May 29, 2009 03:24 pm
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“We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against,” a nonfiction classic by Nicholas von Hoffman, was the bible of the 1960s counterculture movement.
It could easily have been the mantra of the Fort Worth Paschal High School class of 1965, of which I was a part.
We were the antithesis of counterculture in appearance — clean-cut, clean-shaven, button-down shirts, Bass Weejun loafers.
We were solid citizens, generally speaking, striving for excellence in academics, athletics and other pursuits, such as cutting out of school during sixth period to hang out at Record Town on University Drive.
Only on rare occasions did we take the liberty of misbehaving while on campus.
The price was a severe paddling at the hands of school disciplinarian Charlie Turner — or, in my case, a tongue-lashing from my mother, a Paschal English teacher.
Neither punishment was appealing, so we were reluctant to cross the line.
But we had our rebellious moments outside the hallowed halls of PHS.
Suffice to say, we were not perfect.
Except, perhaps, in the manner in which we executed the mayhem.
Like the early morning one late spring weekend when as many as four students piled into a pickup, drove to Forest Park Zoo, roped and hoisted an alligator into the bed of the truck, drove to Paschal, and lowered the reptile into the courtyard just inside the front door of the school.
Imagine the shock on the faces of custodians when they opened the door at 5 a.m. Monday.
Imagine the alarm on the faces of the culprits as they were called before assistant principal Hubert Cherry to explain what in God’s name they’d been thinking.
“Everybody’s heard about the alligator incident. It’s pretty famous,” said my friend and fellow PHS graduate Doug Wiley. “The way you hear it now, everybody was involved. There were really only three or four. I was not one of them. I wanted to run in the district track meet.”
The caper unfolded much as aging storytellers recall.
“The kids got an alligator from the zoo and hoisted it into the Paschal courtyard,” Wiley said. “The custodians found it the next morning and freaked out. I don’t know if the following is true, but it came from my source, that they all wore dark clothes and blackened their faces to make kind of a commando thing out of it.
“Supposedly, they were driving around Forest Park at 2:30 in the morning when a cop stopped them. He apparently didn’t question their appearance. He just said, ‘How are you boys doing?’ My source may have been embellishing the story a little bit. The funny thing was, the zoo had him work there after the incident. Evidently, they decided he was pretty good with animals. The alligator wasn’t hurt.”
Also remembered is an incident in the fall of 1963 when Wiley and I were juniors.
The weekend of the Paschal-Arlington Heights homecoming football game, a group of young gentlemen decided it would be a kick to prematurely torch the Heights bonfire in Benbrook.
They were not successful, as I recall, but they came close. One Paschal student flew a small private plane over the bonfire, dropping purple and white toilet paper and, it has been said, Molotov cocktails.
“Not only that,” Wiley said, “but someone else roped mattresses to an old car and tried to drive into the bonfire. I think the police got involved in that pretty quick. The one who drove the car got in trouble. I don’t know about the one who flew the plane.”
When President John F. Kennedy spoke at Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, the morning of the day he was assassinated in Dallas, he paid tribute to Paschal as “the only high school in America with its own air force.”
We were certainly the people our parents warned us against, but we eventually grew up.
Most of us went on to college, partly to absorb higher learning and partly to escape the draft during the early days of the Vietnam War.
More than a handful of us didn’t survive it.
One of my best friends at Paschal graduated from West Point in 1967, shipped out to Southeast Asia and was dead in weeks.
Likewise another friend, a gung-ho Texas A&M graduate, who lost his life fighting a war that none of us really understood — even if we claimed we did.
Our innocence prevented us from understanding much of anything in those days.
“Our fun was gators in the courtyard instead of drugs in the courtroom,” Wiley reflected.
The age of innocence lasted slightly longer for me on graduation night than for some of my 999 classmates.
I passed up several parties in order to spend a reflective few hours fishing from a rowboat at a west side pond.
I probably imagined high school to be the most important time of my life.
Forty-four years later, I’m sure of it.
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