Mr. McFarland's Talk

                                     

Nineteen and thirty-four, as the old folks might have said it, was not exactly the high water mark of the century.   Orson Wells didn’t visit it.  Neither did Jules Verne nor Rod Serling.  And to the best of my knowledge, you can add Mr. Peabody, Sherman and Marty McFly to the list.

The Great Depression was at its worst, by some measure.  The Great Recovery, courtesy in large part of WWII, was yet to make its way to Main Street.  Our parents would have been of an age when they were going to high school, just as we did in the ‘60s.  And our lily white Dayton View would hardly have been exempt from the suffering.  

You didn’t think Mom and Dad came up with all those at-the-dinner-table stories without some first-hand reference, did you?  Many a last spoonful of succotash found its way home thanks to the implied threats that accompanied the telling of those tales.  And we all knew better than to even think about rolling our eyes when the homily began with, “When I was your age, young man …”  

With unemployment hovering around twenty percent, our Mr. Longnecker and Miss Folger would not have had to look far afield to see the profound effects of this catastrophe.  Pick an adjective … social, economic, cultural, educational … this perfect storm would have had its way with every aspect of the hearts and minds of our parents, and those charged with making responsible adults out of clueless adolescents.

Yeah, good luck with that.

In the interests of wanting all students, regardless of station, to share the pain, there was no yearbook in 1934.  If everyone could not afford one, some having one would not be a source of discomfiture to others.

But this generation of our parents was both resourceful and smarter than the average bear.  Might there be a way of having their picnic basket cake and eating it too?  Going back as far as you care to in Fairview lore, you find there was considerable interest in creative writing … both prose and poetry.  So some crafty band of rebels, of all stripes, students, parents and faculty, saw the opportunity to use that passion as a vehicle to create what would amount to their de facto yearbook.  And using their in-house printing equipment, they could defray any significant cost.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … 

It’s impossible to say how much faculty oversight there was to the project.  I’ll guess that there was a fair amount of “positive reinforcement” in terms of what was content and what was left on the cutting room floor.  Even the simple Tower News of our time did not go to press without an imprimatur of the powers that be.

Be that as it may, the effort is a wonderful mix of tribute to the talent of Fairview students, while not losing sight of the goal of having a bit of carpe diem that youth want and need to mark the rite of passage that graduating from high school represents.  As befits a work of such stature, the first pages allowed for a table of contents where the grade level of the contributing students is denoted with roman numerals.  Ooooo.

Then, of course, there was the obligatory dedication to the Founder of the Feast, without whom all things are wanting.

The majority of the booklet of just under one hundred pages is devoted to the collection of very short stories and poems.  Some authors have multiple works published; others are one-hit-wonders.  Some works are, charitably stated, what struggles to escape from the mind of a teenager.  Believe me, I know about trite and hackneyed.  Mrs. Krehbiel made sure of that.  Other submissions are quite good, or, at least, inspired.  In any case, you won’t see me offering any of my high school writing here for your review.

The final pages are devoted to blank space for autographs as well as pages of advertisements to help with the costs of publication.

And yes, that is an authentic Dorothy M. Herbst you see at the top as she appears to be channeling John Hancock.  We’ll start the bidding at $5000.

As with so many things that pass before our eyes, we initially accomplish only a quick and cursory scan … looking for the unusual, the interesting, the comforting.  After all, if there’s something noteworthy, it should jump out and fight its way through the cobwebs to compete successfully for your attention.  But I’m fascinated by all things Fairview, so I afforded Fairview Dawn 1934 a second and more comprehensive read.

ZOWIE!   POW!  BLAM-O! … in Batman comic book parlance

There, nestled in the midst of lesser prose, was Mr. McFarland’s Talk.

OK, I can wait here if you’d like to go back for a re-read.  I won’t tell anyone I saw you moving your finger along the words as you read.

I try not to wear my politics on my sleeve.  They are my own.  I’m happiest when I can have a conversation with someone and not feel like I need to convert them to my way of thinking.  And this writing should be no different.  That I have prejudices is not open to debate.  I do.  And so did my parents before me.  Conversations in the living room, the breakfast table and the family car would have made those biases all too evident.  But that is not the issue here.

What is, is that this story, this Mr. McFarland’s Talk, offers us so many interesting insights into a time we never knew.  Perhaps a Q&A would be the best way to see what makes this story so complex and wonderful.  Don’t worry, I’ll do the heavy lifting.  Just keep an open mind.

Who was the author, Norman Grieser?  We only know what’s in this booklet.  He was a senior and a member of the National Honor Society.  For his work in Fairview Dawn 1934, he was awarded something referred to as The English Cup, but for his poetry, not this think piece.  To the best of my knowledge, he had not been abducted by extra-terrestrials and did not work at Area 51 later in life.  That’s it. 

Who do we suppose selected this work for publication?  Didn’t we cover this already?  Suffice it to say, I don’t think “everyone got a trophy just for showing up.”  Possibly there was input from the students, but I’d put my money on a teacher/administrator cabal cherry-picking what they felt like.

How prevalent do we think this liberal-for-the-time thinking was?  Wow, pretty darn, unless you know something I don’t.  Sure, it’s obvious Mr. Longnecker and Miss Folger chose a black person to speak at the assembly, but it would be another twenty-five years before they did/could hire our Mrs. Rowe.  Baby steps.

Do we know anything about Mr. McFarland?  Nope, and we’re rapidly running out of people to ask.  It’s another case where the message survives, but not the messenger.

OK … now we’ll take a few from the audience.

Is it likely the writer, the one and only Norman Grieser took any heat after the fact?  Do ya think?!  Were there honked-off parents giving a piece of their mind to whomever had the thankless job of answering the phone at school?  Did less enlightened peers engage in a never-ending campaign of name-calling?  Not yes … Hell yes!  It probably didn’t make its way to cross-burning, but there had to be some heated conversations over picket fences while spleens were vented. 

We have time for one more.

Were any minds changed?  Good question.  You get a gold star for the day.  And I think we all know the answer … No.  But we equally well understand that minds change over, how should we say, geologic time.  Just the fact that this happened, served to elevate  the dialogue and raise the collective consciousness and that’s more than enough for one day.

Oh, to be able to go back in time and learn these answers and so much more.  

But every bit the wonderment in imagining, as knowing.  Right Miss Oliver?

So maybe nineteen and thirty four was a pretty good year, after all. 

With most grateful acknowledgement to Arlene and David Gates, teachers at FHS in the mid-‘60s, for passing this copy of Fairview Dawn 1934 down to us to share … and to Jeri Jones Bland, FHS ’66, for realizing a treasure when she saw one and letting us experience it, too.