I thought I was a nerd in high school, but I was mistaken. This is a story of jealousy, hatred, and how I discovered my error.

My high school, Rich Township (now Rich East), is in Park Forest IL, a suburb 35 miles south of downtown Chicago. “PF” was carved out of clay and mud in the late ‘40s to provide affordable housing for returning veterans and their families. The developer was called American Community Builders and that is precisely what they did – created an entire town from scratch, 500 homes at a time.

PF was more too – a magnet for people we’d now call mind workers, as well as those who came to be called organization men. In fact, “The Organization Man,” the famous pop-sociology work of the ‘50s, was a study of PF.

Families streamed to PF from all around the country, not just Chicago, because it was so affordable. It was also, in adspeak, “a great place to raise kids” – which, to prospective homebuyers, means (1) Your kids will have lots of playmates, and (2) the schools are great.

But PF was not necessarily a great place to raise a kid like me nor my sister Judy. We’d relocated from Hyde Park, then a heavily Jewish, intellectually fizzy, racially changing, scary-exciting neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that is home to the University of Chicago. (Note: Barack Obama lives in Hyde Park. Even though I support Obama, I think he’s definitely going to be dogged by the accusation that he’s a pointy-headed-liberal-who-can’t-park-his-bicycle-straight. I mean, that IS Hyde Park.)

Being uprooted from Hyde Park and plunked down in PF was culture shock. For one thing, out of some 25,000 residents in 1954, not a single household was black. Far worse for me though, the high school was the finest flower of the Eisenhower era, dominated by basketball players and the cheerleaders who loved them – types I’d never encountered in my then-young life.

I wasn’t blond, I wasn’t a WASP, and I was overweight. I couldn’t play basketball, baseball or football (too small, too uncoordinated). Such were the social pressures to conform that I did go out for wrestling and track, but neither lasted more than a week or two. I felt like an outcast.

I drew unto me a group of friends who were also outcasts, or so I reasoned under the Groucho Marx theory: ‘I wouldn’t join a club that would have me as a member.’ I did go out with girls but not very successfully, success being defined as sex sex sex. (Did I mention I was awfully horny? Girls aren’t actually drawn to that, as I was to discover later in life. Much later.) Overcome with jealous rage, I fantasized that I’d go to a reunion one day and discover that the high-school heroes had ended up selling shoes at Kinney’s.

Mercifully, high school ended. I went on to have a great life, in which various successes slowly eroded my feelings of nerdiness. Then, six or seven years ago, I attended my first high school reunion and began to discover what high school had really been like.

People were glad to see me – very glad in some cases. Odder still, I was glad to see them. One guy went on and on about a wonderful piece I’d written in the student newspaper, which he could virtually recite from memory. I remembered neither the piece, nor the guy.

That reunion had been for all the classes from ‘54 through ‘65, not my graduating class. My class, ‘58, recently concluded its 50th Reunion in Las Vegas. And guess what? No one was selling shoes in Kinney’s.

The high school heroes and heroines were present, to be sure. After living golden lives in high school, most seem to have gone on to golden lives as adults. But somehow along the way, they’d turned into human beings too. I had deep, soulful conversations with several. Some had suffered misfortune and were surprisingly candid about these experiences. I had no impulse to gloat.

I’d seen only one or two of these classmates since Graduation Day. But seeing them again after 50 years, I felt rushes of feeling as if I were 18 again.

I shouldn’t have needed reunions to wake up to the reality of my high school experience. Those high-school “outcast” buddies I mentioned above? We’ve stayed in touch over the years and I love them as much as any guys I know. But they say my “outcast” theory is a lot of crap. None of them think of us as outcasts in high school.

The reunion ended in a warm bath of love. More than one participant wants to reunite again. Nineteen (out of some 200) are dead, a few are in wheelchairs or on oxygen, but most of us look pretty good for a bunch of 67- and 68-year-olds. Not just the jocks and the cheerleaders either — the rest of us too.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. I haven’t been posting much lately because I’m hard at work whipping TO WALK HUMBLY into shape. Even though “Humbly,” the sequel to my first novel TO LOVE MERCY, isn’t finished, my literary agent Michele Rubin is ready to start showing it around.

P.P.S. If you’re in the Washington DC area, mark your calendar for Saturday, June 7. I’ll be appearing from 1-3 p.m. at the Small Press Book Fair at Barnes & Noble in the Rio Center, Gaithersburg MD.