Sigh.
Nurse Nellie and not-long-for-this-world US Marine Joe Cable.
I have to confess, although I’m really not interested in tying myself too much into knots over it, that it was a bit jarring yesterday to wake up and discover that the young person who’d attempted to assassinate Donald Trump and I share a common high school alma mater, although exactly fifty years apart.
Bethel Park Senior High School.
My family and I moved to Bethel Park in 1964, fortuitously, as it turned out. We’d looked at I dunno how many alternatives in the Pittsburgh suburbs, but eventually settled on BP because we ran into a delightful couple (he was a retired Swiss chemist and she was–by her eldest son’s account–an “old hippy,”) and they were about to decamp to Mexico for a year to indulge their crafty side, so they wanted to rent their house to a family they knew would take care of it.
It was a lovely home, built in 1939. Pennsylvania Dutch inspired on the first floor (Alice did most of the paintings), and a Swiss Chalet (courtesy of Jacques) upstairs.
We lived there for a year and then, fortuitously again, the house-but-one next door went on the market, just as Alice and Jacques were returning home. So we bought it. 323 Sunset Drive. The house that Agent 99–Barbara Feldon (born Barbara Hall) grew up in.
Some of my immediate family, including myself, were very happy there. (Long story when it comes to the other relatively few; never mind.)
I graduated from BPHS in 1972, exactly 50 years before the putative Trump assassin.
When we lived there, Bethel Park was a thoroughly decent middle-working class, and successful multi-ethic community, sandwiched between Mount Lebanon (the rich Jews) and Upper St. Clair (the rich WASPs). My relatively short, old-growth, wooded, charming, street comprised those of Italian, Polish, Scotch-Irish, German, and English ancestry, together with actual, immediate, immigrants from China, England (there were two such households, so not just us), Austria, Germany, and the afore-mentioned Switzerland. And we all had much in common and got along just fine.
It wasn’t all that racially diverse at the time, I can testify to that. I was the editor-in-chief of the high school yearbook, and I remember only a very few folks of color in the place. The school was large, I know that, too. The graduating class in 1972 consisted of 671 members, and I was #11 in terms of QPA. I remember that because I was in charge of record-keeping at the time.
Just as I remember a couple–she was Black, he was White, and a lovely photo which I wanted to put in the “candid photos” section of the yearbook. They were wildly popular, both singly and together, were very happy, and were holding hands in the shot.
God. I ended up at a school board meeting, under the wings of the yearbook advisor–who was doing his best to support me–explaining why I would rather resign than remove that photo from the page where I’d placed it.
I did win. Of course I did. The photo stayed.
That was Bethel Park High School in the early 1970s. I remember so many other weird things, like the (probably useless) campaigns of sending letters and cookies to the young men in Viet Nam, in which we tried to do our clumsy best to show our childish, but sincere, support for their sacrifices. And I remember those who died there, especially my childhood friend’s brother, one awful day.
I don’t know what the hell, if anything, has happened to Bethel Park in the intervening half-century.
But I remember how things used to be in the days when we didn’t all have our hands at our throats, and when Armageddon wasn’t the first thing on our minds.**
(**Oddly enough, those were probably the days when Armageddon should have been the first things on our minds. But somehow, we made it through. Funny. Go figure.)
