Gordon Shepherd

TEEN SPIRIT 

Youthful Idealism and The Spirit of Democracy

BOOM! All of my senses were instantly charged. The hair on the back of my neck raised up, and, as though forcibly drawn by an irresistible power, I too found myself rising to my feet. What the hell?! I thought out loud, my heart racing. I was surrounded by nearly two thousand adolescent youths, most of whom I didn’t know, all standing and yelling their lungs out. It was a perfect, deafening din, yet somehow disciplined and focused; the reverberating sound-waves had nothing else to penetrate but my brain and the brains of all the other fervently standing kids in the densely packed auditorium.

            It was September 8, 1959, my first sophomore day of school at South High. I had never attended a South High pep rally before—I didn’t even realize that there was going to be a pep rally that day. All I knew was that we were supposed to attend a schoolwide assembly right after meeting with teachers and our homeroom classes. The assembly wasn’t in the gym. It was in the auditorium, a classy, 1930s, vaudevillian-looking theater in the middle of the school, with mezzanine and balcony levels that were designed to seat an audience of 1,500, but somehow was supposed to squeeze in a student body of 2,000.

            The school band was in the orchestra pit, and, on stage, senior and junior students were putting on a skit. Suddenly, BOOM! In startling unison the drummers hit their big base drums as hard as they could; the band launched into the first bars of the school’s fight song; the student actors on stage instantly shed their costumes and revealed their true identities as that year’s South High cheerleaders. Then holy bedlam enveloped the auditorium.   

            Yep, school spirit, teen spirit.

            In the early 1990s, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was dubbed an anthem for the apathetic kids of Generation X and became Nirvana's biggest hit. (Okay, so what if Kurt Cobain’s Teen Spirit actually referred to a popular deodorant.) Recently, at a restaurant get-together with some of my university colleagues, an English prof said, “I hate that shit,” by which he meant adolescent school spirit. Well, of course, he does. It’s juvenile. He may even have hated it when he was a juvenile student in 1960s Louisville, Kentucky. But if he had been a student at Salt Lake City’s South High in 1959, I wager he’d have been standing hoarsely on his feet like the rest of us.

            Disgracefully, for the next three years I was an indolent, disengaged student (mercifully allowed to graduate with a 1.7 GPA). Nonetheless, I embraced unreservedly the religion of South High School. I say religion because it felt like religion is supposed to feel. The auditorium was our sanctuary where the true believers of South High’s idealized democracy gathered for communion. On occasion our communion might be solemn and celebrated in hushed tones. But more often it was electrically charged, collectively exuberant, and even joyously transcendent. It wasn’t high church, it was charismatic and pentecostal. In those moments we were one: one voice, one heart, one spirit. We felt like we belonged to something bigger than ourselves.  

            Yep, school spirit, teen spirit.

            Sure, there were doctrines too, which the spirit of our gatherings reinforced and validated. They were the elementary doctrines of American democracy—liberty, equality, and justice.

            We believed we practiced these doctrines in our student body elections. Dr. Ralph V. Backman (with an undergraduate degree in sociology, master’s degree in philosophy, and Ed. D. in educational administration) was our adult guru principal and South High’s apostle of the essential connection between democracy and public education. Unlike the other city or county high schools, Dr. Backman insisted that our student elections be held at the beginning of each school year in the fall. Nominations for office would be democratically made by all students the previous spring in their homeroom classes. But subsequently Dr. Backman wanted incoming sophomores—as novitiates to South’s democratic traditions—to participate in the election of their student body officers.  

            During the summer, the four junior students (always boys), who received the largest number of supporting votes in the spring as nominees for student body president in their senior year, selected campaign managers (always girls) to help organize and run their campaigns for office. Notwithstanding the obvious gender discrepancies at play, the biggest summer events in anticipation of the coming school year were August campaign parties, which each candidate was expected to put on at somebody’s house who had a backyard big enough to accommodate hundreds of kids dropping by to check things out before school started.

            Nominally, these parties were for the purpose of making campaign posters to hang on the long walls of South High during the week before the election. Everyone was invited to find some magic markers, a poster board, and get to work.  But what really happened, of course, was that the best artists in school were heavily recruited by the different campaign managers to produce appealing propaganda posters in conformity with catchy slogans that had already been decided upon—slogans like: I Want to be Led by Fred; People Can’t Get Enough of Starr; All Footsteps Lead to Shiba; and Put South in Shep Shape/Leadership with Our Leader Shep.

            While the artists applied their art, everyone else milled around listening to pop records playing in the background, munching on potato chips and homemade cookies, and, acting nonchalant while scoping out members of the opposite sex to see if there were any new faces, or if one could make eye contact with the shy boy/girl that sat across the aisle in algebra class last year. AND, the various presidential candidates and their campaign managers all made it a point of personal respect and compliance with South’s unity norms to attend one another’s parties and compliment one’s rivals. Real life electioneering, making bilious promises and casting aspersions on one’s opponents, was considered bad form. The school was looking for a symbol, someone whose character and demeanor would personify our idealized devotion to equality and fair play, not an unctuous bully or blowhard. The spirit of South High would reveal to us the anointed one in due time, we innocently believed.

            Yep, school spirit, teen spirit.

            When school commenced the first Monday after Labor Day, the Halls were festooned with banners and plastered with campaign posters. The aforementioned pep rally assembly got things started with a BOOM, and, in heartfelt unison, we unitedly sang “On South High, we’ll stand behind you forever!” Forever, as it turns out, is a long time. Pledges of eternal devotion are the stuff of religion. A mere week later a campaign assembly would be conducted at which the four candidates spoke, expressing their hopes for the school in the year ahead. This was when the anointing spirit of democracy was expected to fall on the chosen one. The chosen one would not be boastful or bombastic. He would speak from the heart with sincerity and humility. A majority of students would know this, we believed, and be given the gift of discernment to choose correctly.

            Votes were cast in everyone’s homeroom class, taken by the homeroom’s elected House of Delegates representative to Dr. Backman’s office, counted in the presence of the office staff, the candidates’ campaign managers, and the student editors of the yearbook and student newspaper. The final results were then announced at yet another school assembly to thunderous applause. Win or lose, everyone was expected to close ranks and bear witness to the divine wisdom of the democratic process. From that point forward, our weekly, communal assemblies in the auditorium were not begun by Dr. Backman or any other adult administrator or teacher but by our democratically elected student body president. Without fanfare or announcement, our president would step quietly onto the stage, and students would unitedly rise to their feet in respect for the office and in collective confirmation of their loyalty to the school and its democratic ideals.

            Yep, school spirit, teen spirit.

            Sure, we were naïve in our idealism, immature in our pride and narrow loyalties, and blatantly ethnocentric in our uncontested belief of the innate superiority of our school and its traditions. What American high school worth its salt wouldn’t produce students with similar attitudes and convictions?

            But let’s be honest too. Decades after departing from our sacralized sanctuary to struggle individually for a place in the coldly indifferent world of adult occupations and professions, we retrospectively tend to rhapsodize about our youth—selectively perceiving our youthful communal virtues and glossing over our shared problems and shortcomings. We professed equality and fairness, but our school was a place where some exclusionary social cliques also formed. On occasion, self-righteousness outweighed tolerance and humility. Girls’ accomplishments took a backseat to the athletic exploits of boys on school teams. Boys, not girls, were expected to symbolize the school’s democratic values by running for student body president. Members of the state’s dominant religion could be witlessly insensitive to the religious preferences of others. Ethnic minorities were sometimes made to feel like valued tokens that belied both personal and institutional undercurrents of latent racism. And scores of lonely kids might not have worn the right clothes, or cared about the right kind of music, or joined clubs, or participated in extra-curricular activities.   

            Playing Devil’s advocate, we might inquire: How different were the group mechanisms for stimulating and reinforcing quasi-religious feelings of loyalty and transcendent commitment in high school from those perfected by the Nazis at Nuremberg? Or more recently implemented by white nationalists and neo-confederates at Charlottesville and other public venues? Or currently on garish display at political pep-rallies that serve to name and impugn the enemies of the homogenized people cheering in the bleachers? Or from the rituals of any other manner of inward-looking and outward-despising tribalism that defies the righteous realization of our shared, global humanity?

            Hmmm, well, let’s take a deep breath and not get too carried away by retrospective cynicism. Let’s not be guilty of throwing out the innocent baby with the polluted bath water. Fervent feelings of devotion to a cause are not really the problem—let there be more devotion, not less. Imperfection and discrepancies between our ideals and our personal pettiness and hypocrisy are not the real problem either—let there be more idealism, not less. The real problem lies in the actual cause to which people are devoted. What is the cause? A review of history’s many conflicts—in every country of the world, including our own—reveals a shameful number of avaricious and xenophobic “causes” that render unholy the group mechanisms for promoting unyielding devotion and commitment. Yes, unholy.

