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Show They say in Lake Woebegone that "all the men are strong, all the women good looking, and all the children are above average." And so it was with the Class of '36. Our ladies were the last of the 500 and they were beautiful to us. They were all we had and the odds in the dating game or the mating game were hopelessly in their favor. And the men in the class were the last of the Stanford "roughs." As hard as it was to get a date, I never completely understood why the men thought their chances of doing so were enhanced by the wider spacing of time between shaves, between showers, and between changes into clean clothes. But we cleaned up our act as the female population grew and our competitive chances improved. By the time we were seniors, we were almost neat and tidy. A fiftieth reunion is a natural time for retrospection. Most of us have already lived our three-score years and ten and now we are playing on the house's money. It's pleasant to recall that we grew up in an Age of Relative Innocence. For the most part, people got married first and lived together afterwards. Cigarette smoking was fashionable, grass was mowed, coke was something you drank, and pot was something used for cooking. In those good old days bunnies were rabbits and not Volkswagons or Playmates. Poetry rhymed. There were Five and Ten Cent Stores where you could actually buy things for five and ten cents. For a nickel everyone could ride the street car, ride the ferry, make a phone call, buy a soda pop, and get change when you paid for a newspaper or bought a stamp. A dollar would just about fill the gas tank. We witnessed the world's record set in the shot put with a toss of just over 54 feet. We went to the Rose Bowl three years running and saw Bob Reynolds play an incredible 180 minutes, a record that's beyond breaking. We witnessed Stanford win the Pacific Coast Basketball Championship without a black player on the squad. The "four-minute" mile" was considered beyond reach. The boys dated girls who wore skirts. We danced cheek-to-cheek to music from the big bands to great tunes like "Night and Day", "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes", and "Dancing in the Dark." Life seemed good in the old days and, as Dizzy Dean recalled: "The older we get, the better we were." But George Ball spoke the truth when he said: "Nostalgia is a seductive liar." Things were far from perfect then. We entered Stanford in the worst depression in history. Jobs were scarce - economic hardship common. The "Dust Bowl" affected more people than the Rose Bowl. Blacks couldn't play in the major leagues and Marion Anderson couldn't sing in Constitution Hall. 2. |