Thursday Thirteen High School

My lovely wife who now sports shorter, blonder hair told me about a funny post at Carlos' blog today. Carlos is www.ragamuffinsoul.com and he was writing about how blogs are like living in high school. I really enjoyed my high school experience. I was quite well accepted espite being a fat geek. Seriously, I weighed 315 pounds during my senior year. With the exception of rock concert t-shirts, I wore only clothes my mother bought for me. I had no concept of hair style and my glasses were thick and for many years had tinted lenses. In fact, if I get enough comments on this post (I would say 50) I will post a high school era Valtool picture or two.

So for the theme of the Thursday Thirteen, I offer thirteen high school memories.

1. I played football for one year. I was an Offensive Right Tackle. It was 8th grade football and I did not return for Jr. Varsity the following year. I did join the marching band for the Spring of my 9th grade year because I was already in the concert band and if I marched I could go to the festival in Panama City Beach, FL.

2. I paid for the band trip and made about $200 in spending money by selling Krispy Kreme Donuts. We would order however many dozen we wanted to sell and then on Saturday we would either deliver them to neighbors who ordered them, or in my case go to a major intersection and hold them up. People would wave you over and you'd sell them to drivers stopped at the red light for $2 a box (this was the 80's) and you would make $1 profit for your charity.

3. I was in a number of clubs including the German Club. For 2 or 3 years I went to the State German Convention. It was held at a Boy Scout camp in Dahlonega, GA and we had various competitions ranging from history/geography to language skills and a skit competition. I remember one skit we did was a Fraternity Feude like Family Feude and the frat names were the Smoka Sigs and the Tappa Kegga Brew.

4. I wanted to be on Student Council pretty badly. I never won in the regular elections, but for my Senior Year I was selected as an at-large member, which was decided by the regular members.

5. I had my first real job starting during my Sophomore year. It was as a Courtesy Clerk (bagger) for Kroger. I was without a car, but I had a way to get there because my bus driver ran two routes for my school and if I got on the first run (I lived on the second run), she would drop me off at the shopping center with the Kroger as she drove back to the school for the second load.

6. I volunteered in the library. As I said, I was a geek.

7. Our computer lab at the time was filled with Apple II, Apple II-e, and Apple II+ computers and one Trash-80 (the Tandy TRS-80). I was in the computer club all 5 years of HS and was an officer 4 of those years. I remember playing the DOS versions of Castle Wolfenstein and a game that involved shooting a cannon over a hill based on angle/wind/powder. Each spring we had a Dr. J. vs. Larry Bird One-on-One Tournament.

8. I had friends among most every clique you can list, jocks, socialites, brains, rockers, geeks, band geeks, I dunno, I lost my train of thought, but I blended well.

9. We did not have a stadium at our school. We played our games at a county stadium at the local community college. After the games we would go eat at Chilis.

10. I went to a TON of concerts while in HS. The first was in February of 1985 and was Hall & Oates. Others included Sting, U2, Pink Floyd, The Cars, Madonna, Level 42, Bon Jovi, Boston, Whitesnake, Great White, Roger Waters, Bryan Adams, Billy Joel, & Bruce Springsteen. Most of these required working to get good seats and in the days before the internet that meant camping out at Turtle's Records & Tapes.

11. I could not get a date for the Senior Prom. I had some options, but none panned out. I decided to go alone because it would be better than not going at all. I had a good time and spent a lot less money than if I had gone with a date.

12. I organized a scavenger hunt for my friends and we ran it one day during the summer between our Junior and Senior years. Some of the items I had included an overdue library book, a copy of our principal's signature, the younger brother/sister of one of your teammates, and my favorite, a hubcap from the car of one of your opposing teams!

13. Bottle rocket wars. You get a few gross of bottle rockets, a small group of friends, a matching number of paper towel tubes with one end taped up, and a big empty playing field after dark. This was most of the same group we played cards and sometimes D&D with until the wee hours of the night on weekends, me, Pete (my brother), Hal and his brother Jon and Eric and his mom. Eric's mom did not participate in the bottle rocket wars, but she was part of the weekly calls to Dominos. We had the number memorized. :)