This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of having graduated from high school, so because it’s what I do, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to those four years and more recently, I’ve been having conversations with a few of my classmates. It’s funny the things that each of us has remembered since that time. Some of our memories jibe, but many don’t. When I started writing this little travelogue down memory lane months ago, I thought it might be valuable to see what others recall about this Junior class trip we took, and I was hoping others had taken photographs, but so far, I’ve seen only a few photos and heard a few stories, several of which I can’t repeat. What follows is a pretty disjointed collection of my memories, and includes a few photographs I took way before I knew anything about taking photographs.
In late May of 1972, about half of my Junior class at Cardinal Stritch High School in Oregon, Ohio went on a trip to Washington D.C., led by American History teacher, Prefect of Discipline, and Dean of Men, Mr. Dennis Rectenwald. (I never knew he held all those titles!) My mom let me take our (read: her) Kodak Instamatic camera on the trip, along with five twenty-exposure rolls of Ektachrome slide film, and while the pictures aren’t all that great from a technical point of view, and compositionally are nothing special, I was pretty pleased at the time that ninety of the one hundred frames turned out. I thought that was a pretty good percentage at the time. I wish I’d taken more pictures of my classmates, but… monuments!! I was no doubt considering “family slide show night” when I took most of them. There are are a handful, however, which include classmates, albeit mostly because they happened to be between me and whatever it was I was photographing. As I write this, it occurs to me that I never showed these to anyone from school, with the exception of maybe one or two after Facebook came along.
I recall that the newspaper’s weather forecast for the week of the trip was great — sunny with temperatures in the 90s, but when we arrived in a couple of buses at the Holiday Inn in Silver Spring, Maryland at around 3:00 on that May morning, it was in the low- to mid-40s… maybe colder.* As we dragged ourselves into the lobby, we were told that our rooms were not yet ready because the entourage of Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had been shot in the D.C. area on 15 May by Arthur Bremer while campaigning for President, had extended their bookings, which interfered with ours. We slept that night on the floor or chairs in the ballroom — which was freeeeeeezing as the hotel couldn’t turn off the air conditioning — or in hallways… wherever we could find a place to sleep. I don’t think I ever managed more than a hour, if that..
After finally getting in to our rooms, it was either the first or second day that my roommates — John Johnson** and Bill (“Willie”) White — and I missed the bus to George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon because we’d overslept. What did we know about getting up in the morning by ourselves, right? I still can’t get over the fact that Mr. Rectenwald and the other teachers who traveled with us weren’t aware that they’d left three teenagers behind in a big-city hotel to fend for themselves. This is something that I have thought about often… did our classmates yell, “Here!” when roll calls were taken on the buses? Because, of course, that’s what teenagers do. Did Mr. Rectenwald make an executive decision to just leave us?
I really wanted to know, so I found Dennis on Facebook and sent him a note. He called me in a few days’ time and we had a nice chat. He said that there wouldn’t have been a roll call, but a head count. Which actually sort of makes it worse. I can understand the scenario in which our classmates said “Here!” when our names were called, and I can almost forgive a head count being off by one person, but three?!? He reminded me, too, of how he had warned everyone the day before that if we weren’t at the school by a certain time that the buses would leave without us, then he himself overslept and got to the school about fifteen minutes late.
Anyway, back to D.C…. after John and Willie and I awoke and discovered we’d been abandoned, we made our way with the day’s itinerary in hand — by cab once we scraped together enough cash — to the Lincoln Memorial, where we waited to meet the rest of the group upon its return from Virginia.
Once reunited with the rest of the class, the rest of our sojourn went as planned: the Washington Monument (I took pictures from each window at the top — north, east, south and west); the Capitol Building; the White House; the Supreme Court building (we didn’t go in); the Federal Mint; Arlington National Cemetery (the changing of the guards was pretty mesmerizing; the click of their heels shattered the silence surrounding the ceremony) — primarily to see the Kennedy gravesites, I think, since Rectenwald was a major Kennedy buff; the Kennedy Center; and the National Zoo.
The White House was not the barricaded building that it is today, and I was actually able to take a photograph through the fence. There were no policemen or rows of bike-rack barricades to keep people away.
There were demonstrators at the gates of the White House… not protesting the war, but, well… take a look…
At the back of the photo, Pete Quinlan (lavender shirt) and his then-girlfriend, Cathy Ulman, watched on in bemusement.