            But school spirit, teen spirit, youthful idealism as the means for inculcating democratic values of liberty, equality, and justice are not unholy. The few grains of altruism our species may possess at birth must be nurtured, encouraged, and channeled as young people grow up, searching for themselves, and wanting to belong to something of meaning and value beyond their  own egos. Shouldn’t that something be in our schools as much as in our churches—and not in exclusive private schools, but public schools—where the children of all races and religion can learn it together? E Pluribus Unum. Dr. Backman was right. A healthy democracy requires healthy public schools, and vice versa. Even if imperfectly taught, imperfectly learned, and imperfectly applied, let our children be infused with the spirit of democracy at an early age. Why belittle or demean this today in our occasionally disillusioned years of old age? As my wife said to a recent student intern at the county juvenile court where she was chief of staff, “Convince me you can change the world, and I’ll give you the chance to do it.”

            Yes, let there be school spirit, teen spirt, youthful idealism, and the elementary doctrines of democracy. Rising to our feet, we stand behind you forever.  

Linda Bailey (Ogden)

BRAVO!

Gwen Aupperle (Koehler)

May we write you in for President???  

Gordon Shepherd

Dear Linda and Gwen,

Thanks for your Bravo! and “vote” of confidence. The strong sense of democratic community we experienced at South was one of the highlights of my growing up, and it continues to bolster my faith in our collective future, in spite of the difficult times we currently are undergoing. All best wishes to you and our classmates of ’62.

Linda Bailey (Ogden)

Despite humanity's cruelty to one another, I think historically its cooperation is the more important story. Humans are, after all, social and when they can cooperate and work together their accomplishments are not only monumental but almost miraculous. Remember the polio, measles and chicken pox scares of our youth? After WWII the Marshall Plan transformed Europe. It is when humankind works together, with genuine concern for all, that the world truly advances. It takes compromise and sometimes an abandonment of self interest, but to me it is when humankind shines.

Gordon Shepherd

ALL THE SMART GIRLS BECOMING WOMEN

By Gordon and Gary Shepherd

When we were kids growing up and just beginning to notice that girls were different than boys, we concluded that girls were smart. They didn’t seem to get into trouble, they got good grades on tests, their handwriting was neat, and they were good spellers. The idea that girls are smart has never left us. That was our experience growing up and it remains so today.

            Granted, at Liberty Elementary in Salt Lake City where we first became cognizant of girls, Phillip Starr was unanimously recognized as the smartest kid in the school and he also appeared to be a child prodigy on the piano. All of the teachers at our school loved and praised him and we thought he must be a genius. Actually, maybe he was. The only grade he got lower than an A his entire life as a student in Salt Lake City’s public schools was a B in gym, his sophomore year of high school. After that, Phil signed up for R.O.T.C. and never had to take any more gym classes. He was a National Merit Finalist his senior year and accepted a full-ride scholarship to Stanford University.

            Okay, so Phillip Starr was the boy exception who proved the rule: the smartest kids when we were growing up were girls.

            At Liberty Elementary, for example, our next-door neighbors Kathleen Mclean, Donna Schipaanboord, and Kathy McClure always did their homework and got top grades; Lynne Madron and Annette Bowman got straight A’s and Linda Brown, Raelynn Symes, Helen Moody, and Carolyn Olson were also consistently excellent; and let’s not forget Carol Jean Christensen and Janice Yano—especially those two, both of whom were A students. We say especially them because the two of us developed schoolboy crushes on Carol Jean and Janice, respectively. As Gary was to say later in life (and it applied to both of us): “I was always attracted to smart girls—I tuned into their intelligence like signals from a radio tower.”

            When we went to Lincoln Junior and then South High, girls didn’t become any less smart, there were just more of them and, wow, were they ever smart and talented. For seniors at South, the biggest academic recognition was to be awarded Honors at Entrance. To qualify for this recognition, the minimum grade-point required our senior year was 3.909 (this was prior to the grade-inflating practice of giving college-prep students extra-credit points, sending award-winning GPAs today over 4.000). Of the fifteen South High seniors who qualified for Honors at Entrance in 1962, eleven were girls: Linda Bailey, Linda Booth, Annette Bowman, Marilyn Downs, Kathy Carling, Nancy Foster, Susan Hemmingsen, Sylvia Jackson, Judy Owen, Christine Schmidt, and Kathy Woolf.

            And yes, as already acknowledged, Phillip Starr was one of the four boys awarded Honors with a perfect 4.000 GPA, because only grades in academic classes were calculated for the award. (The three other boys who qualified were Fred Richeda, Allen Owens, and George Van Komen.) Of the eleven girls on the list, Gary—at one time or another—dated three of them: Linda Booth, Kathy Carling, and Nancy Foster. Karen Demke missed by less than a tenth of a grade point from making the list, and Gary dated her too. And not to be entirely outdone, Gordon went to a school dance with Marilyn Downs our senior year (she was our class valedictorian, edging out Phil Starr by a tie-breaking perfect attendance record stretching back to the 9^th grade).

            Since Gordon was generally doing poorly in school at the time, he rarely had classes with the smartest kids. But he once took a geometry class with Kathy Carling. Virtually every time Mr. Jarrett needed a student to go to the board to demonstrate the proof for an especially tricky problem, it would be Kathy. Gordon sat slack-jawed and dumbfounded as he watched Kathy  casually breeze through the incontrovertible proofs of ancient Greek theorems and their corollaries. But back to our statistical thesis about smart girls. Of the forty-five students from South’s entire student body of 2,000 who achieved straight A’s during the 1961 fall semester, thirty-four were girls. That’s 76 percent. We rest our case. 

            “Yes, well, very nice” Gordon’s wife Faye says about all of this. “Girls should be respected more for their brains. But what about political equality at your democratically touted high school? Did girls ever get to run for student body president or for class president, when you attended South?”

            “Well, you see,” Gordon obfuscated, “in those days at South, smart girls would be campaign managers for student body elections, and very frequently, they subsequently were elected to be student body officers and class officers. So, for example, our senior year, Linda Booth was elected student body Secretary, Mercy Johnson was school Historian, and Susan Fenn was elected Secretary of the senior class!”

            “Did they ever run for president. Was a girl ever elected president? Faye persisted in asking.

            “Well, no, actually . . . no,” Gordon was forced to admit.

            “Why not,” she persisted.

            And Gordon’s answer was, “I don’t really know,” but the truth is he did know.

            The truth is that girls were not candidates for student body president, or class president, at South High or any other high school in Salt Lake City in 1962 because it was contrary to the traditional norms and conservative restrictions of the society in which we lived at the time.

            Sheepishly, Gordon had to make the following admission: “After high school, temporarily unmotivated boy-dopes like me, were allowed time to get themselves sorted out and encouraged to think they had greater potential, began pursuing occupational careers that required more education or training, which often landed them in advantaged positions of authority over smart women.” 

            But times have changed. A great many of the social restrictions saddled on women and girls have melted, if not altogether evaporated over the passage of the past fifty years. In the present century, the educational, occupational, and political advancement of women is, in fact, a reality. The world has finally started recognizing the equivalent talents and skills of women and to permit and encourage equal female participation in many previously male-dominated sectors of society. In addition to being concientious moms, women are now presidents of universities, CEOs of large corporations, police and fire chiefs, truck drivers, military officers, editors of newspapers, town and city mayors, judges, state governors, elected members of Congress and supreme court justices, as well as school teachers and nurses. But bias persists in other arenas. Male sexual misconduct and exploitation of women continue to disgrace us. Significant and persistent male-female pay discrepancies for the same jobs continue to plague many workplaces. And what about the ultimate bastion of leadership in our country? Why has the United States of America—the world’s erstwhile citadel of democracy, a country that produced public schools like Salt Lake City’s South High in the twentieth century whose dedicated teachers and administrators preached and attempted to model democratic values of justice and equality for young people—never put a woman president in the White House?

             All the smart girls of our youth are now women. Will they (and a sufficient number of smart, younger women and the men who admire them) come together powerfully enough to make political history? It’s about time. Let’s welcome smart girls and smart women with high hopes for what they will be able do for the future of our struggling country.

Paul Stevens

Memories of My School Years

By Paul Stevens

As I was reading Gordon and Gary’s commentary on smart girls, it brought back a memory I have of third grade at Whittier Elementary School.  I sat behind Sally Post that year and remember her being able to answer all the teachers questions easily and quickly.  Sally also had wonderful penmanship .  I tried hard that year to improve my penmanship, but I could never quite match what Sally could do.  Since I have grown older, I have realized that if a boy doesn’t marry a girl smarter that he is, he will not do nearly so well in life as if he marries a smart girl.  I married a smart girl!

Whittier school was just behind South High School and I can remember in the winter throwing snowballs at the South High girls as they walked home carrying their books and notebooks in their arms.

I also remember learning to square dance in the fourth grade where we had the opportunity to go one evening to perform for a square dance club at the Hotel Utah.  Dancing was fun but it took me a couple more years to be able to feel comfortable dancing alone with a girl.  They taught us to waltz and foxtrot, and in the seventh grade we had a graduation dance where we filled out our dance card.  I always liked girls, having grown up with four older sisters, but it wasn’t until I got to Lincoln Jr High that I felt comfortable talking to and interacting with girls.  The summer of 1959, I had the opportunity to dance in an All Church Dance Festival at the University of Utah.  We learned how to foxtrot, jitterbug and cha-cha, which gave me more confidence to really enjoy dancing.

