More history

I continue to slowly explore the history deposited in my home. It turns out that I am not descended from an outlaw, as the Jesse James who died was not the historical thug, but a farmer in the Ozarks who ran afoul of Confederate sympathizers. My own ancestor literally had the noose around his neck when word of Union forces arrived and the "bushwhackers" ran away, leaving him to his own devices.

A lot of the interest in the records is what I can glean from inference. Ancestors in Missouri who married at 13 years of age. People having 11 children. Family names that recur in marriage records. These things tell little, but are reminders of what life was like five or six generations back.

Closer to home, time and space wise, is my father's Senior yearbook. Dad was a Castlemont High School, Oakland, graduate of 1960. I've learned a few things from going through the old yearbook, reading the signatures, and looking at the photos. One, Dad's high school looks way more interesting than my high school was. Even the clubs were cooler, or at least had cooler and more enigmatic names. The women's swim team was the "Aquadettes", but many of these club names give no indication of what was going on: Bishops, Block C, Caduceus, Excaliber, Guild of the Lance, Ladies of Avalon and the Ladies of Devon and the Ladies of the Holy Grail, Shamrocks, the Six Footers, Trianion, Ye Castle Hams, and the Undertakers. This doesn't even consider all the groups with greek letters for names.

Dad was on the Varsity Basketball team, but has very few signatures in the Varsity section. He does however have a lot of messages from women throughout the entire book, many of which imply that Dad was ... well favored by the ladies. This jives with something he implied back when I was in High School. I didn't date in High School, and my Dad had an issue with that. I didn't realize at the time that my Dad was a bit of a player.

He also had some interesting classes. In particular, people write about Bookkeeping Class, Yearbook (he was the Sports Editor), Office Practice, and American Problems.

I want to take a class in American Problems.

I wish, now, that we had gone over this yearbook together... away from my Mom... and had him tell me about these people and experiences. My Dad never really talked about the past. Just a few comments here and there, but no real stories. Really, you'd never know that any of these people who hoped that they'd be "friends forever" ever existed. Like a lot of men of pretty much every generation, Dad wasn't a "sharer".

It really is a loss.

I'll keep the yearbook and let my own imagination fill the gaps of my Dad's unknown past. I'll give him some great adventures, and maybe you'll get to read or see them someday.