Recently, the Northampton High School Class of 1963 held its 60-year reunion at The Bluebonnet Diner, where class member Ed Orzechowski delivered these remarks.

Welcome, classmates, spouses, partners and friends to this reunion of the Northampton High School Class of 1963. It’s been sixty years – can you believe it? – since we gathered for the last time as a class on the stage of John M. Greene Hall, just a mile up the road from here.

The first time was six years earlier. In 1957, Northampton formed its first ever central junior high, and we came from elementary schools across the city to a red brick building on South Street. John Feeney and James McDonald, our principal and vice-principal, welcomed us to the new Hawley Junior High School.

Those were the days of Silly Putty, hula hoops and mood rings. Girls wore bobby socks and saddle shoes. Engineer boots were popular with us guys, but they were banned when we left long black scuff marks up and down the corridor.

In 1959, we moved on to Hamp High. When our football team scored touchdowns, we sang about “the school we loved.” Our school was “the best in the land, where every heart beat true for the gold and the blue.” We cheered that “victory might always be ours,” and on Booster Days, if victory was ours, we paraded into downtown to celebrate.

Our graduation ceremony, four years later, was at John M. Greene Hall, a mile up the road from here. There were 183 of us on stage that evening. The temperature in Northampton had reached 91 degrees on Tuesday, June 25, and it was hot under those robes.

The program opened with a reading of “The Creation,” a spiritual poem by James Weldon Johnson. Some of you may remember rehearsing and then reciting that poem as a chorus. It began:

“And God stepped out on space, / And he looked around and said: / I’m lonely – / I’ll make me a world.”

Our principal, Ronald Darby, presented awards, and we received diplomas with a handshake from Mayor Wally Puchalski. Together as a class, we sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and then walked into our futures.

What was our world like in 1963? And how has that world changed?

For one thing, Northampton was never called “Noho” back then. It was simply “Hamp,” where downtown included businesses like Gould’s Furniture and Tepper’s Five-and-Ten, operated by families of two of our classmates. We also had two other five-and-dimes – Newberry’s and Woolworth’s – places where you could buy good stuff for a nickel or a dime.

Stores were open late on Thursday nights. McCallum’s Department Store, now Thorne’s Market, was the heart of Main Street. Down by the underpass was Wally’s Newsstand, operated by our mayor, and just beyond was Jack August’s Restaurant where a neon roof sign featured a fish at the helm of a boat, tilting the wheel back and forth.

We shopped in clothing stores like Todd’s, Ann August’s, Carlisle’s, Cohen’s, Fine’s Army-Navy and Cahill & Hodges. And at Herlihy’s and Longtin’s in Florence.

On Strong Avenue was The Miss Northampton Diner – now called Familiar’s – where my mother was a waitress once upon a time. Yes, a “waitress,” not a “server,” always in a white nylon dress that was her uniform. She brought home silver dollars that she collected as tips, and I still have that collection.

This diner right here, The Bluebonnet, had opened in 1950, when most of us were four or five years old. Main Street in Florence had The Florence Diner, still a landmark but now commonly called “Miss Flo’s,” and Bird’s Store which is still open. The current Bird’s is a place for lottery tickets and Beano cards, but in our day we bought penny candy, and cherry cokes at the soda fountain.

At Wally’s and Bird’s, we bought Teen and Mad magazines, and comic books – we called them funny books back then – for a dime, and paperbacks for 75 cents: The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Lolita and Portnoy’s Complaint.

The Hamp we knew had three movie theaters – The Calvin, The Plaza, and The Academy – that brought us movies like The Ten Commandments and Peyton Place; Dr. Strangelove and Rosemary’s Baby; The Graduate and Goldfinger; To Kill a Mockingbird, Bonnie and Clyde and Psycho.