A vivid memory I have of Lincoln Jr. High was from the spring of 1959 as I was sitting on a bus with Wayne Miller, waiting to go to Lagoon for our school outing.  As we were waiting and talking, Wayne said to me: “This is the only time we get to swim at Lagoon!”  Startled, I asked him what he meant, and he responded that during the rest of the year, Lagoon would not allow Blacks to swim in their pool.  That was the first time I realized that segregation was being practiced in Utah.  Since than I have discovered that black entertainers, who I went to see at Lagoon during the summer, i.e., Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Louis Armstrong, could stay at the Hotel Utah but had to use the back entrance.

I have lived around, gone to school with, served in the Army with and worked with people of all races and nationalities all my life.  They have been and are my friends and neighbors.  I find it sad that there is so much dissension and contention because of race in the world today.

I remember going to parties before high school began each fall to get to know those running for office in school.  They were a lot of fun and made it easier to get to know kids from other junior high schools before high school started.

I am sad to say I did not put a lot of effort into scholastic endeavors in high school.  I enjoyed the social aspects of school more than the academic part.  Going to football and basketball games were fun along with dances and other activities.  I can also say I never had 100% attendance at school.  During the winter we would sluff school to go skiing at least two to three times each year.  As a parent and grandparent, I have taken my kids and grandkids out of school to go skiing.  It has been a good family activity that has not interfered with their scholastic endeavors.  In spite of my initial lack of seriousness in academics in high school, I did do well in college, earning a couple of degrees.

One of my classes at South High that I remember well is physiology taught by Sarah Kaplan.  She was short little lady but she was good.  My recollection is that one of the things she talked about was how elastic our skin was as a seventeen or eighteen year old.  She would say our skin was smooth and tight, we didn’t have wrinkles or saggy skin.  She was warning us it wouldn’t be like that forever but we thought it would last forever.  Looking back, it seems like only yesterday, but fifty plus years have gone by faster than I ever imagined.

I have always felt my growing up in the area of Salt Lake where I did and associating with the kids in my neighborhood and the different schools I attended gave me a solid foundation for life in general and an ability to work with and enjoy friends, neighbors and co-workers throughout my life.  It seems to me that we were all the same and life was good.  So, I am happy and proud to have rubbed shoulders with all of you.  We might not have been rich in worldly goods, but we were rich in the association of friends who made our live worth living.

Gordon Shepherd

Paul, thank you, thank for you for your post, “Memories of My School Years,” especially your anecdote about Wayne Miller’s comment to you about people of color, like him, prevented from swimming at Lagoon, and your comments about South High physiology teacher, Sarah Kaplan (whom I also greatly admired).  I loved most of all your ending comment, “I am happy and proud to have rubbed shoulders with all of you. We might not have been rich in worldly goods, but we were rich in the association of friends who made our live worth living.” I could not agree more. All best to you after all these years ~ Gordon Shepherd

Gordon Shepherd

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

By Gordon and Gary Shepherd

Gary was behind the steering wheel, Gordon was riding shotgun. It seemed oddly familiar as the brothers scanned the wide-open spaces of Eastern Wyoming. Fifty years previously they had traversed this area of the country in a two-ton Utah National Guard truck on their way to summer camp near the Black Hills region of South Dakota. This time they were in the cab of a 26-foot U-Haul moving van, heading in the opposite direction, toward Salt Lake City.

            Three days earlier, Gordon had flown from Arkansas to Detroit to help Gary and his wife, Lauren, pack the U-Haul with assorted furniture, books, paintings, and other belongings for transport to temporary storage units on 3^rd West in South Salt Lake. Gary and Lauren had listed their home for sale in Rochester Hills, Michigan and were about to close on the purchase of a house in Sandy, Utah located near the entrances of both Little Cottonwood and Big Cottonwood  Canyons, overlooking the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Lauren had insisted that, if they were going to move back to Salt Lake, she wanted “a home with a view.”

            As they continued driving west, there was no shortage of topics for the brothers to discuss and reminisce about. Among other things, they remembered their 1967 National Guard summer camp in South Dakota that had coincided with Israel’s victorious “Six-Day War” with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, during which the two had speculated about where their majors in sociology at the University of Utah might take them as adults. They also ruefully recollected the ill-fated demise of one of their early storybook heroes—the vainglorious George Armstrong Custer—who led the 7^th Calvary to annihilation in a greedily stupid military confrontationn with Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors after gold had been discovered on Indian lands in the Black Hills. And, coincidentally, they also recollected that Deadwood, South Dakota was the location for the hit musical “Calamity Jane”—starring Doris Day as Calamity and Howard Keel as Wild Bill Hickok—performed some 10 years later on South High’s auditorium stage as the school musical by the South High Acapella and drama classes in their senior year, with Sally Post in the role of Calamity and Howard Ashby as Wild Bill.

            In slightly off-key registers, Gary began whistling while Gordon sang some lines from one of Calamity’s numbers entitled, “I Just Blew In From the Windy  City.”

I just blew in from the windy city
The windy city is mighty pretty
But they ain't got what we got
I'm tellin' ya, boys
We got more life in Deadwood City
Than in all of Illinois!

            Reminiscing about the high school production of Calamity Jane (Gary had had a bit-part in the chorus) reminded the brothers of the rapidly approaching 55^th reunion for South High’s class of ’62, which Gary was supposed to emcee. On a spur-of-the-moment impulse, Gary enjoined Gordon to dial Paul Eddington on his cell phone to see if Paul was still planning to attend the reunion. Paul was a distant cousin on their mother’s side, whom the twins had met for the first time at South, and the three had become friends. As an adult, Paul ended up living in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, and Gary had recently renewed their friendship by making a short visit to Cleveland from Detroit. But Gordon had not seen or talked with Paul for decades. He remembered him as a mature looking, confident speaker, with a dazzling smile who had been chosen to attend Boy’s State with Wayne Miller, Owen Wood, and Phil Starr. At South, Paul teamed with Bill Gehrke—another good high school buddy—as award winning debaters for the school’s debate team.

            Yep, when Paul answered the phone, it was the same, self-confident voice that Gordon remembered from adolescence. With Gordon’s phone on speaker, the three friends talked freely as the U-Haul van ate up the miles driving west through Wyoming. No, sorry,” Paul explained, family conflicts would prevent him from attending the reunion. But he asked Gary to belatedly apologize to any female classmates attending whom he may have offended by his callow, adolescent glibness.    

            After talking with Paul, we drove on, staying awake by continuing to reminisce in a rambling stream-of-consciousness. We recalled that Paul’s younger sister Susan had dated and then married, Bill Gehrke’s brother Jack, who was two years younger than us. Jack blossomed athletically at South where he QB’d the football team, starred as point-guard for the basketball team, shortstop for the baseball team, and took second place at the state track meet in the 220 yard dash as a senior in 1964. At the University of Utah, Jack became the starting quarterback his junior year, continued playing shortstop for the Ute’s baseball team, and, upon graduation in 1969, received professional offers to play both football and baseball. He decided on football and signed as a wide receiver with the Kansas City Chiefs, who subsequently traded him to the Denver Broncos. But to us—in junior high and his sophomore year of high school—Jack was just “Little Gehrke”—small and cocky, but already a standout, all-around athlete in competitive sports. A conscientious A-student, his older brother Bill loved sports too, but, like us, was not athletically gifted the way Jack was.

            “Hey, Gar, do you remember the time we got caught skinny-dipping with Bill, Jack, and Jim Burns (another high school friend) at Hygeia in Sugar House? queried Gordon. “Sure,” Gary replied. Here’s a shorthand version of the story. 

            Somebody had suggested, “I know what we can do. Why don’t we sneak into Hygeia?” We don’t recall whose idea it was—it might have been “Little Gehrke’s,” who was tagging along with Bill and Jim Burns—but it sounded agreeable to all of us. It was a warm, August night, a couple of weeks before the beginning of the 1960-61 school year. None of us had access to a car, so we’d have to hike almost two miles to get there from the Gehrke’s neighborhood on Browning Avenue. But what the heck, we had nothing better to do. So off we went. 

            Hygeia’s Iceland on 21^st South and 12^th East had opened in the late 1940s as the city’s only ice-skating rink. In the 1950s Hygeia added a heated, Olympic-size swimming pool. Both the skating rink and the swimming pool were open to the public through private club memberships, which to us and our working class parents seemed prohibitively expensive. For the likes of us, there was the free, “open plunge” at Liberty and Fairmont Parks in the summer, and also free ice skating at Liberty Park Pond, across from the Tracy Aviary, for kids who wanted to try their luck on an old pair of skates in the winter.  

