I went swimming later on in the afternoon.” The human body is an amazing thing.
When my daughter Dana graduated from Georgia State University in 2006, she told her mother and I that she wasn’t going to walk in the Graduation Exercises. “It’s crazy,” she said. “It’s two hundred and fifty dollars for the cap and gown alone. And there are about a three hundred of us graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree, so we don’t even walk. They just tell all of those graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree to stand. We stand and then sit back down. They don’t even call our names. And, they give you a rolled up piece of blank paper then mail your degree to you later. Take that money and throw me a big party. I want a luau.” Never ones to shy away from hosting a social gathering, we complied. And it was a grand party, indeed. One of Marie’s friends in the printing industry, Larry, ran a catering business on the side. Larry and his partner would bring a whole pig to your party, cook it, provide all of the side dishes and do all of the clean up. It was also very expensive, so Marie struck a deal with him. Larry cooked the pig, and the morning of the party Marie met him at the intersection of I-285 and Bouldercrest Road. She picked up the pig, brought him home and we placed him on the dining room table, right in the middle of everything. We then surrounded him with fruit and veggies, and placed the various side dishes around the table.
Of course, my buddy Barry and I had to take it a step further. We put a pair of cheap sunglasses on the pig, a lei around his neck, stuck an apple in his mouth and named him “Snuffles.” My Aunt Louise walked in the house, took one look at Snuffles and freaked out. She wouldn’t even go into the dining room because he was in there. Nor would she go out onto the deck because, in order to get there, you had to walk through the dining room. She sat in the front room the entire party with her back to Snuffles and would not even look at him, let alone eat any of him. I’m sure that if it weren’t Dana’s Graduation party she would have left immediately. And, of course, my Uncle Tub had to take it a step further by snapping off one of poor Snuffles’ ears and eating it in front of her. My nephew Jason’s girlfriend at the time was not particularly pleased about a whole pig being on the dining room table either, but she wasn’t as freaked out as Aunt Louise. I’ve got pictures of Snuffles somewhere in either the albums or the archives. I’ll have to dig them up and post them. Snuffles, stretched out on the table, sporting his shades and lei, eating an apple, a real party animal… Still Cruisin’! –J.
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