50-year high school reunion reminds me of the true meaning of success — and it’s not money

(This is the second of a four-part blog on my recent trip to the United States.)

EUGENE, Ore. – My high school class of 1974 has forever been labeled “Greatest Class Ever to Graduate from the Greatest High School West of the Mississippi.” The source? 

Us. 

So what if no one else agreed? In the early 1970s, South Eugene High School in Eugene, Oregon, had a few calling cards that few public schools could match. We had an eclectic student body, one that knocked down clique walls. Football players were in theater. Journalists were in student government. Debaters were in keggers.

About a dozen in my class went to Ivy League or elite universities. Students were the sons and daughters of professors at nearby University of Oregon. Winding up at Oregon was something to surpass, not to aspire.

Our football team went 27-0 over three regular seasons. Our track and  gymnastics teams had state dynasties, our basketball team went to state and the baseball team I played on made the league playoffs. Purple remains my favorite color.

My lifelong love for the theater began by going to my high school drama department’s three plays a year. Our debate team was No. 1 in the state.

It was the early ‘70s. The Vietnam War had ended, the State of Oregon decriminalized marijuana and students were throwing parties again, not bricks. I spent half my senior year in an alcoholic fog.

What better way to celebrate what we had and what we became than a 50-year high school reunion? I arrived from the farthest away, bringing a small backpack from Rome, many good memories and one destroyed friendship I wanted to mend.

But I also arrived with a new attitude, weaned from a decade in Italy where success isn’t measured by your bank account or job status. It’s measured by your happiness. I wondered how many classmates felt the same. How many wouldn’t come due to unnecessary latent peer pressure?

As I wrote last month, the way the U.S. has become divided like no other time in my life, the only events that could get me back would be a 50-year high school reunion or a family wedding. I hadn’t visited the U.S. in five years and both events happened …

… on the same damn day.

On Saturday, July 20, my reunion had its big night and my nephew had his big wedding. I could only go to the reunion’s meet-and-greet lid lifter that Friday before catching a 6 a.m. flight the next morning for the wedding outside San Luis Obispo, California. I had to meet ‘n greet fast like a hack politician.

Our nickname

While our athletic and academic merits can be debated, one fact about South Eugene can not. We had the best damn nickname of any high school in the country.

Axemen. 

We were the Axemen. The school, started as Eugene High in 1900, had been called the Axemen since the 1930s as a respectable nod to the area’s lumber industry and the trees that make Eugene so green. It’s strong. Aggressive. Symbolic. Most of all, it’s unique.

Our chant was “GIVE ‘EM THE AXE!” Three yell kings did a tradition-rich cheer that wasn’t exactly University of Oklahoma’s Boomer Sooner but it made up for it in theatrics, not to mention pseudo violence:

Give ‘em the axe!

Give ‘em the axe!

Give ‘em the axe where?

Right in the neck!

Right in the neck!

Right in the neck there!

This was accompanied by the yell kings making slashing motions with their hands to each others’ necks as they bent and stood, like medieval executioners trying to make last call. They’d yell three choruses and each one got faster. By the end it was a flurry of yelling, bending and chopping, actions that no doubt in today’s woke culture would close down the school in about 90 minutes.

Then one day a small group of students with too much time on their hands decided “Axemen” was not “all-inclusive.” Never mind that it’s not derogatory. Never mind that every female athlete I knew at South liked being called Axeman and no one wanted to be called Axegal.

But they got to a lame principal, Andy Dey, and despite a petition with 3,700 signatures against a name change, he cited a school-district survey that said 40 percent felt “Axemen” didn’t include them. He changed it to The Axe. Our student newspaper was called The Axe. Our teams shouldn’t be reduced to singular.

However, full disclosure: Our student newspaper wasn’t a two day’s drive from politically correctness. When I was sports editor in 1972-73, we put all the girls’ sports news in one column. The column’s name?

Chic Chat.

