Happy Birthday RHS 1964 Class August 13, 2011
speech written &given by John (Buddy) Wester
(forwarded by Donna Tuthill 08-20-11)
Happy Birthday - 2011
A birthday party with your high school classmates --- the worst place on earth to lie about your age. Do you remember that Doogie Houser was our classmate? All of you recall that Eddie Taylor was 12 years old when he graduated with us. I went to high school and college with him. We graduated from college on a Friday afternoon, walked out of Kenan Stadium, and I gave him a ride to the highway patrol office in Chapel Hill. Eddie Taylor is the only person I know to secure his college diploma and driver's license on the same day.
Let me share what I have been thinking about during the past few weeks --- wondering whether you have been doing likewise.
Is there any chance, any possibility that it has been so long since we walked out of Kate Finley Auditorium on a balmy June evening in 1964 to face the whole wide world?
Whether we were ready to do so was entirely an individual, person-by-person issue. Most of us left with a solid education in the fundamentals necessary to secure and hold many types of jobs. Some of us were going on for more formal education, perhaps a privileged path, but also a postponement of real life. Others of us believed we would receive whatever further learning we needed soon enough and well enough, without more time in a classroom. Some few of us already owned a strong sense of the world --- what we should take on for a life mission, where to take it on, whom to love, even whom to marry.
Whatever our widely different states of readiness, we set ourselves bravely on the road to what life would hold.
By the time we left the walls of Rockingham High, we were not as innocent as we had expected to be. Chilling events had come at us of late to grab us by the shoulders and shake us hard. As of graduation night, President John Kennedy had fallen to an assassin’s bullets only seven months earlier. And our nation would soon see more assassinations, the rumble of violence in its streets, and feel the wounds of an undeclared war 9,000 miles away --- all of this to happen before we turned 21.
Our years together had been a time for playing, and a time for growing, and a time for learning. When we rode together, in cars and on buses --- watching the road beneath us fly to ball games, band concerts, and beach trips --- did anyone here, anyone in this room, believe that youth would end?
As we rode together, we felt safe together, secure in a faith that we held the affection of many up and down the aisles of those buses, whatever our passing rivalries for popularity or attention. I am sure of this much: no one in our class was ever jealous of anyone. Not a chance.
So strong was the sense of our protection from the outside world that we had little reason to ponder what trials and demands would challenge us in the very near term. Looking back and into the mirror of all these years, was there, day-for-day, a more blissful time in our lives than the years leading to our last walk together from Finley Auditorium? Aren’t those years --- our time together in those years --- standing alone, so much to be thankful for?
We had the devotion --- I know that is what it was --- of a loyal corps of teachers and coaches. Their names are now more memory than we wish were the case, yet our memories of them are enduring: Crosland, Dockery, Howell [we are so grateful to have her with us today] , Stogner, Baxley, Mulkey (both of them), Miller, Souther, Peele, Goodman (both of them), and another Goodman (the young one) [we welcome him here today], Biggerstaff, Covington, Leak (two of them), Phillips, Ingram, Garris, Brooks, Staklinski, Morse, Wood, Webb, Lewis, Guthrie, and Eutsler [in all the halls of fame and deep in our hearts].
Theirs was a devotion we did not earn, and often did not welcome. How many of us, however, watching our children go through school in the years since our graduation, believe that our children’s teachers cared as much, believed in them as much, or wished so much for them as these teachers cared, believed, and wished for us?
I cannot escape a feeling of great good fortune that I came under their care at such a critical time in my life.
So we have come here again, after all these years --- with no promise, no assurance that we will do so again --- to reflect on a rich experience of life, in a timeless place, with forever friends. How fortunate we are to do so. This is reason enough, for sure, to explain why we come back to this sandy soil, to visit among these towering pines, like those surrounding “the circle stately standing, 'neath the sky of blue.”
We come back now in spirit more often than in fact, but we always come back. These are our people. This is our home.
I thank President Yow for this high honor.
May God bless him, and all of us.
August 13, 2011