ALAN writes:

Last month I attended the 50-year reunion of my eighth-grade class from 1964. It was organized by a few dedicated classmates and took place in a lovely park on a beautiful autumn day. Fifty years had gone by since I had seen or spoken with any of those classmates. For four hours that afternoon, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

We attended a Catholic school in south St. Louis. That parish and the neighborhood around it were a decent and often wonderful place to live, play, grow up, and attend church and school. Our class included 80 to 90 children.  Not nearly that many came to the reunion. Some live in other states. A few have died.

Most of our teachers were Catholic nuns. We attended Mass every day before classes. Some of us reminisced about being altar boys at early-morning Latin Masses or patrol boys at street corners at the end of the school day.  Almost all of us lived nearby and walked to and from school in sunshine and snow.

Our school was attended by boys and girls. There were no feminists among the nuns, the lay teachers, or the parents.  There were no “unisex” restrooms and no “victims” of “gender confusion”—because the fraud called “gender confusion” had not yet been invented……because Americans in 1959 were not stupid enough to believe such nonsense, as they are today.

Our school had no metal detectors, no self-important “security” personnel prowling the halls, and no “No Weapons Allowed” signs on its doors.  None of us sassed our teachers or used profanity in classrooms or shot anybody or wanted to.  Two blocks away, white students in a public high school used rifles in the basement, but they never shot anybody either.

We never heard the words “diversity, multiculturalism, tolerance, inclusion,” or “openness” because they had not yet been adopted by Marxists as code-words for their anti-American, anti-Western revolution.  We were taught the magnificent achievements of American men and women and Western Civilization, not how evil they were.

Some classmates are taller now than in 1964, some are wider, and some grayer.  But their decency, self-discipline, honor, and good cheer were plainly evident.

At the Reunion, we talked of the Church’s annual Feast of Corpus Christi procession along the streets through the neighborhood, and of school picnics and parades, and of the priests and nuns we remembered from those years.

We talked of corner grocers and confectionaries and bakeries and candy stores, and of games we played with baseball cards in the schoolyard during recess, and of a day in 1958 when our teachers escorted us to the school auditorium to watch the motion picture  “Escapade in Japan” starring young Jon Provost, best known in those years as “Timmy” in the “Lassie” TV series.

More than fifty years afterward, several classmates remembered how my father played baseball with us at the neighborhood park on many summer days and evenings in 1958-’59.

We talked of songs we remembered from our school years and several classmates broke into spontaneous, letter-perfect renditions of Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red,” The Cascades’ “Rhythm of the Rain,” Marcie Blane’s “Bobby’s Girl,” Del Shannon’s “Little Town Flirt,” and Little Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him”……no mention of revolution or drugs or cop-killing, and not a single off-color word or suggestion……just cheerful melodies in simple songs about love, dating, heartaches, rain, flowers, hopefulness, and loyalty.

In a 10-page essay I composed for my classmates, I wrote: “I am sick and tired of hearing how terrible it was to be taught by Catholic nuns who enforced rules and standards.  If those rules and standards had not been abandoned as thoroughly as they were over the past fifty years, the parish might still be thriving, its schools might still be open, and the neighborhood might still be clean and civilized instead of a combat zone.”

It was an indescribably wonderful afternoon shared by classmates from a better time in American life.  It was a time when the parish population was 80% greater than what it is today, and when lawlessness in the neighborhood was negligible.  It was the tail end of the America whose moral and cultural standards Lawrence Auster remembered well, wrote about at VFR, and wanted to see restored, as I do also.

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