I believe that the Husband’s Liberation fellow is Harry Britton, who was mentioned in an article of New York magazine in its 9 May 1977 issue, in an article about salaries:
Far and away the most unrewarding profession we ran across is to take to the streets full time in support of “men’s liberation.” Harry Britton, originally of Erie, Pennsylvania, and now of Ninth Avenue, has been supporting himself this way for several years, wearing placards, carrying signs, and selling his leaflets in midtown for 25 cents each. Harry makes only $2000 a year. He’s not in it for the money, though; he says his only goal is reconciliation with his wife, from whom he is, unsurprisingly, separated.
Another demonstrator had a sign claiming to know the truth about the John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy assassinations.
I don’t recall much about the tour inside the White House except that it was minimal. I recall that Nixon wasn’t in the building at the time, and probably wasn’t even in town. On the way out, I took a photograph, and I think I’m able to make out four of the people in the lower right corner of the frame.
Another photo in which classmates appear was at the Jefferson Memorial.
I’m relatively certain that the four heading up the stairs at the Jefferson Memorial (again towards the lower right) are Denise Fowler, Mike Gerrier, Robert Johns (I’m 100% sure of him), and Margy Reinbolt.
I asked Margy if she could confirm, but she couldn’t. I think that I’ve got a pretty good memory, though, about the way people walk (a gift, yes… hahaha!) and that looks to me like Margy’s gait, as well as her hair length at that time. Denise was pretty long-legged and often wore pretty short culottes to school (and opaque stockings). She also had a shag hair style. There’s a chance that the couple in the upper-left corner of the cropped image were classmates as well, but there’s not enough distinguishable detail to make an educated guess, although the guy looks a little like Dennis Bihn.
As I was writing this, I got in touch with Rob Johns, who appears in both the Jefferson and Iwo Jima Memorials, and his photos from here confirm the identities of Margy and Denise. In the above photo are (left to right) Marty Hanely, Denise Fowler, Margy Reinbolt, Rob Johns (foreground), one of the McGarry sisters, I think, and Cathy Ulman.
I didn’t take any pictures inside the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (the Mint), but I vividly recall the uncut stacks of paper money we were shown. Zooming in on the above photo, I can make out John Johnson at left, Diane Sopko (maybe) in the yellow skirt, Sister Mary David (I think), and Sister Emily or Sister Jane Mary. That might even be Bill Schmidt in the yellow shirt at the far left.
I’m not sure where the following photograph was taken (possibly near the zoo as we waited for the bus?), but I can recognize all but one of the people in it.
From left, Bill Schmidt, Pete Quinlan, Cathy Ulman, Chris Hickman, Cathy McGarry, her sister Linda, Mary Gadus towards the back all in blue, Rosie Ello way back there, and Marty Hanely. That might be Dennis Rectenwald between the McGarry sisters, or possibly Bob Gladieux.
About the only thing I can recall about the visit to the Capitol Building beyond the grandness of the dome above the rotunda and the statues that rung its circumference, was that there was a spot in one of the rooms — probably in an anteroom in the Senate chamber or something — in which the acoustics were such that you could hear the private conversation of someone on the other side, something which the tour guide demonstrated for us. I don’t recall now if the phenomenon was by design or by accident but it made for interesting trivia.
The return trip home turned out to be a bit of a calamity as the bus I was on broke down somewhere in the middle of the night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was probably neither legal nor safe but our entire busload of kids was loaded onto the other vehicle for the remaining trip home. I tried to sleep in the middle aisle on the floor but — big surprise! — I couldn’t. I came home with a nasty cold that lasted for a few days.
A couple of side notes:
- I recall that The Last Picture Show had recently been released and while none of us went to see it that I’m aware, it was getting a lot of hype on television. In my mind’s eye I can see a theatre near the hotel, but there’s probably no way to know for sure this many years later. I’m pretty sure that the Holiday Inn is gone now, at least in that year’s incarnation.
- Cigarettes were pretty cheap in Washington (duh… tobacco country!) and I bought a carton while I was there. Yes, I was a fiend for about a year, but I quit that fall to prepare for baseball tryouts in the spring, and I haven’t looked back.
- One of our classmates was an exchange student from Chile, Kadur Alejandro Flores Murillo, and villains that we were at that age, we (meaning I watched) tried to get him to pee himself as he slept by putting his hand, which was dangling off the bed, into a glass of warm water. I don’t think it worked. He probably even woke up. I found this photo in the 1972 yearbook and I think it’s of Kadur, sleeping in his D.C. bed.
- During the trip, I developed a huge crush on a classmate who shall remain nameless in order to spare her the embarrassment should she ever see this.
*I checked a historical weather website to see what the temperatures might have been that week, and the lowest temperatures I could find were mid-40s. I could swear it was colder!
**In a recent email exchange with John, he surprised me when he said that he didn’t recall missing the bus.
