Petur Williams:
CLASS OF 1966
Fairview High SchoolClass of 1966
Boulder, CO
George Washington UniversityClass of 1972
Washington, DC
Earlham CollegeClass of 1970
Richmond, IN
Institute SchmidtClass of 1964
Lutry,
Whittier Elementary SchoolClass of 1960
Boulder, CO
Petur's Story
We graduated from Fairview High School in 1966. There were about two hundred seventy five of us in the Class of 1966, I think. It is fifty years later, and some number of us, not yet ten percent, have not lived to see 2016. We have lost track of another twenty or so who, for all sorts of good reasons, we cannot find.
There is a reunion coming in July of 2016 for the rest of us, the willing remainder of the Class of 1966 of Fairview High School. The school we went to has been converted from a High School to a Middle School. When we graduated, there was no such thing as a "Middle School". We called that part of our public education Junior High School. A few other things have changed since we escaped our secondary education in 1966.
We are fifty years older. Our country was in the midst of a televised and deeply divisive war effort in Southeast Asia when we left school, and that continued six years beyond our graduation. That war, in Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Laos was something that formed the very core of our lives during that time, for all of us who stayed home as well as the small number of people our age who actually served in the military and may have fought in the war.
Our country has been involved in war on and off since that time, but not in any war that was transmitted daily to us by the pictures and voices of all the media we knew. Not in wars that could not be ignored, like that war in Vietnam. That, too, passed.
Memories of all the rancor and the horror and the glory of that war linger in all of us, but by the time Watergate and the Nixon Administration was ushered out, we were clearly ready for a much different set of concerns.
In 1974, we got an interim President in Gerald Ford, the only President ever who had not been elected either as President or Vice President. Mr. and Mrs. Ford made Vail famous by having his vacation home in Beaver Creek.
By then, we were all in our late twenties, then lived through the Carter era of 1978 to 1981, and the Reagan years of 1981 through 1989, and , G...Expand for more
eorge Bush the Elder (1989-1993), and then Clinton for 1993 to 2001, and Bush, Jr. for 2001 through 2008, and since 2008, President Obama, leading us into an era of the strangest political season I have had the pleasure to experience, and the possibility of a Paul Ryan Presidency who doesn't want to be President or a Donald Trump Presidency, who does, but most people think he shouldn't, or the first Presidency of a woman, but the second of a Clinton, or the outside chance that Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders may lead our country beginning in 2017.
And, all of a sudden, we are fifty years from graduation at Mackie Auditorium in 1966. I live in Boulder most of the time, ski in Vail and Beaver Creek most of the winter, travel a lot. I got married to a Dutch citizen in 1984. She had and still has a job as a flight attendant. Then it was for Continental Airlines, now for United, after Continental took them over a few years ago. United flies to a great number of places we can get to for very little money. She flies two or three times a month now to India or China. Along the way, Ilon and I created two children. Thysson is now 31, and Gemma is now 29. They were both born in March. Ilon was born at the end of January and I was born at the beginning of February. We spend our winter celebrating our birthdays. Now it is Spring. Gemma's birthday is the first day of Spring, March 22nd. My birthday is usually when they play The Super Bowl, February 7. Those things, like the other ceremonial days of each year, make us remember where we are.
All those years I described above had specific days and specific events that carried us from joy to joy and disaster to despair, and they are all gone now. We were mostly eighteen years old when we left high school, and we have lived fifty more years. I look forward to paying attention to the ones that come up as we go on, and I look forward to seeing and talking to you in July of 2016, when we celebrate the time so long ago we spent together, and the times between. Best wishes, Petur
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