            Hygeia fronted busy 21^st South, but the back side of the pool area was situated on a shallow ravine slope, blanketed with tall weeds and sagebrush, which served as a secluded path to the pool. When we got to the top, all we had to do was climb an 8-foot, iron picket fence and we were in! We all shed our clothes down to our tidy-whiteys and jumped into the warm water. The pool had a diving board, which we proceeded to make good use of. It had good spring, and we took turns seeing how high and far we could jump. We were having a great time, laughing, splashing, and yelling a little bit too much. Suddenly, at the other end of the pool adjacent to the dressing rooms, we heard an angry adult voice and glimpsed a man with a large flashlight hurriedly unlocking the iron gate. “What the hell do you kids think y’re doin’ in here!” he thundered.

            Holy shit! A night watchman! We all grabbed for our clothes and carried them with us as we swiftly scaled the iron pickets and dropped down to hide in the sage brush ravine. All but one of us made it over the fence in time. Bill was the one who got caught. The night watchman grabbed his shoulder and spun him around in the glare of his big flashlight. “I oughta whip your butt black and blue with my belt buckle! Take your clothes and git! And tell your buddies down there to never come back,” he commanded, “cuz I won’t be so frigg’n nice next time!”

            Well, there wasn’t any next time. In a few weeks, football season would be upon us (Bill was junior varsity quarterback), classes would begin, and summer swimming—whether free, paid for, or enjoyed at night by sneaking into member-only pools—was over. We didn’t razz Bill as we walked home. We all knew that anyone of us could have been in his place; that he had taken the heat off  the rest of us by getting caught, and that’s why we had been able to escape. The mystery, of course, is why Hygeia’s night watchman didn’t call the Salt Lake City Police or Bill’s parents. Maybe he figured it would be too much hassle and that all he really needed to do was scare us a little bit. Or, maybe like the downtown cops a decade earlier—who had let Gary and our friends Ron Swenson, Al Ebert, and Udell Stones off scot-free after Gordon had blasted their patrol car windshield with a mammoth dirt clod—he simply took a tolerant, boys-will-be-boys attitude towards adolescent escapades—as long as they were white kids, of course. We were often lucky in that regard growing up in central Salt Lake City in the 1950s.

            Hygeia Iceland/Swimland, by the way, burned down in 1985 and its former location on 21^st South is occupied today by a Chick Fil’A restaurant.    

            By the time our U-Haul van carried us down Parley’s Canyon and into the city, it was well past midnight. We stayed on Foothill Drive all the way to the campus of the University of Utah, and then headed up the northern avenues overlooking downtown Salt Lake City. We parked the truck on 9^th Ave, just around the corner from where our sister Sue and her husband Rod Stone lived on H Street. We would spend the night at Sue and Rod’s and then unload the truck in the morning at the storage units in South Salt Lake. It was quiet and serene as we checked the locks on the truck before walking down to knock on Sue’s door. From where we stood we had a commanding view of Salt Lake City and the twinkling radiance of a billion lights that filled the entire Valley of the Great Salt Lake. We were home.

Susan Hemmingsen (Marchant)

Masks adorned with adorable baby cubs, blue polka-dots, or South High written in bold blue letters.  Can you imagine these as part of our wardrobe back then (would they have come issued with the football and basketball uni's or packaged with our Pep Club marching outfits?)  Personally, I know I would have balked then at the rule of having to wear them, "unloving" them as much as I do now.  I try to picture kids in classrooms today saddled with the reality of these bits of cloth - they have to have a "stiff-upper-lip" to put up with them and everything else that comes with the package of troubles facing our world.  Which troubles of the many am I referring to you might ask.  But hey, even if you don't ask, you might guess that I am about to make this a topic of conversation.  Right?

I will spare you a gigantic long list and talk about one that is at the very top of my list....one that I do believe students are (as we once were and maybe, perhaps, still are) in excellent surroundings where they can begin to learn the critical thinking skills which train them in the art of telling fiction from fact.  I hope that they are getting humongous daily sweet-tasting doses of such skills!  

Digging out facts is work, difficult time-consuming work, which is being challenged by many who want the truth to be anything but the truth here in this Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.  So, I am trying to be brave in voicing my feelings in the hope that it might help in some small way keep America the Land of the Free and the Home of Thinking by those who choose to be FACT-CHECKERS.  The words of a song, sung and written by Randy Rainblow on YouTube, help express my feelings.  (I took the liberty of omitting some verses)

Fact-checker, fact-checker, find me some facts

I can't keep up, I can't relax

I thought the facts you fictionalized

Were called something else - like lies.

Fact-checker, fact-checker, you be the sleuth

So many tweets, so llittle truth,

Help me keep track because they seem to be

Writing reality.

Fact-checker, fact-checker, even just one

Actual fact, that might be fun!

Help counteract the inaccuracy 

And find just one fact for me.

Sending wishes for a Happy Winter Solstice, Wonderful Holidays and wishes for some HAPPY FACT-CHECKING.

Linda Bailey (Ogden)

Susan, well said. I hope you are enjoying the holiday season as much as is possible. It is always said to be a season of joy, but I have found it to be a season of many emotions since being an adult. As a child it was a season of wonder and magic for me. My parents were fairly poor, but they made Christmas a really big event. I was in sixth grade when a teacher informed us, of course, Santa was our parents. I think I may have been the only child there who still believed. I had questioned it, of course, but knowing the financial position of my household I decided that those amazing Christmases were indeed magical, which meant Santa was real. To this day, Santa holds a very special place in my heart and memories. When a child, the magic was for me and it still is, but now I see it in giving a gift to someone you love and the gift is perfect. Watching the recipient's face light up with delight is always magical.

I distinctly remember the first Christmas that truly was exciting because of what was being given to someone else. My mother had always wanted a mink stole. So my father and I went shopping. I tried on all these different luxurious furs so we could get an idea what we wanted to get her. I do love the feel of fur, but now I prefer to feel it on the live animal. But then I hadn't quite developed my feelings beyond loving fur. Anyway, I was so excited that Christmas to give my mother that gift. All the gifts had been opened and my parents and I were admiring how nice Christmas had been when Dad said oh, we forgot something. My mother couldn't imagine we had forgotten anything. But he brought out this beautifully wrapped box and gave it to her. It was one of the few times in my life I saw intense joy, surprise and wonder on my mother's face. She was never one who cried with joy, but she did that morning. Absolutely one of my best Christmases ever.

I hope everyone reading this has a joyful holiday season, whatever their beliefs or circumstances and that next year fulfills all our wishes and hopes for good health, good times and good friends. Linda

John McLane

Thank you, Linda. Your family was far from poor. You all possessed a wealth of love, kindness and selflessness which has obviously made for wonderful memories.

Wishing you and your family peace and glad tidings.  John

Susan Hemmingsen (Marchant)

Appreciate your response to my writing Linda, and loved the story of your favorite Christmas.  Also John, nice to read your remembrance of Linda's family and hear from you.  As I've been fortunate on this forum to read entries from my fellow classmates, it has made me wish I knew the stories and background of each and every one of you.  As has been written previously, what a deverse ethnic group we represent; our last names have origins in so many parts of the world - Greece, Denmark, Germany, England, France, Ireland, Sweden, and on and on and on.  And, I am sure that there are places of origin I have no idea of.

Gordon Shepherd

Dear Susan, Linda, and John,

Thanks for your posts. Cheers to you and warmest season’s greetings to all of our South High friends, wherever they may be.

Gary Shepherd (Shepherd)

Amen to what Gord says.  Your stories from the heart are all helping to make this Christmas a good one, despite COVID and all the rest of the crazy bad stuff that has happened this year.  

Gordon Shepherd

In remembering our youthful friends, we should acknowledge that life isn’t always kind, that we’ve all occasionally had to struggle—both as young people and as we have aged. This, of course, doesn’t diminish the value we place on our early friendships and what they meant to us when we were growing up. The following is offered in tribute to our oldest friend from childhood through adolescence, Ron Swenson.

REQUIEM FOR A BOYHOOD FRIEND

By Gordon and Gary Shepherd

Gary quickly scanned the brief obituary notice our sister Susan had clipped for him. He and his wife Lauren were home for a summer visit to see family and old friends in Salt Lake City. Sue lived on H Street, high enough in the Avenues neighborhood so that one can view the wide expanse of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake from east to west and north to south, which Brigham Young had claimed for the Mormons (never mind the resident Indians) in 1847. The obituary said there would be a gravesite service at 11:00 AM, in Wasatch Lawn Memorial Park at 33^rd South and Highland Drive—about an eight-mile trip from Sue’s house. Wasatch Memorial Park is a sixty-five acre cemetery grounds, just west of Parley’s Canyon (named for one of Brigham’s fellow apostles, who explored the possibilities of constructing a road—now Interstate-80—down the canyon in 1848). Rearing up on adjacent sides of Parley’s Canyon are the fortress-like Wasatch Mountains that had initially given the Mormon pioneers a false sense of protection from Babylon America in the middle of the 19^th century.  

            It was just a little past 10:30 AM, so there might still be enough time for them to make it if they hurried. They had no map of Wasatch Lawn’s complicated burial quadrants, nor had there been any directions specified in the obituary. On this sunshine drenched day, however, there seemed to be only one active, burial service underway—in a far-flung corner of the cemetery— and Gary, Lauren, and Sue drove toward it. They parked off the side of a curving road on a hill right above the burial service site and began trudging down the grassy slope toward a small knot of mourners clustered around the casket and freshly dug grave. They had arrived late and stood quietly unnoticed on the outskirts of the small gathering. A woman was speaking a few modest words in memory of the deceased, and her voice sounded familiar: it was Sondra Swenson, Ron Swenson’s oldest sister.