Don’t laugh. It could’ve been worse. My other choice I came up with was From a Broad’s Eye View. Hey, it was 1972. South Eugene had a boys cooking class entitled “Bachelor Survival.”

The Paddock

So on that steamy Friday afternoon last month, I walked into the reunion’s meet ‘n greet watering hole. The Paddock has been around since 1948, so named because then-owner Bob Ross had two horses stabled behind the tavern. It moved to its current location south of our school in 1964 and became my older sisters’ go-to tavern in the ‘60s and my place to unwind during college in the ‘70s. The late Steve Prefontaine, an Oregon Duck and America’s greatest distance runner at the time, was a bartender.

Renovated in 2018, it has a nice airy main room with lots of Oregon craft beer on tap and an adjacent party room. 

I had just retired to Rome in January 2014 so I didn’t return for my 40th. I hadn’t seen most of my classmates in at least 20 years, some of them 50. Checking out the bios on the reunion website, of the 131 who responded out of a class of about 340, 75 still listed themselves in Oregon. 

Yes, Oregon remains that appealing.

Every reunion has different mysteries. The 10th you wonder what careers everyone chose. The 20th you wonder what women are still hot. The 30th you wonder who’s still married. The 40th you wonder who’s still fit.

The 50th, you wonder who’s still alive.

Taking a pulse

Our In Memoriam was long. Cancer claimed two members of my tight circle of friends, our right fielder and our basketball forward. Suicide claimed a baseball teammate. When I walked in to see the 95 people gathered, I wasn’t shocked to see two friends, both ex-football players, hobbling with walking aids. Things can be worse than aging joints.

One song girl, who had the best legs in the class, wore her old short purple and white uniform and it still fit. One woman who never married won a brief, informal poll for the best looking. We had our share of overweight. But in a country where the CDC classifies 42 percent of the U.S. population as “obese,” we remain one of the fitter high school classes. One guy had lost 100 pounds.

I bounced from person to person. It was like speed dating but I had to drink a beer before moving on. Our star running back ran a fitness club in Indonesia for a short time so we had something in common besides sports. One friend has a grandson who’s a college football prospect. One is big in the Oregon wine industry and I was proud for not accosting him over Oregon’s larcenous wine prices.

My drinking education

Some classmates had brought my recent book, The Cappuccino Chronicles: An American Journalist’s Decade in Rome, and I signed them. One who didn’t had no idea he was in it. During my junior year, Dan Dizney had occasionally badgered me about not going to keggers. It bordered on the precipice of teasing and bullying. I stuck to my guns. I wasn’t going to drink until I liked the taste.

I finally caved. On New Year’s Eve 1972 in my junior year, I gathered at a friend’s house with three others and I made up for lost time. I drank a six pack of Budweiser and a bottle of Annie Green Springs Cherry Frost. Annie Green Springs was a vile swill hobos spat out. 

We went out for pizza later that night and I swear the guy behind the counter did an Irish jig. I had the time of my life and to this day, drinking remains one of my biggest joys. In the book, I thanked Dan. I stood warily as he read the passage alone in the corner.

“That was great!” he said. “Only one error. You misspelled my name. It’s with a ‘z.’”

Oops! That’s right. It’s not like Walt Disney or Disneyland. I forgot the time in high school when he explained that he’s a distant relative of Walt but an old relative didn’t like the Disney family and changed the spelling. Dan forgave me; I didn’t forgive myself. I had it corrected in the book. Amazon is good about that.

The friends I missed

One person I dearly missed. The day my life changed forever was late in my senior year at Oregon. Tim Goldberg, a fellow Axeman from ‘74, held court at a college party and described his 1½ years traveling and living in Asia and the South Pacific. Inspired, I shelved my plans to get a newspaper job upon graduation. I no doubt saved myself from working 50 years before dying in a stadium press box somewhere, two ex-wives and a ne’er do well son in my wake.

Instead, I bought a ticket to London and spent a year traveling around the world alone. I’ve been traveling ever since. Tim Goldberg is the reason. He was traveling on reunion weekend so I could only thank him in the book. He even made my acknowledgements.

