The social upheavals of the late 1960s caught a lot of people by surprise. Nobody was ready for the madness and revolution on the way, least of all the graduates of Palisades High School’s Class of 1965.
Those California kids were nestled in sunny comfort and luxury, alive with the promise of great things to come. They weren’t the only ones who saw that promise. Time magazine that year sent a team to profile this class on the cusp of graduation, dubbing them “smarter, subtler, and more sophisticated.”
It turned out rather differently. Or as a popular sage of that era, George Harrison, would later observe. “When you don’t know where you’re going/Any road will take you there.”
What Really Happened To The Class Of ’65 takes a 10-years-after view of that Pali High class, written by two of its members, Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky. Largely taking the form of an oral history, it is as much a time capsule of 1975 as it is of 1965, packed with colorful, candid tales which reflect a period where the only rules people followed was to be yourself and let it all hang out.
I suspect more than a few of the participants later regretted talking so freely. So be it. The result is a great read, hard to put down. Yes, it’s shallow, smug, and obnoxious in places, reflecting mindsets of suburban privilege morphing into elitism, but that is part of its wistful charm.
Class member Lee Grossman: “My memories of school are mostly in terms of being told to go back and walk down the halls, or being told to run a lap around the track. I tend to compare it to prison. I can’t think of any institutions other than those two where you have to ask permission to go to the bathroom.”
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| A high school scene in the 1960s. According to the authors, Palisades High School graduated over 500 seniors in 1965. Thirty of them are profiled in the book. Image from https://doyouremember.com/77960/60s-high-school-kids-attire |
What
Really Happened To The Class Of ‘65 purports to be a sociological examination
of the Baby Boomer generation’s road to maturity, but what makes it worthwhile
is its candor and vivid accounts of high school life.
Kids have always worked very hard at protecting their inner selves from
scrutiny. Fortunately the older versions of these kids are all-too-happy to dish
on what they hid back then: their class insecurities, sexual desires, pranks, troubled
family situations, and what they thought of each other.
There
is a quality of timelessness to some of their catty observations:
“I just remember her being sort of a snob, and I could never quite trust her.
She would be my friend one day, and the next day everything would change...”
“He was totally sarcastic. I enjoyed his sense of humor, but a lot of people
didn’t. I know this because people used to ask me how I could stand to go
around with him.”
“I had some urge to hurt guys. I don’t know what it was. It was really terrible. If they started to like me too much, I wouldn’t go out with them any more. Or I’d try to get them to like me and I wouldn’t like them back.”
I wish the authors did more with this “when they were young” element of the story. There are discussions around dances, favorite music, and the day President Kennedy was shot, but not enough of them. The structure is a series of individual portraits where, after various classmates briefly recall a specific student, that student, or someone close to him or her, speaks at length about their life.
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| A high school dance in the 1960s. At Palisades High School, they were called "Sports Nights" and were a way of getting some action with the opposite sex. One woman recalls: "At Sports Night I would start at one end of the room and dance to the other end of the room - usually losing my partner along the way." Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/verylastexcitingmoment/3981254592 |
There is still poignance in the stories, though, especially two. One, Brock Chester, the school dreamboat, pursues an acting career with diminishing success and eventually commits suicide, apparently because he couldn’t handle the frustration of failure.
“There are some reasons to thank him for giving us the wisdom that was really laid out in front of us all the time, for helping us to realize what life’s all about,” his close high school friend Gary Wasserman tells the authors. “How a lot of things we take for granted in junior high school, high school, our contemporary lives, can mean a hell of a lot more than the face value.”
Another, Jamie Kelso, joins a series of movements and eventually becomes a right-winger, renouncing sex, movies, and society in general from his own dreamworld. Rigidly judgmental, he also makes for great copy and sometimes a bit of sense, as when he talks about his classmates coddled by their parents to the point of becoming “parasites:”
“By age 19, a man or woman’s character is largely set. If up to this age, the parents have freely provided cars, tuition, allowances, vacations, clothes, apartments and entertainment, then they shouldn’t be too surprised when they discover that their son or daughter is a moral cripple.” [Kelso himself eventually became a white nationalist, and today rates his own “Extremist File” page on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website.]