***

            Ron Swenson became our first boyhood friend when our parents moved back to Salt Lake City from God-forgotten Cowley, Wyoming, following several of our dad’s unsuccessful business ventures in sales. It was the summer of 1949. We were five year-old twin brothers and on the verge of starting kindergarten that fall at Liberty Elementary School on 3^rd East, right around the corner from our humble, bungalow home at 312 Herbert Ave. That summer was when we met Ron, who was a year older. Ron lived a half a block north of Liberty School on 3^rd East, but we first met him in “the field,” a big, vacant lot between Herbert and Williams Avenues that abutted Ron’s backyard fence. In later years some apartments were erected in this lot but when we were growing up, “the field” is where we habitually joined with Ron and other neighborhood pals to play army or cowboys and Indians or even Robin Hood or Knights of the Round Table, depending on what movie we had seen most recently.

            We remember after we first met Ron in the field, going to his home and calling loudly for him on the back steps of his house in the prescribed manner of the times: “Rhaa-ahnnnn! Can you come play?!” Ron’s mother opened the screen door, and she was exasperated: “That little bugger!” she heatedly exclaimed. Apparently, Ron had made some kind of mess in the bathroom, locked the door against his mother, jumped out the bathroom window, and had headed for the field. Ron’s mother actually became one of our favorites among our friends’ mothers. She seemed a little younger and more candid than most moms, smiled easily, semi-cussed a little, and sometimes chatted good-naturedly with us while she drank her morning coffee. Most of the moms we knew would have looked askance at drinking a cup of Postum, let alone coffee.

            Ron’s father was a WWII vet who worked on the west side of the city for the Rio Grande Railroad. Of Swedish ancestry, Mr. Swenson was darkly handsome instead of blonde, quietly observant, and, unlike our father and the fathers of our other Mormon friends in the neighborhood, smoked Camel cigarettes. He had mechanical skills, tinkered with car engines, and built elaborate model train sets as a hobby. Barely noticeable unless you looked for it, his right thumb was scarred and deformed from a battle wound received in the Second World War. He let Ron’s mother take charge of the house and kids but reprimanded with quiet authority when he deemed it necessary. We liked him too.

            A year ahead of us in school, Ron was stricken with Rheumatic Fever when we were in first grade, and he ended up being held back a year. For us, however, that misfortune had its positive side: we were best friends, and it meant that Ron would be a member of our grade cohort at Liberty for the duration of our elementary education. That Halloween, with Ron restricted to bed rest at home, we trick-or-treated for him and brought him back a bag of candy, which Mrs. Swenson eyed warily before telling us it was okay for him to keep. Later, when we were nine, Ron suffered a relapse. This time Mr. and Mrs. Swenson obtained a tutor for him to keep him abreast of his studies at home, where he was confined strictly to his bed. We remember the big black and green “horse pills” (as he called them) that he struggled to choke down every day.

            For six months we made almost daily, afterschool visits to see Ron. He had Lincoln logs and a metal erector-set to play with, and he began, painstakingly, putting together plastic WWII model planes. From our visits with Ron we learned all about British Spitfires, Japanese Zeroes, and American Mustangs as he carefully glued the parts, positioned the decals, and painted the fine details. When we talked about what we were going to be in life, Ron said he was going to be an engineer.

            Ron was well enough to return to school in the 4^th grade around Thanksgiving time, 1953. Mrs. Lawrence had given the class a poetry assignment to write about what Thanksgiving Day meant to each of us. We were anxious for Ron to do well, and he did, sort of. That is, he had rehearsed the lines he composed and recited them to the class in a resolute voice when it was his turn: “On Thanksgiving Day we work and work, and we never shirk, on Thanksgiving Day.” We all applauded.

            A few years later, the two of us became obsessed with sports, especially baseball. We spent hours poring over Hall of Fame batting and pitching statistics and could quote verbatim the names and lifetime records of baseball’s immortals. We got a baseball bat and mitts for our birthday in the 5^th grade, and, when spring arrived, we learned how to both pitch and be a catcher, taking turns to catch the other’s fastballs with an opposing team’s batter swinging away six inches in front of our young, scrunched-up faces.

            A year older, a little taller, and a little bigger, Ron had decent shoulders and what we enviously thought was a good build. We thought he looked a little like the Yankee’s famous Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig—like a first baseman—so Ron got a mitt for his birthday too, a first baseman’s glove. We spent time showing Ron how we thought he should field his position at first base, how to switch his feet to cover the bag and maximize his stretch when a baserunner came charging down the line. He in fact began playing first base on our little league team while the two of us were “batterymates,” switching every other game as pitcher and catcher.

            In the summers we played baseball, drank Dr. Pepper at Ron’s house (forbidden at home by our parents because of its caffeinated contents), and slept out most nights in sleeping bags with Ron and some of our other neighborhood friends: sometimes in Ron’s back yard, sometimes in ours, and sometimes on Liberty Elementary’s old playing field. Lying on our sleeping bags at night we vividly remember gazing at the cloudless, black diamond Salt Lake City sky, and gratefully thinking that we were the luckiest kids on the planet.

            One Friday summer night, we, Ron, and two other school buddies—Udell Stones and Alvin Ebert—were walking home from watching a WWII war movie that had been shown in the social hall of the old Liberty Ward chapel, a half block west of Liberty Park. At the corner of Herbert Ave and 3^rd East there was another vacant field-lot, within equidistant shouting range of both Ron’s house and ours. The lot was filled with large, tall clumps of grass which, when grasped firmly and yanked stoutly up by the roots with a heavy, clinging clod at the end could then be hurled at an adversary, exploding in a satisfying burst of dirt and grass when it hit its mark.     

            Sweaty and satiated with our WWII combat games of throwing grass-clods at each other, Swenson (we had commenced calling one another by our last names), Ebert, and Gordon left the field and began strolling north on 3^rd East. In the meantime, Gordon had yanked up the biggest grass-clod yet and was dangling it by his side as they walked. “Hey, Shepherd,” Ebert called out, “see if you can hit this car.” Two hundred feet in front of us shined the headlights of an approaching vehicle. “Sure,” Gordon said, and anticipating the exact moment of intersection, launched his weighty grass-clod missile on an arc toward the street . . . BLAM! Right in the middle of the car’s windshield! And, almost instantaneous with the explosion of dirt that showered them, they heard SCREEEECH! as the car’s driver slammed on the brakes.  

            We all took off running. (That is, Swenson, Ebert and Gordon did; Gary and Udell Stones were still dueling each other in the field.) Both Ebert and Swenson were faster runners than Gordon, who momentarily slipped as they were about to round the corner on Williams Ave. “I’m doomed!” Gordon thought, as Swenson and Ebert sped ahead. He could hear the heavy footsteps and adult swearing of an angry man breathing down their necks. So, instead of following Swenson and Ebert, who, under the glare of streetlights, were now pounding neck and neck down the middle of Williams Avenue, Gordon cut through some bushes of the house on the corner and ducked around to the backyard of the house next door. He stood there breathlessly waiting to see which way his pursuer would come, so he could scat in the opposite direction. But instead, he heard more shouting from the street; it was Swenson and Ebert who were being chased, not him anymore. “Stop! It’s the police!” he heard, as the staccato sound of footsteps in flight continued down the street. “The Police?! Holy shit! Who did I hit?!”  Gordon wondered out loud.

            It turned out that the approaching headlights Gordon had impulsively tossed his dirt-clod missile at belonged to a Salt Lake City Police car. Swenson and Ebert stopped running and meekly surrendered to the irate cop who had chased them down.  

            Back at the scene of the crime, the cop’s partner had jumped out of the driver’s side of the car and grabbed both Gary and Udell by the scruffs of their necks while they stood stunned and dumbfounded, close to the side of Third East where the squad car had screeched to a halt, entirely baffled by what had just happened. The second cop, spewing curses, tossed them unceremoniously into the back seat of his car. When the first cop returned with Ron and Al Ebert in tow, they were all deposited with great trepidation to join Gary and Udell in the back seat. The two cops then wheeled their dirt plastered vehicle around and headed for downtown Salt Lake City—with all of the delinquents in custody but one: Gordon.

            Gordon stood paralyzed in the backyard on Williams Ave. until it was plain that, in the dark and confusion, nobody had even seen him. He was home free! He hopped the backyard fence, found himself back in the vacant lot, cut through the weeds, and made a beeline for 312 Herbert Ave, which was on a diagonal across the street. Our parents called out from the living room where they were absorbed in watching General Electric Theater on television: “How was the show?” “Great!” Gordon answered and went straight to bed. 

