Girls were still girls, boys were still boys. We got our first "gay" teacher, and the term "gay". The guy who ran the library had always been queer and nobody thought much about it but when Mr. Sanchez "came out" it was a major political event. We still had teachers who were WWII vets though the post war generation, hard core leftists all, had more or less taken over. My government teacher, who had hit the beach at Salerno and had known the history of the place for the past 2000 year, told me privately that he was retiring at the end of my senior year because "This whole place is going to crap." First time I'd heard a teacher use that word.
The best thing that happened was in 1972 when the Vietnam war was canceled because the TV ratings were so poor and Nixon said there would be no more draft. The worse part was in '73, just as we were getting our driver's licenses, the oil embargo hit, gas lines formed and the price of gas went up to $.60 a gallon. The government teacher told the whole class to forget about what our supplementary reading, "A Primer on Government Spending" by Heilbruner and Bernstein, said but the first chance we got after we graduated we should read Adam Smiths "The Wealth of Nations..." I always thought it was cruel to tell teenagers to read 18th century English prose.
Then Watergate happened and we all believed what we read in the papers. Maybe the most important thing I learned in high school was to never do that.
I graduated in 75 too.
My Freshman year in high school, my family had been back about a year from a five year stint in Japan and the Philippines. I was nervous about coming home due to all the unrest (we didn’t have that on military bases overseas) stories about lunch milk being spiked with LSD...all that stuff.
So when we return to the states, my dad gets his last duty station at a small naval communication station near Andrews AFB, and my freshman year at high school in Prince Georges County, they commenced “desegregation” of schools and forced busing. It was an extremely unpleasant time for me. We had come from military run schools where there wasn’t a huge amount of racial tension (race relations were very good, IIRC) so to be thrust into that situation was much like being dunked in icy water. I remember walking into a bathroom to take a leak, and there were about eight black kids in there smoking a joint.
I was a clumsy white kid with short hair and the black plastic “BCD” glasses (Birth Control Glasses) and had only just finally learned recently how to deal with bullies, so I was pretty insecure.
All those black kids turned and looked at me as I walked up to the urinal, and while I am peeing, they all come closer and one of them said “You aren’t going to tell anyone are you?”
Without even turning, I simply said “Nope.” then turned and left. There was a lot of racial tension, especially between these guys they called “Grits” who were called “Greasers” in the decades before in other places. The “Grits” uniform was blue jeans, white t-shirt, cigarette pack in the sleeve, and hi-top Keds. We had one who hung around with our group who seemed like a good guy, but he was the only one of them I ever knew personally. I recall hearing after I had moved away that there was a shotgun fired in a hallway in a racial incident, and he was somehow involved. Anyway, there were a fair number of fights there. I really hated that school.
My dad retired and we moved north. I hated high school with a red hot burning passion, but I did make a few friends and that was okay.
But among the best two years of my life were those two years there, and not because of high school. I got involved with a CYO band (they operated like Drum and Bugle corps, not like a high school band)
I spent those last two years of high school completely immersed in CYO, and spent ALL my time outside of school, all year round, with those people who went to three different area schools. That was my high school fun...all my lifelong friends are from that activity.
When graduation approached I had to make decisions about life as everyone does. My parents wanted me to go to college, and would have gone into hock to pay, but I couldn’t do that. I was an awful, bad student. I would have flunked out, no question, I was that bad. So I decided to join the Navy when I graduated in 1975, and my parents were reasonably happy with that, I think they knew full well I wasn’t college material.
So, I was trying to figure out how to tell my best friend I was going in the Navy. He played hockey, and was pretty good. One night that early spring of 1975, I was trying to fix something in my parent’s 1966 Dodge Van (which they let me drive around! How cool is that?) and my buddy suddenly poked his face in the door...his nose was spread across his face, and as I stared at his nose, he told me how a slap shot had hit his stick as he skated backwards and ricocheted directly into his nose, breaking it. (Ah, the days of no facial cages!)
He had to go get it fixed. As I looked at him, I just blurted out “Hey...I joined the Navy! In the Fall.”
He stared back at me, and without any hesitation, he said “F*** it! I’m going with you!” That is my best friend, and still is...:)
I had a great time in the Seventies, even if I hated school!