I’m opening almost five decades of scrapbooks, starting with 1978, and uncovering the personal as well as the cultural headlines of each year.
1981 was a year of heightened sensation.
If senior year in high school didn’t feel fraught enough with emotion, the world seemed ready to match our moods.
- After a year and a half in captivity, 52 American hostages were freed in January by the Iranian government.
But there was little time to rejoice:
- Less than three months after the slaying of John Lennon in New York City, a would-be assassin tried but failed to kill the recently inaugurated President Reagan.
- In May, another would-be assassin severely wounded Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.
The world felt violent and frightening. Fortunately, I had friends I could talk to about it all – or try to ignore it as we headed toward graduation and our separate ways.
Even as I continued to spend my weekends and weekday lunches with the guys, I had begun to strike up phone conversations with one of my Analysis classmates, Janice.
Part of our conversation involved homework in this challenging class.
My checkered high school math history left me feeling insecure and perplexed.
Janice was far more adept with math and had a way of breaking down the ideas so I could understand them.
When we weren’t talking math, we would talk music. She quickly found out my Top 40 passion.
Her tastes hewed closer to the music played on WAOR, the station out of Niles, Mich., that was true to its call letters.
In addition, Janice loved Bruce Springsteen, an artist I only knew through his Top 40 hits and the No. 42 “Badlands,” which Chicago radio played a lot in 1979 before I moved to South Bend. She – and he – would eventually win me over.
I’d give Janice lyrics quizzes, with snippets from various songs, to see how well she knew hit music.
She did quite well (although she did not get the snippet from “Badlands” I included).
She’d return with lyrics from album tracks that I bombed (I did get the lines from Heart’s “Crazy on You,” but that hit the Top 40).
We spent a lot of time on the phone laughing and chatting – enough to make my dad and her mom wonder what was going on between us.
What was going on was we were becoming friends.
This was new to me.
The friendships I’d had with girls typically involved “going out” – to dances and movies – with a subtext of “Is she a girl friend, or is she a girlfriend?” It was a subtext I didn’t understand or want. From the start, Janice and I never had that subtext. Chatting and hanging out with her was like hanging out with the guys. She just wasn’t a guy.
But she did have an interest in one of the guys. I was very slow to figure it out.
As the junior-senior prom approached, I did ask a female classmate who said yes. The other guys talked about whether to do so, too. My friend Chip said he planned a quiet night at home. So, when Chip and Janice walked into the Erskine Park Country Club, I was shell-shocked. Someone caught it on film (unfortunately, the flash went off, obscuring the image).
They got me.
Spring and summer were a flurry of senior rites of passage:
The class trip to King’s Island in Ohio (complete with an on-site Pointer Sisters concert); senior skip day (which I didn’t join, being a good boy); awards night; and graduation, where my friend Tom, the valedictorian, would send us off into the world.
Summertime included a trip to Tower Hill in Michigan:
And a photo op in front of the Pink Elephant liquor store in South Bend.
Chip, Janice and I hung out a lot, sometimes with the guys, sometimes just the three of us.
Right before college, I got a case of mono that laid me out for two weeks. By the time I was able to get up, I had a mustache that I decided to keep.
There were only days left before I went to IU-Bloomington to pursue journalism, Janice went to rival Purdue to study computer science, and Chip headed to Great Lakes Naval Base near Chicago.
My other friends, for the most part, went to Notre Dame (across the street from our high school) or to out-of-state schools.
We went our own ways reminded of the world’s violence.
Mere days after graduation, a classmate died. A drunk driver in a truck crossed a center line and hit the car our classmate was driving. Three other classmates, his passengers, thankfully survived.
Most of the St. Joe Class of 1981 packed the church to say goodbye and console his family and his girlfriend, another classmate. Another wrote in a letter to the South Bend Tribune:
“The friendships we share we should cherish now because we don’t have forever.”
On the big screen:
I went with Chip, Janice, and Janice’s friend Barb to an area drive-in to see a horror double feature, Happy Birthday to Me and Final Exam. The movies were awful, though we enjoyed making fun of them.
Take This Job and Shove It wasn’t much better, but I did enjoy The Four Seasons.
By far the best was Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had all the adventure I loved.
On the small screen:
MTV was making its debut as we were heading to college, but we were only vaguely aware of it until we came home for the holidays.
Not all cable companies had it, and not all families had cable TV, for that matter. That would soon change.
On my radio and turntable:
Still a lot of country and AC dominating my year-end Hot 100:
Journey, REO Speedwagon and Diesel hit the top with harder-edged tracks pointing the way to greater diversity on the charts in years ahead.
And at home:
As of late August, “home” was Ashton Center at Indiana University, where I didn’t have to concern myself with a roommate.
(I persuaded my dad that I’d lived most of my life with my brother as a roommate and deserved some time to myself.)
I began to make friends in the dorm through events like:
The center’s toga party,
A trip to the movie theater to see “Arthur,”
And an awesome ELO concert with opening act Daryl Hall and John Oates (really, closer to a double bill).
They couldn’t have been hotter, with the nation’s top hit, “Private Eyes,” and follow-up “I Can’t Go for That” on the way.
That concert allowed me to unite friends old and new: My high school friends Chip, Janice, Tom, Fran and Joe all came from various locations to Bloomington. They met my IU friends, including Brian and his girlfriend, Mary, visiting from the University of Illinois.
It was that same semester when Brian went to U. of I. for the weekend to visit Mary, whom he missed deeply. And it was only when he was gone – and I realized the way he missed her was the way I missed him – that I finally realized I was gay.
By winter break, I came out to Tom, whose friendship never wavered. Playing on Tom’s stereo in the background?
What else? Dan Fogelberg’s The Innocent Age.
Within a few months, I’d tell Janice, then Chip. All three had my back, and I was grateful.
It would be a while before I felt ready to tell my relatives.
But I’d come to see Tom, Janice and Chip as the family of my heart.
Next up… 1982…
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What a memory you have! I guess the scrapbooks help but I had to think hard about 1981 to remember anything other than graduating college, getting my first apartment, and unsuccessfully job hunting. I saw Raiders but if I hadn’t read it here I would have guessed it came out years later. Anyway, this was a nice stroll down (someone else’s) Memory Lane.