            An hour or so later, Gary slipped into our small bedroom. “Where the heck were you?”!? he hissed, as he crawled under the covers of the rickety bed we shared. Gordon didn’t have a good answer for him, but Gary was actually more interested in narrating what had happened after Gordon fled the scene than venting recriminations against him. He said the cops drove straight to downtown police headquarters on Main Street and Second South, parked in front of the old red brick Victorian-looking structure, and herded everyone up the steps and through the imposing entrance while bystanders gawked on the sidewalk. Inside, they were ushered into a small interrogation room. 

            Initially, Ron, Al, and Udell all thought Gary was Gordon and were waiting loyally for him to confess. Instead, Gary shook his head and said he had no idea what had happened. The cops suddenly turned on Ron Swenson: “You’re the biggest, you were running the fastest! You have the dirtiest hands! You’re the leader, aren’t you?! Admit it!” Ron, of course, his rheumatic heart quaking with fear, denied he was the leader of anything. In their turns, Al and Udell also disclaimed guilt while furtively casting anxious glances at Gary. But they all resisted the pressure to rat him out. We weren’t a gang; it was just a little war-play in the field, and a stray dirt clod went further than intended, Officer Krumpke.

            Well, it didn’t take too long for the two arresting officers to discern that what they had in hand were some pre-adolescent boys who were guilty of a little mischief, but who didn’t seem to represent a dire threat to community safety. Their decision? Not to book us or call anybody’s parents; they had scared us enough to learn a lesson, they said. “And this guy”—exclaimed the bigger of the two cops, effortlessly hoisting Udell off the floor and holding him aloft with one beefy arm —"is too little to belong to a gang anyway!” Maybe, just maybe, they recalled themselves at our age when they too were rambunctious, impulsive boys and decided to cut us a break. But Had our skins been black or brown?--we surmise we would have been treated much differently. 

            But not even call our parents? That was surprising to us, even back then in 1950s Salt Lake City, for which we were eternally grateful. What they did do was drive Gary, Ron, Al, and Udell back to the corner lot on Herbert and 3^rd East, drop them off with a warning to keep their noses clean and not to throw things at cop cars again. That was it. Our parents never did find out about what happened that night.

            When we hit adolescence, things began to change. Now there were girls, of course, and parties and dances. We were all a little bashful, but Ron was more than reticent or shy around girls; he couldn’t seem, even with timid diffidence, to talk to them or flirt with them. Not that Ron was entirely ignorant about girls; his two sisters, Sondra and Roberta, grew into beautiful young women.  Both of them—Sondra, willowy and blonde, and Roberta, dark like her father with luscious  brown eyes and eyelashes—had plenty of male suitors asking for dates. Ron was as horny as the rest of us, but as a teenager he never had a single date that we know of, not one. Maybe spending eighteen months of your life in bed as a child affects your self-esteem in ways we don’t fully understand or appreciate.

            Whatever the case, Ron did become clothes-conscious. His father got him part-time jobs at the railroad, and, instead of frequenting the department store bargain basements where we had all shopped previously with our parents, he began spending his earnings on fashionable items (like soft-spun jersey wool pullover shirts at Hibbs men’s-wear store and Florsheim loafers at Al Homan’s Shoe Shop). He cultivated his taste in music and began listening to cool jazz records instead of pop tunes and rock‘n’roll on the radio. He also learned auto-mechanics from his father but disparaged American jalopies to work on and favored European sports cars instead. His first car was a vintage, 1946 MG, whose entire engine he removed and reassembled. He then traded up for a 1958, Austin-Healey Sprite. 

            By the time we got to high school in 1959, the two of us were hanging out with the jocks and the kinds of earnestly civic-minded students who joined clubs, staffed the school newspaper, poetry magazine, and student yearbook; participated in school plays and debates; sang in the A’Cappella choir; played in the orchestra and band; and engaged in numerous other extra-curricular activities for which South High was famous. In our 1961-62 senior year, Gary was elected student body president and Gordon became the sports editor of the South High Scribe.

            Ron, on the other hand, gravitated to other friendship networks, toward kids who were less actively involved in student activities. He didn’t attend sporting events. and he never joined a student organization. A mystery to this day is the fact that Ron’s photo-portrait never appeared alongside those of his cohort classmates in any of our high school yearbooks, including our senior year. In the official annals of our high school history Ron Swenson was a complete cipher. 

            But we were still friends and kept in contact outside of school, especially in the summer when Ron and Gordon would play tennis regularly on the public courts at Liberty Park. Every summer Saturday—when he wasn’t working—they would motor twenty miles north of Salt Lake in his Sprite on Highway 89 to go swimming at Lagoon and covertly look at the girls. But Ron hung back and would never introduce himself or talk to any of them, even when we knew them from school. He would always pump Gordon for information afterwards, however, asking him how they looked closeup in swimming suits and what they had said.

            When, at the age of 20, we both accepted LDS mission calls to serve for two years in Mexico, Ron dutifully attended our missionary farewell from the Liberty Park ward. When writing to us while we were in Mexico he would say things like, “Hallelujah, brother Shepherd! and, “I’ve been trying hard, but I still haven’t gone to hell!” which delighted us. Ron’s irreverent sense of humor was one of the things we prized most in our friendship.

            After two years of Spartan abstinence from worldly pursuits south of the border, we returned home to a very different world. Young people our age were radically redefining the salient issues of the 1960s. The counter-culture was thriving on the west coast and elsewhere; “psychedelic” drug experimentation was becoming widespread among middle class white kids—not to mention recreational marijuana; the civil rights movement was engulfed in violence and becoming increasingly militant; and student protest against the Vietnam war was already separating children from their parents and deeply dividing the country. A bit taken aback by the abrupt transformation of the 1950s America of our youth, but irresistibly drawn by the tides of change, the two of us continued our educations at the University of Utah, got married, and pursued out-of-state graduate studies in sociology. We stayed in touch with some of our childhood friends but not with Ron. He seemed to disappear from our cognitive maps.

***

            At the lonely Wasatch Lawn burial site for Ron Swenson, Sondra continued her modest eulogy: “But let’s not dwell on the unhappy times,” she said. “Let’s remember the good days for Ron when Gary and Gordon Shepherd used to come to our house as Ron’s best friends during his school years. Those were the best years of his life, the years when he was truly happy.” Gary sank his chin into his chest.

            Dear Ron, we want to thank you for your friendship. You were our first and most loyal friend in boyhood. Those were important times for us. We regret we didn’t do more to stay in touch as we got older. We could have, but we didn’t. Forgive us. Perhaps you already have. We still dream about you sometimes at night, as though you were still with us. We consider that to be a kind of blessing, and perhaps a sign of your forgiveness too. Thanks.

Gordon Shepherd

It’s an understatement to say that we live in troubled times, that America’s democratic principles and foundational institutions have been severely challenged in recent years—over the past few days in particular—to all of our astonishment. In the following essay we reflect on the values of community and democracy to which we were exposed as boys through our reading, the schools which we attended, and our neighborhood associations.

LEARNING COMMUNITY AND DEMOCRACY FROM FREDDY THE PIG

By Gordon and Gary Shepherd

            In retrospect we gotta admit, one of our important boyhood role models was a pig—a fictional pig, to be sure—a thinking, talking pig with a keen sense of loyalty, duty, and higher purpose; a pig whose admirable qualities of character stand in glaring contrast to those of  disgraced demagogues and seditionists who openly defied the democratic norms and constitutional foundations of American law following the 2020 elections. The fictional pig’s name is Freddy.

            Freddy the Pig was the creation of Walter R. Brooks, who, from 1927 to 1958, wrote a total of twenty-six “children’s novels” about the adventures of Freddy the Pig and his farm animal compatriots on the Bean Farm in upstate New York. These books featured titles like: Freddy Goes to Florida, Freddy the Detective, Freddy and the Clockwork Twin, Freddy the Politician, Freddy and the Ignormus, Freddy and the Bean Home News, Freddy the Pied Piper, Freddy the Magician, Freddy the Cowboy, Freddy the Pilot, Freddy and the Men From Mars, Freddy and Simon the Dictator, etc.

            Calling the Freddy books mere Children’s novels, however, would constitute a mean  injustice both to Freddy and Walter R. We were very pleased recently to discover that actual literary critics (e.g., Anthony Boucher, J. Francis McComas, Adam Hochschild, Roger Sale, Stuart Mitchner, AND Lionel Trilling) have praised the superb writing and effortless exposition of fundamental moral values that Brooks wove into the adventuresome plots of Freddy and his Bean Farm companions. And Nikolas Kristoff, columnist for the New York Times, proclaimed the Freddy books to rank among the best children's books ever produced, saying they were "funny, beautifully written gems." These professional encomiums, we modestly agree, retrospectively validate our shared boyhood taste in good literature. While Freddy books were written for young readers, Brooks never talked down to his audience and resisted the temptation of utilizing a minimal vocabulary in the composition of his anthropomorphic tales of talking animals. If nothing else, from reading Freddy we both learned the importance of selectively caring about the right words to use in good writing.

