Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

I'm Back.

I'm back. I took a week off for Comic-Con (GeekFest), then another week off to catch up with all the stuff I fell behind on, then another week off just because I felt like it. Then my mother called to see if I was dead.

Yep. My mom is online now, and she wants a retraction of some of the stuff I said about her. So okay. For the record: My mom is not a "twelve o'clock flasher." Nothing in her house blinks "12:00" at all. Happy, mom? (Truth is, she only uses old-style clocks. Her VCR uses a sundial.)

GeekFest I can sum up with this anecdote: We're driving to the convention, six people packed in my Jeep Cherokee, with Steven and Al singing the theme from "Gummy Bears." Al remarks "you know, any right-thinking government would have us neutered."

Loren replies, "isn't that redundant?"

So what else went on while I was away? Oh, I went to a high school reunion. There's a story behind that. Back in the high and far-off days, the city of West Covina had two high schools: West Covina High and Edgewood High (I assume that at some point there were actually woods nearby and the school was at the edge of them, or perhaps this is yet another example of the Suburban Rule that you have to name whatever you build after whatever you bulldozed to build it, hence all the housing developments named "Whispering Oaks." But I digrees.) WCHS was known as the Spartans, and in the spirit of true cross-town rivalry, EHS was called the Trojans (insert your own joke here; God knows we did), and all was right with the world. Until the bubble burst.

What bubble? The population bubble. From 1945 to about 1960, lots of babies were born, most of them between '45 and '55. That was called the Baby Boom. This huge wave of children all coming in at once had a major impact; lots of schools had to be built to handle them. Almost every school I attended (and I went to a lot of them; three different schools for sixth grade--I was always the new kid) had some classes held in temporary mobile buildings, or recently-constructed additional classrooms.

The years from 1960 to about 1975 were called "the birth dearth." There are a lot of reasons for that: the invention of the pill, the Women's Liberation movement, the Roe v. Wade decision, changes in the workplace... but I think the biggest reason for the drop in childbirth is the Baby Boomers. There's nothing like having obnoxious children in the house to make you rethink the idea of having another one. For whatever reason, 1973 was the smallest crop of babies for several years in either direction, and it's had a huge impact.

Remember back around 1989, McDonald's started a push to hire retirees and the disabled and anybody they could find other than teens? They had all kinds of commercials showing elderly folks flipping burgers and shmoozing with customers. Reason being they couldn't find enough 16-year-olds to hire. The class of '73 was 16. Two years later, all the colleges in the US started to focus on adult education, returning students, part-time students, foreign students, and some schools lowered their admission standards, all in order to find enough students to keep the places running.

Because of this precipitous drop in population, about half of the schools I attended eventually closed, each of them at about the time the '73 babies would have entered them. From '79 to '85, elementary schools closed or became continuations schools for high school dropouts. In the early '80s, junior high and high schools closed or became adult education centers to serve (as usual) the Boomers, some of whom were now getting off drugs and looking to get the education they skipped in their youth.

That's what happened to Edgewood. All the students were transferred across town to WCHS, and Edgewood became an adult school. Now it's a middle school as another population bubble makes its way through the system. In order to not hurt the EHS kids' feelings (or more likely, to prevent turf wars in the cafeteria), the school officials decided to scrap Sammy the Spartan as school mascot and rechristened the school as the Bulldogs, using that same stupid bulldog logo that every other "bulldog" school uses.

The unintended result (there's ALWAYS an unintended result) is that several decades' worth of alumni were suddenly orphan alumni of a school that doesn't exist anymore. For most of us, that's not a big deal, but there are some folks who consider their high school years to be the best of their lives. For them it was an outrage. A few of these folks decided to hold annual "Spartan" picnics, to which anyone who graduated before the advent of the Bulldogs was invited.

So I went to a Spartan picnic with my family. I wasn't sure what to expect. I'd gone to my 10-year reunion, mostly so I could be rude to the jerks that hassled me in high school. Once I got that out of the way, and saw that most people were fatter and balder than me, I eventually had a pretty good time.

When my 20-year reunion rolled by, I was either really busy or really broke (our youngest was a year old then, and I was freelancing, so it was probably the latter), so we didn't go. Then this picnic came along.

Funny thing, the vast majority of the people I knew there were the people I see all the time, the friends I had stayed in touch with. We sat in the middle of this crowd of strangers (graduates of classes from '65 to '80 or so), wondering if we had somehow come to the wrong picnic. Eventually, some familiar faces showed up. A few acknowlegements...

My former boss, Jeff, who had given me my first real art job, was there. I had designed embroidered patches for biker gangs and did art for screenprinted t-shirts at the shop owned by his parents.

I saw a fella that I hadn't known too well in high school, but who was a close friend of some of my cronies in the drama department, name of Joe. His kids are now professional actors; one of them did a voice in Disney's Peter Pan II: Return to Neverland. He married a cute girl who was also in the drama department, but a few years behind me. Hi, Julie!

Mike was another one I didn't know real well in high school, partly because we traveled in different circles, but mostly because I was fairly oblivious to everything but the drama department. I knew him well enough to recognize that he was popular enough and in with enough "in-crowds" that he could have been a real prick to me if he wanted, but instead he always, ALWAYS was a good guy, always friendly, always treated me like a regular guy instead of like the ass I was then. If you get up to Vancouver, go to his restaurant.

Don was in the class ahead of me, but we worked on the school magazine together. He did a lot of photography and some poetry, if memory serves (it may not). Today he's an editor for an ATV magazine and has a nice wife that I only got to talk to briefly.

But by far the oddest moment of the day was talking to the twins, Dan & Dale. In high school, they were surly and unpleasant to me, and made it pretty clear how much they didn't like me. In retrospect, I suppose I was a really obnoxious pain in the ass. If nobody likes you, maybe it really is you. Whatever, I wasn't looking forward to seeing them. But it happened that I was standing nearby when somebody said something and I unthinkingly fired off a smartass replay. The guys turned to look at me, one of them saw my nametag and said "Igor?" (Yeah, I was called Igor then. I made monsters in my ceramics class, so the teacher gave me that name.) " How are you?"

"Eh. Taller. Not nearly as big an ass as I used to be," I replied.

He shakes his head and says "you weren't an ass. You were funny."

Can you beat that? Either one of us is not remembering things correctly, or we had very different ideas about what was going on back then. I don't remember anybody thinking I was funny in high school except my fellow dorks, geeks and freaks. It's kind of nice at this late date to find that some of my "enemies" either never were that, or forgot that they ever were. I probably shouldn't have reminded them of that (in case they ever read this), but as Mike says, I "always was a shit-stirrer."

The lesson learned from all of this is, you should go to your high school reunions. Go to the 10-year one to get your revenge. Some of the most popular people in your class will inevitably have not done well, and you'll get to be smug and superior. But by the 20- or 25-year mark, you'll be able to relax a bit and might have a few pleasant surprises in store. And you may find that you quite like some of the ones you couldn't stand back then. People change.

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