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Today's Featured Biography

 
Randolph Rhody

UPDATE FEBRUARY 2021: Are you ready to revisit the wildest of the wild Sixties? I have published a historical memoir that begins with our senior year and describes my hair-raising vagabond years immediately after graduation. Titled "THE HIPPIE HITCHHIKER FROM NEBRASKA," it is available in print or e-reader format on Amazon and online booksellers worldwide.

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In our senior year, some guys wore Madras shirts and cowboy boots - at least the ones who could afford them. The hot car to have was a 1957 Chevy, and the really spoiled kids had brand new GTOs. I had a rusted-out 1953 Chevy convertible that I paid $20 for. It had a slushy automatic transmission and torn vinyl seats. It got me off the Air Force base where we lived and into town, to cruise through the two Kings Drive-Ins and go to the dances with my girlfriend at Antelope Pavilion. The best band there was The Coachmen - remember them?

I came to Lincoln after having gone to 10 different schools in 9 years, usually changing in the middle of the year, like a lot of the military kids. Today I envy the civilian kids who grew up in the same neighborhood with familiar classmates and friends. I think the disruption and continuous sense of loss was an emotional handicap for many of us kids from the Air Force base.

I’m grateful that my entire three years of high school were in one place. By senior year at Lincoln High I felt like I was fitting in. What I lacked in advantages, I made up for with hard work and determination. Somehow I made the Honor Roll a few times, got some Society for Academic Achievement and National Merit Scholar awards. Not to boast. I was never one of the guys who got a letter sweater. I wasn’t a Varsity or Intramural anything, or a student leader who got a write-up in the Thumbnails column of the Advocate.

I always worked after school. In my senior year I drove a Chicken Delight delivery van because I had to buy my own clothes, gas, and lunch. During second semester I ran away from home and rented a room in Lincoln that I paid for with my earnings. I was 17 ½. Just as well, because my parents moved again before the end of the school year and it was better that I got to stay. They didn’t come back to my graduation or send me as much as a “Congratulations”. I didn’t see them again for 11 years. I remember a big cheer from my classmates when the announcer read my name at the graduation. It gave me a sense of worth I never felt at home.

I lost my yearbooks in 1966 and appreciate the work that was done to get the web site together. I still remember a lot of people from 1964-65. Looking at the names and photos on the class web site, many more people begin to look familiar. Sitting in classes with my mind wandering half the time, I admired sports heroes like Frank Brill and Lonnie Teselle, and geniuses like Bruce Raymer and Walt Warnsholz, and Student Council leaders like Roger Stark. I remember the athlete Herman Tapp and my friend Rodney Molden – it saddens me greatly to read that they are already dead. I remember my very good friend Bill Stahl, also from the air base, who graduated mid-year and started university and didn’t even get his name in the yearbook. In our class were other air base friends Bob Bassett and Ron Glenn (whose family moved before we finished). My townie friends Ray Woodward and John Ogden. Of course I remember the girls I went out with - Karin Miller, Sandy Schneider, and our exchange student Cachito Cacho-Sousa from Peru, and a lot of other girls too.

I often wonder where they all are now, hoping life turned out okay for them. I followed many different paths after high school and after a few hair-raising detours I arrived for good in San Francisco (Haight-Ashbury) in 1968. I haven’t left the Bay Area since; I had enough moving as a kid. While working I earned a degree from UC Berkeley and what you would call a career at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company - right in the middle of the action in a control room operating first military satellites and then Space Shuttle activities, later teaching engineering, then testing software at IBM. When we were in high school, nobody ever heard of a career with space vehicles or computers.

Very recently the theory occurred to me that I was younger than most of my classmates, which at the time didn’t quite register with me. I turned 17 in September at the start of the school year, but a lot of kids were already 17 and going on 18. I know today if kids have their birthdays too late in the year, like me, their parents hold them back so they’ll be age-equivalent when they start first grade.

Even though Kennedy was shot during our junior year (the news came while I was in Spanish class), we were still mostly innocent then. Whenever I see the movie American Graffiti I always think, “That was exactly how we were!” Our senior year was the same year as the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, but that seemed far away. Soon we would be pulled into the undertow of Civil Rights, Vietnam, LSD, and Free Love. The leisure hours I had spent passing notes to Janet Rhodes and Charlotte Nowakowski back in Study Hall would look good by comparison.

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