            Exactly how we became acquainted with Freddy and his friends escapes us now. It probably happened serendipitously when we first began the practice of making regular visits to the old Salt Lake City public library on 15 South State Street around the age of nine or ten. Our Aunt Alice was a 5^th grade schoolteacher who encouraged us to read by giving us books for Christmas or as birthday gifts. Reading Aunt Alice’s gift books whetted our appetites for more, and consequently we discovered THE LIBRARY. Analogous to the pithy answer attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton when asked why he robbed banks—“because that’s where the money is”—we began frequenting the library because that’s where the books were.

            Neither of us recalls going with a list of books to find; it was pure random searching in the fiction section for Young Readers. We both remember simply pulling books off the shelves that had catchy covers or interesting titles as we strolled down an aisle and then browsing through them to see if we thought they’d be worth our time to read. What we DO remember attracting us to the Freddy books at the beginning were the terrific pen and ink illustrations by Kurt Wiese, which  included succinct captions that captured highlight-moments in each story. We were hooked.

            If we remember right, the check-out limit was seven books per week per library patron. Naturally, Gary checked out his limit of seven, Gordon did the same, and then we shared all fourteen books before returning to the library the following week to get another set of fourteen. We checked out other books besides Freddy, of course, including all of the books in Frank Baum’s Oz series, some science fiction, sports books, and American history biographies for young readers. But without question, our favorite reading was the adventures of Freddy the Pig. We re-read the entire canon multiple times throughout the years of our childhood and early adolescence. The particulars of our other youthful readings have mostly faded from recollection.  But we still remember Freddy with clarity and a combination of fondness and genuine appreciation.

            It was especially in the summer when we indulged in library reading binges. As our age approached double-digits in the mid-1950s, little league baseball and library book reading gradually replaced swimming at Liberty Park as our daily pastimes. With lazy fondness we  recall sprawling out on the cushioned porch swing at our Herbert Avenue house with a stack of books. We would finish a chapter of Freddy, doze a little, and then regain cognizance to stare blissfully at a soft, cotton-seed shower wafting on gentle breezes coming from the row of immense cottonwood trees lined up across the street on 3^rd East. Is this what the celestial heaven vaguely envisioned by prophetic mystics might be like? If so, we could buy into it—especially as an escape fantasy from today’s ugly age of growing authoritarianism. But let’s not get too far ahead of the story.      

            One of the charming strengths of the Freddy books is the wide range of barnyard characters—representing a fair moral sample of the human menagerie—that play significant roles in the realization of Brooks’ compelling fables. In addition to Freddy, other principal characters include Jinx the Cat, Mrs. Wiggins (a cow), and Charles the Rooster. None of these, or any other of the characters in Brooks’ stories, is a perfect paragon. They all have their “human” weaknesses, as well as strengths. It is their allegiance to one another as part of a diverse community of political equals that gives them their collective strength. Important issues that arise are debated at proto townhall meetings in the Bean barn, and democratic voting is conducted when momentous community decisions need to be made.

            Without compelling characters, though, you can’t have a compelling novel. Even we, who have never written a novel, know that much about novels.

            Freddy is clever, multi-talented, a day-dreamer poet, imaginative, and idealistic. He’s also a little vain, slovenly in his housekeeping habits, and has definite lazy tendencies during tranquil times. But when confronted by problems that provoke his lively curiosity or especially by ones that threaten the peacefulness or integrity of the farm or portend harm to his friends, he is an ingenious and energetic pig of action who is undaunted by obstacles in his path. In confronting life’s challenges, Freddy is a renaissance pig who alternately is a detective and master of disguise, a newspaper publisher and editor (of the Bean Home News), a magician, a political campaign manager, an artist, a pilot and adventurer, as well as a compulsive poet of doggerel verse.

            Jinx the cat is Freddy’s improbable best friend and counterpart. Jinx is the realist to Freddy’s romantic idealism; he is fearless, blunt, disdains cant and hypocrisy, can be impetuous and fierce, but is a friend you depend on for getting results when the chips are down. A good natured Holstein cow, Mrs. Wiggins is a combination of tender-heartedness, stubborn commitment to her old-fashioned yet humane values, and a font of common sense wisdom that often serve as a corrective to some of Freddy’s more flamboyant ideas. But when it comes to personal flamboyance, Charles the Rooster is the personification of flashy showiness. Much more vain than Freddy, Charles is an eloquent public speaker in love with the sound of his own voice. He lacks good sense and judgement, however, and talks a much bigger game than he plays. He is self-centered and irritatingly complains too often about the indignities of his life.  But he, like Jinx, can also be a loyal friend when the chips are down—even if occasionally he has to be kept in line by his impatient and practical wife, Henrietta. Henrietta and Mrs. Wiggins, we should point out, both act as effective female counterpoints to the male presumptuousness of Freddy, Jinx, and Charles.

            Other important Bean Farm residents, whose distinctive personal qualities are woven into virtually all of the stories, include Hank the horse, a stoic, strong, and reliable comrade when situations require both muscle and integrity; Alice and Emma, timorous sister ducks who fawn and fuss over their fraudulent Uncle Wesley, but who also demonstrate pluck and rectitude when pushed too far; and Whibley, the sardonic great horned owl, who delights in puncturing the various pretensions and follies of the other animals but always offers words of wisdom and guidance in times of crisis.

            We should also point out that the Bean Farm animals do not merely interact with one another. Rather, their stories routinely implicate them in the affairs of the larger human society beyond the boundaries of the farm. The literary device Brooks employs to make this plausible is to portray the Bean animals as being capable of human speech in a way that initially surprises human actors and consequently bestows great notoriety upon them as the “talking animals.” How they acquired speech is never explicated, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s simply introduced as a fact and thereafter satisfies the fundamental premise of all fantasy stories and most science fiction, which require the suspension of readers’ disbelief.

            Freddy the Pig stories are mystery/adventure yarns and therefore require villains. In the adventures of Freddy there are two types of villains: barn rats and human rats. The barn rats are led by the oily and sinister Simon, who exercises tyrannical control over the rat clan. Simon and his unprincipled progeny do not share the other animals’ commitment to community and fair play. They ceaselessly attempt to plunder the Bean animals’ food and possessions and engage in a variety of other criminal depredations, which challenge the civic order of the Bean Farm’s citizens. Given the chance, Simon would like to become dictator over all the animals.

            The human rats are people who are offended by the Bean animal’s presumptions of equality, look down upon them, and/or attempt to exploit them for personal gain. While the majority of humans are both decent and accepting of the animals and collaborate with them in various ways, the rats among them are mean and remorseless. They stupidly think the animals are pushovers and can be taken advantage of with impunity. Some of the latter, by the way, are local plutocrats who flaunt their money and pettiness toward others with narrow convictions of inherent superiority. In many of Brooks’ stories, the community good will and democracy of Freddy and his friends are ultimately at stake and must be sustained by their concerted efforts to overcome the villainous plots perpetuated against them or their friends by human adversaries. 

            So why did all of this appeal so strongly to us at our age and circumstances as elementary school kids in central Salt Lake City in the 1950s? The answer is both simple and subtle. We were reasonably bright kids whose reading proclivities had already been reinforced by our mother (who read stories to us as preschoolers) and our book-gifting, public school teacher, Aunt Alice. And, as we recounted earlier, random chance played its part in our discovery of Freddy books in the public library. But as far as the appeal of these books to us is concerned, we don’t think they were stunningly revelatory or somehow caused us to embrace the principles of community and democracy that were part and parcel of the stories’ adventurous plots. Rather, these principles were bracingly congruent with what we matter-of-factly had come to accept and value already in our own youthful experience with neighborhood friends at Liberty Elementary school and the local Liberty/Liberty Park ward of the LDS Church—values which later were strongly reinforced at our public junior and senior high schools.

            In some analogous way, our childhood associations in those primary institutions were manifest in fictional form as Freddy and his friends living on the Bean Farm in upstate New York. When we read about the adventures of Freddy the Pig and his Bean Farm associates, we thought, “Of course! They’re just like us and our friends at school and church.” We experienced an affinity with Brooks’ animal characters and their stories, because they seemed to resonate with our own emerging values and friendship priorities. We even identified different Bean animal characters with many of our friends and adult guardians, whose personalities seemed roughly equivalent—whether endearing or obnoxious—including candid depictions of their various shortcomings along with their personal virtues.

            Having said this, we must also say that whatever our rudimentary ideas about friendships and democratic loyalties might have been at that age, they were not coherently defined or articulated in any clear way. Looking in retrospect at the stories of Freddy the Pig, we both appreciate how they clarified, consolidated, and strengthened a tolerance of diversity, sense of unity, and concern for the welfare of others beyond our own egos, which perhaps we first began gravitating toward as identical twins when we were children. These kinds of reflections, of course, may sound pompously self-serving, and we don’t mean to portray us in our innocent dumbness to have been democratic child prodigies. We were pretty ethnocentric about a lot of things for a lot of years beyond our childhood. All we’re saying is that, however imperfectly acquired, understood, and practiced, these were values that resonated with many of our most important experiences growing up. And may we add that one of the important functions of great literature is to inspire and reinforce a vision of humane values for imperfect humanity.

