by Larry Shorthill
I want to discuss a wondrous and unique time and place in our lives. The time was 1967 and the place was here in Livingston. Our class was a very unique class, perhaps the most unique class to ever graduate in this town.
First, we graduated in a wonderful community. Besides the natural beauty of Livingston, we had a beautiful community of parents and concerned citizens. The Livingston of our youth was an affluent middle class small town. It was, at the time, blessed mightily by the local agricultural community and the verdant valleys around Livingston were home to some of the finest cattle ranches in Montana, or anywhere for that matter. The tourist industry was strong even then, giving local merchants a good base. The natural beauty and wonders of Yellowstone Park and the fishing on and around the Yellowstone River and surrounding areas helped to keep Livingston on the map and gave many of us youthful employment. And, of course, there was the railroad with its abundant and good paying jobs that fed many of our families. Poverty was not absent from Livingston, but the standard of living was middle class and good. This was unique among similar sized towns in Montana, and perhaps in a lot of other areas of the country as well.
The local affluence allowed our local school board to hire and retain some of the best high school teachers. Our science department was unrivaled in all of Montana and it would have ranked among the top in the nation. We had rich programs for music and art and our English department was excellent. Park High also performed well in athletics and Livingston produced fine teams in basketball every year and Olympic-class track stars come from our community. Our teachers and coaches set high standards and they expected performance.
The 1965 yearbook claims that the seniors of that year were the last PCHS class but all our class jewelry says otherwise. The old school still had Park County High School in letters on its north side. I doubt anyone in our class really thought of us as anything but PCHS graduates. The next year, the class of 1968 truly graduated as PHS from the new high school. We graduated from that old iconic high school from which many of our parents had graduated, and maybe our cousins or siblings or aunts and uncles. The old school had proud traditions and a lot of school pride.
We graduated at a marvelous time. 1967, the summer of love, the Age of Aquarius, and soon to be, Woodstock—and the sobering influence of Vietnam. All of us were shaped by the music and the war. The time was vibrant, alive, and tragic. Many of the young men of our class decided to go to college to avoid the war as long as possible. By the time we were seniors in college, the draft and the war were winding down. If we had been a year or two earlier, many more of our classmates would have fought and maybe several would have been lost to us.
Among those who went to war, we lost Alvy Wood. I think Alvy was the first of our graduating class to die after graduation. His death touched us all since Alvy was a quiet, gentle young man from a great family. His name is on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial will make any of us PCHS graduates, even the most stoic, cry.
As much as Vietnam shaped each of us, the music fed us. I can still remember where I was the first time I heard some of the music of that summer. It will always be the music of choice when I turn on the radio, or listen to a remastered CD. I love other music, but the music of the late 1960s is special to me and special to all of rock and roll since most of the popular music before it consisted of love ballads and simple songs. The rock from around 1967 was the foundation for all the rock that followed. I know our parents thought a lot about their music as well, but our music helped shape a consciousness—It wasn’t just to dance to any more.
The last, and probably most important thing that made our class unique was its size. I think the official count from our class is 162. Livingston graduated classes of this size before us and after us, so the size, by itself is not what makes it unique. The size is what gave us a certain character and the size cemented our bonds and relationships as a whole. I mean by this that a class, say of 80, or 320 would not have been the same by any means. With 160 students, we were past the point of critical mass in size. We had enough diversity in our class and in our school body to provide for a talent pool in art, music, drama, athletics and scholarship. And at the same time, we were small enough that we all could know each other. In a class of many hundreds it would have been impossible to know or remember all of the rest of the class. Not so in our class. The class of 1967 was a gifted, blessed, and very unique class.
The story of our our class is like a story quilt made up of 162 story pieces, or story squares. Many have seen such a quilt, I’m sure. Actually there are more than 162 story squares in this quilt and I could not guess the exact number—some of the extra ones belong to some of our classmates who did not graduate and some belong to our classmates who moved from Livingston before graduation. Some also belong to a few of our classmates a little older or a little younger than us who consider the class of 1967 their own for some reason or another.
Each story square represents one of our classmates. It’s their life story. What I learned in the 40 years since graduation is that each square is the same size. Some of these squares might be a little brighter or a little more colorful than the others, but the squares are all identical for the most part. Each story told by one of these squares has ups and downs, successes and failures, good times and bad. Most, but not all of these stories include the joys and tribulations of raising our children and many include the boundless joys of our grandchildren. Some tell of travel to far places and some tell of tragedy and sorrow. Taken together the whole quilt is the story of the class of 1967.
In a regular quilt made of squares, each square borders four other squares and each square only directly touches four other pieces of the whole. Those on the borders touch even fewer. In our quilt, however, each square touches 161 other squares. Every one of us is interconnected within the whole of the story quilt of our class. Since every story square is identical in size, its contribution to the whole story is just as important as any other square. We all had some clique that we belonged to at the time. Some of us even had several cliques of friends and some of were on the fringes of the class. Others may not have felt like they had a single friend in our class. But now, after 40 years, I have learned that every one of us has more similarity in our lives than we ever could have imagined while we were operating within our cliques.
We have now lost 24 of our ’67 classmates to their final rest. Their story squares are now finalized, even if their stories had not been completed. As our lives are touched by their loss, our own stories are diminished as well. We also have lost six or eight other ’67 classmates who we cannot locate. Their stories are largely unknown and their quilt pieces are yet unfinished. The whole of the quilted fabric and each of our own stories are diminished by their loss as well.
There are other groups, like those of our class who for health, financial, or logistical reasons could not join us. Some are far from home and others are physically incapacitated and unable to be here. Hopefully they will join us in ten years. We need their story squares for sure. The second group of story pieces belong to those who are away from Livingston and who chose not to attend the recent reunion because they might have felt they didn’t have friends among us, or who believed they had little in common with us anymore. To this group I say we all have more in common now than we ever did then and your story square is important to each and every one of us. Join us next time and add to the richness of our tapestry.
The third and final group of squares belongs to those classmates who still live in or near Livingston but who did not attend our class reunion. Your stories are the most important to us since your experiences in Livingston fill in the gaps of time for us. They color the quilt brighter still. All of you provide a beacon that draws us back to Livingston.
If any of you know someone who has not attended a reunion, or if you come across someone who has been lost to us, please let them know about our story quilt and their needed contribution.
To all of you who will be traveling home from the reunion, I wish you a safe journey. To all of you, please stay or get healthy so you can be here in another decade. Long live the class of 1967.
Comments