High school is what you make it. Like so many other things.

I went to two high schools. One was in Florida and the other in Tennessee. Two years at each.

I was miserable from time to time, but I remember having a lot of fun. I had almost no money, but that didn't seem to matter too much. I had a lot of really good teachers, and one or two of the other kind.

The Florida high school was about two miles from the beach and maybe a mile from a community center that had a good youth program, so there were plenty of places to hang out. In Nashville, a dime bus ride would take you anywhere in town. If you know Nashville, it was fun city then just like it is now. They had public swimming pools and concerts in the park.

Back in those days, a date cost 2 X 35 cents for a movie, and maybe a dollar at a drive in restaurant. Hamburgers were a quarter and a milk shake was 20 cents. If I could get my hands on the family jelopy, gas was 25 cents a gallon.

Maybe the bad times tend to slip my mind after so many years, but I don't remember being miserable very often.

The high school that I went to in Nashville had a lot of very wealthy kids. It still surprises me that the fact that I was poor didn't make much difference. One of my closest friends was the son of a state official and another was the son of a Vanderbilt professor. Even the kids of my father's boss treated me as an equal, and they were really rich.

I'd like to do it all over again, knowing what I know now.
Howard