Another person I wanted to see will go nameless. Let’s just say he was my best friend for 35 years. We were drinking and golf buddies in high school. He had traveled extensively in Europe before college and mentored me before my round-the-world sojourn. Before our senior year, we threw our clubs in the back of his station wagon and played bad municipal golf courses in the Pacific Northwest for a week.

As we grew into our careers and he married, I’d return to Eugene and we drank, smoked a little dope before golf and discussed washed-up Major League baseball players. He once visited me in Rome. In the Internet age, we wrote long, learned emails about life in general, in sports and our Axemen brethren.

Then came 2016 and he attended a Trump rally in Eugene. He returned mesmerized. He was enthralled by Trump’s hold on the audience. (Duh! It’s a Trump rally!). And my friend said, “He has the most beautiful wife in the world.” (Yeah, that’s a good reason to vote for him.)

He didn’t say he’d vote for him. He just defended him. That was enough. I sent a couple of crisp responses, including a clip of a Trump rally in North Carolina showing supporters yelling racist epithets. 

Haven’t heard from my friend since.

I had sent him two previous olive branches, one an email asking if he wanted to meet when I came to Eugene in 2018 and another simply said, “How’s it going?” after he sent a mass email about the demolition of our old junior high. 

This time I sent him another long email. I wrote I still don’t like Trump supporters. I never will. But if he still is one, let’s put political differences aside for one night. We can discuss our lives, Oregon’s move to the Big Ten and what the hell ever happened to Bill Mombouquette.

Nothing.

He posted a note saying he and his wife were going to Zurich that weekend but we have no photographic evidence. His absence was missed. Our friendship will never mend. Alas, reunions don’t just reunite friendships. Sometimes they bury them. 

What is success?

The weekend of your 50-year high school reunion seemed like a strange time to visit Zurich. But why do people not go to high school reunions? One friend in Oregon admits he’s not much of a people person and doesn’t go. Some had a lousy time in high school. I once had travel issues. They’re all valid.

I hope none avoids them because they don’t view themselves as successful enough. At my reunion I met lawyers and realtors and business owners and investment bankers and educators and utilities executives. I don’t remember meeting a blue-collar worker.

A class reunion should be classless. Do mechanics and construction workers and farmers consider themselves less willing to put themselves among their old classmates, afraid to be judged? I hope not. Those guys are a helluva lot smarter than I am. 

But the U.S. is a class society. Go to any public gathering – a bar, a party, a sports event – within the first two questions will come, “What do you do?” Whether you like it or not, you are being judged. I know. I did it for years. I played to it. I told guys I was a sportswriter and told women I was a travel writer.

That all changed when I moved to Rome. Romans don’t judge you by your job. In bars I see lawyers talking to construction workers and baristas talking to artists. I only ask someone what they do until I get to know them. They do the same with me.

Instead, Romans ask you three main questions: Been to a good restaurant lately? Where did you go/are you going on holiday? Where did you buy your shoes?

Success in Rome isn’t based on your bank account or where your profession fits on society’s radar. It’s your level of happiness. And Romans, while fighting low salaries and their biggest recession since World War II, have a more celebration of life than Americans. They have their wine, their food, their friends, their Augusts at the sea. That’s all they need.

That’s all I need.

Success comes from inside, not from outside confirmation. If a man owns his own business and clears a million a year but has a dead end marriage, bad health and still kicks himself for not buying Microsft at $21 a share, he’s not a success. If a blue-collar worker has his health, a wonderful family and weekends tailgating, fishing or whatever else makes him happy, he’s a success.

Reunions should reinforce that. At mine, no one mentioned their big salary. No one mentioned their big house. No one, thankfully, mentioned their politics. For one night, we were all on the same level, all tied together after 50 years by a purple and white bond. 

I didn’t meet everyone, but I have just one thing to say to anyone who thought they were better than another.

GIVE ‘EM THE AXE!

Next: Wine tasting in California