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| Palisades High School. The authors recall how the mountainous horizon visible on campus suggested a vista of possibilities to students. Today it is known as Palisades Charter High School and has been extensively rebuilt from its original 1961 construction. Image from http://h223716.temppublish.com/operations.aspx |
A critical tone creeps into the authors’ own viewpoint, albeit with more nuance. For the most part, they are not judgmental, particularly when it comes to the drug-use stories. Wallechinsky is later revealed as a “Johnny Appleseed” for cannabis, and the use of various narcotics is presented as necessary enablers toward achieving higher consciousness.
The only time they get heavy on one of their classmates is a quiet fellow who became a Hare Krishna. It seems a bit cruel:
Ozzie and Harriet had left him poorly equipped to handle the freedom and confusion of the late sixties. After graduation from college, he had nothing but free time and open possibilities; unable to deal with that, he sought refuge in the regimentation of the Krishna temple. For the last five years he seems to have returned to a passive sort of TV trance. He is no longer watching “Ozzie and Harriet,” but for Bob it was simply a matter of switching channels.
If others seem just as blinkered in their pursuits of materialism, leftist politics, and narcissistic self-indulgence, the authors don’t call it out.
Though the book was a bestseller in its day, and even was the basis for a brief-lived television series, there never was a true follow-up, which is not surprising. Doubtless many of the 28 students profiled by name didn’t enjoy the attention their confessions got or relish a second exposure in the more judgmental decades which followed.
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| For male students of Palisades High, getting into college was critical for a deferment to avoid service in the Vietnam War. "Not one member of the Palisades class of ’65 lost his life in Indochina," the authors note. Image from https://www.history.com/news/vietnam-war-combatants |
The authors also give out information on themselves. Michael Medved toiled over an epic poem on the assassination of William McKinley, which a classmate pronounces “awful.” Medved is the most recognizable name in the book, a famous connoisseur of bad cinema in the 1980s who became a conservative pundit in the 1990s and after. He reminds us several times he went on to Yale, and tells a funny story about how he lost his virginity.
Wallechinsky, who was better known at the time for his best-selling The People’s Almanac, notes being a chronic underachiever in high school, the result of being the son of a famous novelist from that time. He recalls being weighed down by the nagging sense of unrealized potential.
Other classmates include several of the prettier and more popular girls, members of a rowdy gang that called themselves the “Saracens,” and a few on the margins. They include Palisades High’s first-ever black student, William Quivers, who recalls a pleasant if alien environment where he passed unnoticed by many; and Carol Shen, who socialized a fair bit more but never shook the difference of being Asian at Pali High:
“Instead of being Chinese, I could have had a broken nose, or a gimp leg, it could have been anything. I mean, in high school I might as well have been crippled – I just felt so different.”
Sex is a key theme throughout the book, how it weighed heavily on the minds of Pali High students even if actual intercourse was fairly rare for most. Several of the women recall their commitment to virginity at the time with amusement, while the men remember who they lusted after in vain.
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| Annette O'Toole in a promo for the NBC-TV series "What Really Happened To The Class Of '65," which ran for 14 weeks as a mid-season replacement in 1977-1978. Screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpIV2UcLqdQ |
Reilly Ridgell’s decision to leave the continent entirely for Micronesia makes sense when you read of how he was treated in high school. One female classmate recalls:
“A girlfriend and I went through a period of extreme cruelty in our comments about other people, and Reilly often had to bear the brunt of it. He more or less became a laughingstock for us. I would tease Riley and I think he mistook that for an interest in him.”
Some of the students went on to find success of sorts, with careers and/or families, but many seem caught at a crossroads, at least in this period of their lives. The Time magazine story is brought up several times as a touchstone to a promised future that never panned out.
At least one of them puts the blame on their privileged upbringing:
“A lot of people from our class had a very tough time. I think some of them just peaked too early. They were trying so hard to achieve that number-one status in high school. By the time they got rolling into college, they had probably burned themselves out.”
Funny,
poignant, wistful, and a touch bitter, What Really Happened To The Class Of ‘65
is like thumbing through someone else’s yearbook and realizing you recognize
most of the people there. While it doesn’t pack the same punch it did for me back when high school memories were fresher, it still glows with the enviable aura of carefree
youth lived on time’s steep precipice.
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