            As for dictator demagogues who disparage the community and democratic values exhibited by Freddy and the Bean Farm animals, most of our political history attests that, sooner or later, their villainy and personal pettiness is upended. The nakedness of a fake emperor who wears no clothes is not pretty. When this is belatedly acknowledged by a deceived people, self-serving autocrats are predictably deserted by their sycophants and enablers, who abandon ship like Simon the Rat and his treacherous offspring.

            To bring full circle our reflections concerning the influence that Brooks’ stories had on our thinking about community and democracy while growing up, let us offer these fond hopes for our country’s future: May the community values and democratic principles of Freddy the Pig and the Bean Farm Animals live long in American society—even in—and especially in—today’s  disturbing political climate of fearmongering and authoritarian appeals to the darker angels of our nature.

Linda Bailey (Ogden)

I love the stories you share. Thank you.

Gary Shepherd (Shepherd)

Linda Bailey (Ogden)

I got the final bill for a dental procedure that began about a year ago when one of my bottom front teeth became loose. Having never had orthodontics, my bottom teeth were very crowded. My mouth is actually too small for all the teeth (not uncommon in modern man). I have fought for years to retain all my teeth but, alas, failed at the age of 75. Thursday just past I received my permanent replacements and am very pleased with the result. For one thing I don't have the crooked front bottom teeth. The work included removal of three of my front bottom teeth, an incision and addition of bone growth powder (actually ground bone/teeth) so that my front jaw bone would grow and then putting my three removed teeth back into my mouth so there was no gap. The three teeth had to be made smaller to fit. After a month or three, with bone now regrown, posts were implanted to hold new teeth, which meant more surgery and then the three teeth went back in. To make a year-long story short and after several uncomfortable procedures to remove unwanted gum growth, I now have three new front teeth. The entire procedure cost $10,440.00, and I have no dental insurance. Which leads me to say, why isn't dental care part and parcel of medical care? Which also leads me to say health care should be available for everyone, not just those (like me) who are fortunate to afford it. I hope all of you are enjoying good mental, physical and dental health in this long pandemic.

Gwen Aupperle (Koehler)

Gordon and Gary must tell you how much I am enjoying your tales of misadventures and literature that influenced you over the years.  I am still a lover of kid lit so will have to check out the Freddy the Pig series.  I am always checking out books to send to my grand neices and nephews now that my grandchilderen are adults and reading things beyond my ken.  Discussing literature with them is a great challenge and sometimes sends me to my OED.

Your after hours swim at Hygeia reminded me of many hours swimming there during regular hours!  (I found out about an after hours swim that my son was involved in, many years after the fact, from my daughter-in-law.  It was at a hot springs pool here in Colorado.)  Also, I recall the times spent at Hygeia on ice skates.Having grown up in Minnesota I was used to skating in local parks where the baseball diamonds were flooded and the park buildings were warming huts.  We could skate into the evening hours without parents worrying about us being out after dark.  I remember coming home to my grandparents' home, where we lived for a time, and putting my toes in between the spaces in the radiator to thaw them out.  Radiators are a thing of the past but in our 133 year old home they are part of the decor (and a devil to paint) and keep us cozy and a reminder of lovely childhood memories. 

Back to Sugarhouse establishments---wasn't there a hamburger joint called Dee's on 21st Street?  I think that was where I acquired a life-long love of french fries.  I paid 10 cents for a good sized serving and hamburgers were 25 cents.  Later, when I was a student at Westminster College, a walk to the Pine Cone for sandwiches was always a treat.

Misadventures were not much in my repertoire but I do remember a late night toilet papering of a famous monument that will remain unnamed .  My teacher dad would have been nonplussed to think his well-behaved daughter could have done such a thing but he never knew!  

Fast forward to troubling times that continue to try my soul.  I am comforted that my husband and I, my son and family and our "bubble" of friends remain healthy.  

Shout out to Linda and her new teeth--what a journey!  

Keep those fascinating life stories coming.  We are survivors, eh?   Gwen Aupperle Koehler

Susan Hemmingsen (Marchant)

Applaud with both hands the sharing from my fellow South High Cubs.  Fun to read about fellow cubs we did not know well and now wish we had, plus adventures of fellow Cubs we were better acquainted with.   

The mentions in your writings of spots in Sugarhouse have sent my mind off in lots of directions as I have thought of adventures that filled my youth.  I lived in Sugarhouse area from the age of six to high school age, moving serveral times along the way.  My first home was a tiny house on 1110 East and 2100 South, sandwiched between Sterling Furniture and a welding shop.  To the east, behind our abode, loomed Irving Junior High, the junior high school I dreamed of one day attending,   Our home was a humble one we rented as my Mom had the ominous task of being a single mother of five children while my "dead beat dad" did what he did best---drink and gamble.  He had been left behind in Lark, Utah where I had entered the world.  To be honest I was, at age six, unable to appreciate the fact that I had a roof over my head and rooms which were warm and dry.  You see, I had a best friend who lived in an apartment above Sterling Furniture which was more modern and more "luxurious" than our place, plus, and this was the real kicker, her place had a phone that we had access to where we could spend time bothering people with our practical jokes.  "Is your fridge running?" we would ask and then break up laughing when we delivered the punch line, "Well, you better go catch it."

I do not remember this friend's name nor have I been able to retreive it from my family's recollections.  She and I spent a lot of time together from heading to Fairmont Park to swing and climb on the jungle gym to walking to and from our elementary school located near East High, Garfield Elementary.  The school  was a good distance from our homes and we filled our journeys with games, songs and sometimes trying to not get stuck in the heavy snow.  I shudder sometimes to think of what could have happened to both of us with the amount of freedom we had as latch-key kindergarders and first graders but we were blessed and, most like, just plain lucky.  I send best wishes and hugs to this special friend for warm memories of fun times we had together, and I also thank her for her gift to me of weathering a time in my childhood that was rough and raw.  I don't recall that we ever confided in each other of our challenges; we both just knew this was the case and we were there for each other.

Next, my journey took me to a red brick duplex located on 900 East across from Fairmont Park.  Here, I had a wonderful huge yard....the park.  So many fun-filled hours spent here with friends playing all sorts of make-believe adventures, running free and wild in the grass, soaring up and down the hills, and even ice-skating in the winter!  When not at the park I could be found swimming, roller-skating for hours, bike-riding the streets and side-walks, and once in a while ring-leading some friends to "far-away places", like Sugarhouse Park and Suicide Rock.  Well, to be honest, I only did Suicide Rock once, as I sort-of, maybe, knew the way there and back.  I was scared silly on that one.  I am sure that some of my friends' parents found me less than the ideal friend for their child but I was never called on the carpet, even though I probably deserved to be.  Some of my friends from this era that you would know were Kathy Woolf, Marydell Snelgrove, and Kathy Springer.  With these friends I undertook the milder activities.

From 900 East I landed in a home a block east still on 900 East.  Tennis courts, rather in rough shape, were located across the street.  I saved my baby-sitting money and purchased a battered racket, we found used tennis balls left on the courts, and played for hours on end.  Sometimes, my younger brother Lionel was my partner, but usually he was off spending time with his buddy, Keith.  I felt uprooted when I moved here and wanted desparately to go back to the place I knew.   The elementary school I attended was Forest Dale Elementary.  I did love school, friends I made there, and gradually, felt more at home in the spot we lived in.  One of the highlights which upended our 5th or 6th grade, not sure which, was an oh, SO handsome new comer named Paul Eddington.  All us girls had a crush a mile long on this guy and could not believe, no, we could not believe, when he just spoke out in class without waiting to be called on!  But, of course, it only added to his mystery and mystique.  Would he get in trouble?  How would he be reprimanded?  Oh, please don't treat him too harshly teach!

Think I will stop here for now.  Most likely will bore you and continue on with my saga another time unless you poison my food or something.  Hang in there my friends, survive this pandemic and please work to help solve this crisis America is in!  Peace and Love.  

Gordon Shepherd

Dear Linda, Gwen, and Susan,

Many thanks for your updates and reminiscences: Keep’m coming! I would love to hear the comments and stories of any other of our classmates who feel so inclined. Cheers and warm good wishes to one and all in the coming year.

Gary Shepherd (Shepherd)

Ditto that for me.  Some may say it's a little late to be learning all this stuff, but I'm really enjoying getting to know things about some of you that I wish I had known back then.  Gary

Susan Hemmingsen (Marchant)

I think this site is fabulous, and I want to thank those who are responsible for making it possible. 

I personally think we have a rare opportunity here, not only to reach back and snatch high school memories of various shapes, sizes, and colors, but also to now, as the adults (?) in the room, dive in and do some introspection, philosophisizing (is that even a word?), and deepening in our understanding of our fellow classmates from a different perspective than we possessed when we were teens.  My studies in anthropology has taught me that people the world over are more alike than they are different; however, these differences, whether weird, fascinating, or comforting, can also be fiercely alienating.  Communication and sharing help knock down such walls making it possible for bridges of discovery, understanding and tolerance to grow.  To me, there is nothing more interesting than stories.....and there have been some great ones shared here, and I so agree that it would be wonderful to hear from all of our fellow South High classmates.  We don't want to miss out on any Cub stories!