Those were the years of 3D movies, and the Hadley Drive-In, where whatever movie was showing didn’t matter. We watched submarine races in the meadows, or wherever else we could find a dark place to park. Souped-up Chevies and Fords with fender skirts dragged a strip on Reservoir Road in Leeds, where hand-painted white starting and finish lines stretched across the pavement. We had carhops at the A&W Drive-In on lower Pleasant Street, where we drove off with heavy root beer mugs as unpaid souvenirs. King Street had Flavorland, an ultra-modern building with a huge flashing sign, where I remember being served an ice cream sundae by one Helen Vollinger, our moonlighting Latin teacher. She probably had the staff conjugating verbs.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, we listened to Top 40 countdowns on WHMP or at The Melody Corner, a store where you could actually play 45s before you bought them home to stack on your hi-fi.

The magic of transistor radios could take music right out of the air into the palm of your hand or a plug in your ear. Our cars had pushbutton AM radios, a speaker in the dash, and maybe even one in the back.

The 1963 Hit Parade included The Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA,” “Walk Like a Man” by The Four Seasons and “Telstar” by The Tornados, in the early years of the space age. Elvis was swiveling his hips with “Return to Sender,” and I have a vivid memory of a certain sock hop at St. Mike’s, where Little Eva did “The Locomotion” on stage in a tight bright-green dress, in front of my wide-open teenage eyes.

The British Invasion was about to begin, and The Beatles would soon be on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was the era of Camelot with JFK and Jackie in the White House, and an early comedy LP called “The First Family.”

Things were “groovy,” so “far out” they were “outta sight.” We could “dig it” or “sock it to me,” and “flower power” was on the way. Lava lamps were around the corner, disco wasn’t a thing yet, and rap was far down the road.

Guys wore flat-top haircuts, stiff with wax, or D.A.’s slick with Brylcreem – “A little dab’ll do ya!” We grew sideburns, wore pink shirts and white bucks, and really skinny belts with the buckle off to one side. Some carried a pack of Luckies or Marlboros tucked into the sleeve of a white T-shirt.

Girls played half-court basketball in gym class, and did non-sweating exercises with wooden wands. They wore poodle skirts and wrap-arounds. Girls washed their hair with Halo, “Halo everybody, Halo!” and wore it in flips, bouffants, or teased beehives sticky with Aqua Net.

Penny loafers were in, with bright shiny pennies tucked into the tongue. And all of us, girls and boys alike, popped our zits and slathered them with Clearasil.

At home, we had a single telephone, probably on a party line. You picked up the receiver, and if some gabby neighbor wasn’t already talking, an operator asked politely, “Number, please?” And she connected you. Away from home, we called from phone booths. When dial phones came in, all our numbers started with JU-4. JU for Justice.

We had black-and-white TVs with rotary antennas on the roof to bring in three network stations – Channel 3 in Hartford, and later 22 and 40 in Springfield. On snowy 19-inch screens we watched Howdy Doody, Buffalo Bob and Clarabelle; The Lone Ranger, Lassie, and Superman; Rod Serling and “The Twilight Zone”; Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and Wagon Train; Leave It to Beaver and The Mickey Mouse Club – I had a crush on Annette Funicello. Eventually, The NBC Peacock introduced us to Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color.”

We got our news from Walter Cronkite, who signed off with, “And that’s the way it is.” And from Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, the pair who always closed with, “Goodnight, Chet. Goodnight, David. And Goodnight for NBC News.”

We watched Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle slug home runs; we saw Cassius Clay become Mohammed Ali; we heard Johnny Most go nuts when “Havlicek Stole the Ball!” and watched Neil Armstrong take “one giant leap for mankind.”

Through our school years, we survived air raid drills and bomb shelters; we made it through the polio epidemic, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Watergate; through the civil rights marches and assassinations of the 1960s, with a place called Vietnam looming on the distant horizon.

We saw the Edsel come and go. We traded slide rules for calculators, then Commodore 64s and the McIntosh Computer. We witnessed the emergence of the Internet and made it through Y2K.

Despite all that life threw at us, we found jobs and careers. We married and raised families. We enjoyed happiness and endured hardship as six decades rolled by.

Now, more than a half-century later, we’ve gained a few pounds, lost some hair and found some wrinkles. We listen to Oldies, subscribe to AARP, take our pills and go to physical therapy.

But here we are, 60 years later, still the Hamp High Class of 1963!

]]>