Bonding With New Pals at Old Alma Mater

Just before school let out for the summer, I paid a visit to my alma mater, Ventura High School. This time I was there as a reporter instead of as a chronic underachiever. “Could do better” had been the story of my high school career.

As I stepped onto the campus and looked toward the old “senior lawn,” where no one but us seniors was allowed to sit in 1961, my throat thickened with emotion.

Just about then, a stern-faced school guard approached and instructed me to either leave the campus or get permission from the office to stay.

I quickly gained control of my emotions. It was on the tip of my tongue to plead, “But I was on the Cougie yearbook staff in 1961. . . . “ However, I could see it wouldn’t cut any ice at all with this woman. You truly can’t go home again--or if you do, you have to get a permission slip from the principal.

But how, I wondered, had the guard nailed me so quickly as an interloper? Was it my blazer? My high heels and liver spots? More likely, it was the absence of obvious tattoos, really big shorts and nose rings. It couldn’t possibly have been because I looked 37 years older than Betty Coed. (Make that Jennifer Female Student today.)

Just before the wily guard fingered me, I’d started a sidewalk conversation with three giggling sophomore girls on their lunch hour. As I turned from my three new best friends to head for the school office, one of them said, “Like, we could all go across the street and talk there!”

“Like, OK!” I said.

The four of us dashed across Main Street--and on the yellow light, too. They were in their second to last day of school, and I was suddenly in the mood to earn demerits.

As the four of us stood on the “civilian” side of Main Street, we, as they say in the ‘90s, bonded. The girls began to instruct me on what to put in an article.

“Oh, write that Miss So and So is a hard grader,” said one.

“Yes! Yes! And say that Mr. So and So dresses funny,” said another.

“And say that Mr. Schmitt, the health teacher, gives too much homework,” said the third.

My hand froze. I looked up from my notebook.

My mind raced. Could this be David Schmitt, the dreamboat of my senior class?

“Did you say ‘Mr. Schmitt?’ Would this . . . uh . . . Mr. Schmitt’s first name by any chance be David?”I asked.

In unison they replied, “Oh, we don’t know their first names.”

That hadn’t changed. None of my high school teachers ever had first names either.

Then one of the girls held up her new VHS yearbook to that most boring of pages, the faculty page.

“Oh, yeah, here’s Mr. Schmitt’s picture,” she pointed. “He’s pretty . . . old.”

Indeed, it was a picture of “old” Mr. Schmitt, 1961 VHS graduate--and exactly my age.

I didn’t think he looked all that old. (But I didn’t think to seek him out on campus either, given I had married another man.)

“I’ll tell you girls something. I graduated with Mr. Schmitt in 1961 from here. Back then he was, well, sort of the class dreamboat. I even had a little crush on him the first few weeks of senior year.”

Their eyes widened, their mouths dropped and one said, “You’re that old, too?” She giggled a bit in embarrassment, but then added, “Gee, did they have the wheel yet?”

This wiseacre would have been my real best friend had we actually been classmates.

No, I told her, “but we knew how to strike flint together and make fire.”

Then suddenly the girls did something that made my throat thicken with emotion again--they thrust their yearbooks at me and asked me to sign them. I hadn’t felt so complimented all of this year.

Nothing would do, I decided, but to sign in 1961 yearbook-speak: write in their annuals exactly what I had written in my best friends’ annuals 37 years ago.

“It’s been a PANIC knowing you,” in the first.

“Stay sweet and have a blast--no kidding,” in the second.

And to the wiseacre, the exact words I’d written to my closest friend in ‘61, “You are so tough--I hope our friendship will never DIE.”

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Brenda Loree is a Times correspondent.