My brother David has taken to posting pictures from High School Days. It all started innocently enough with Groves High School trivia questions, then photographs of himself, followed by a recounting of his successful football season but now he has apparently run out of his own material and has broken into mine.
On Face Book and the World Wide Web is a photograph that has nothing to do with David. He was nowhere near when it was taken and didn’t know anything about it until the Annual came out documenting the one and only meeting of the 1950’s Greasers Club at the Root Beer Drive Inn in Garden City.
I was called in to Gretchen’s room yet again … this time to be told that I was not participating in enough extracurricular activities. Gretchen was always getting onto me for something. I think she stayed up nights thinking up things to get on to about. Now I apparently wasn’t doing enough at school.
This made absolutely no sense to me as I was already giving them four-and-a-half hours most days. I arrived on time to spend an hour and-a-half in the parking lot behind the chorus room. We had to catch one another up on whatever had happen since yesterday. Plus we were listening to Alice Cooper and trying to determine the cause of the blanket of strange smelling smoke that filled certain vehicles.
Then I attended a couple of classes before hopping in the car and going over to Joe’s Drive-In for lunch. We’d stay in the car with aforementioned strange smelling smoke and order cheeseburgers and fries. Once my Mother parked across from us and also ordered something. Gene and I found it difficult to finish our food from the floorboard of the car. It was amazing how long it took Mom to finish her meal.
After lunch I would attend another class then it was off to the stadium for football practice. Gretchen evidently did not feel that this was enough and wanted me to do something else.
“Wha?” I asked.
“You should join the chess club or maybe aim for the National Honor Society,” she calmly replied.
Shaking my head I left her there sitting at her desk. Gene was waiting for me in the hall and had heard everything.
“You’re not going to take this shit, are you?”
Gene was my best friend and always brought a sense of logic to whatever we did. It was hard not to admire him especially when we went to the beach. He’d rip off his shirt, grab the lotion and go from girl to girl asking for help in applying it his back which he could not reach. He was great at that kind of stuff though he never did get a tan on his back.
“Hell no!” I said once we were far enough away from Gretchen.
At the time I was really into 1950’s Rock-n-roll. The Beatles had broken up and Led Zeppelin didn’t have a new album so I was listening to Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Doo Wop groups. This is really good music when you’re driving around in a car full of strange smelling smoke. It makes you mellow. It makes you hungry too.
So Gene and I formed the 1950 Greasers Club to study the aforementioned effects of 1950 Rock-n-roll. We met once.
One Saturday morning around fifty fellow lovers of 1950s Rock-n-roll gathered at the “Root Beer Drive In” which was behind Joe’s Drive-In. Now that I think about it, it took Garden City several decades before it realized that the 1950s were over.
We’d arranged for a photographer to document the fact that there was actually a club and that we had met. Everyone dressed like we were at a casting call for the movie “Greese” … except the black guys. I still can’t quite figure out what they thought they were dressing for.
It was my club so I sat on the roof of the car with my arm around Debbie Hendrix and shot a bird at the camera. Not to be outdone, Mark Stewart stood above me and did the same. If we’d had another meeting there would have been disciplinary action taken against him.
There were also several bottles and cans in brown paper bags which are in plain view. I don’t recall if anyone actually had a Root Beer.
When the Groves High School Annual came out our club got a full page spread. The Chess Club got a tiny eight-of-a-page picture and I’m not certain that Groves has ever actually had a National Honor Society.
So that is how the picture came about. I must say it’s a fabulous picture! You stare at it for hours trying to figure out who is who, who’s copping feels, and who’s wearing what. It’s right up there with the Sgt. Pepper album cover.
Again David had nothing to do with this and was home counting his baseball cards or something like that.
Just saying.
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