Robert Murphy:
CLASS OF 1966
Henry Ford High SchoolClass of 1966
Detroit, MI
Robert's Story
To a high school crush -
I've taken so long to write because I'm not sure how to express my history. When I read your biographical letter it seemed so simple and straightforward that I thought I should try, but my life has not been simple.
I don't mean by this that your - or anyone's - life is really simple. I know that your short bio compressed half a lifetime into half a dozen paragraphs, and that between the words there were undoubtedly many triumphs and tragedies unexpressed. But, still, your life seemed so straightforward ¿ fall in love, get married, rear children, lose your beloved, retire (presumably) surrounded by loving children and grandchildren - while I have been struggling for weeks now to find a way to answer you, to express my own convoluted history, to try and distill the 45 years since I last saw you into something that makes sense.
I¿m taking this time because you had quite an influence on my Young Robert self from the first day of school and throughout the next three years. I was a stranger from outside the district (as I think you may have been), and you allowed me to sit at your table in the cafeteria during the first bit of orientation. We were always friends - and lab partners once if I remember correctly. And though we never went on what you would call a "date", I will never forget a time when I was with you at a drive-in burger place at 9 Mile and Coolidge. I ate onion rings for the first time, and we made out for a delicious 5-minute eternity when you wanted to demonstrate a new flavored lipstick. The feel of your soft lips and darting tongue is with me yet.
You were friendly, smart, pretty, and sensual - a dancer with a gift for unembarrassed self-expression. And because of this - and my appreciation of it - I'll try and tell you what my life has been like for the past little while.
I think the best way to characterize my life is that it has been a quest for two basic things - adventure and personal fulfillment. The adventure part of my quest can be broken up into several things: studying and learning about the world and the people in it; earning a living without being bored; and trying to help correct the many injustices in the world that nag at my conscience - either through writing or through political action. The personal fulfillment part of the quest has led me through four marriages - that wandered the rocky road from love, hope and joy to disillusionment, disappointment, boredom and divorce.
The Marine Corps was my first adventure. You may remember that I dropped out of school in November of '65. That ended my association with just about everyone from Ford High - the senior prom happened on the day before I got back from boot camp. By July '66 I was on the shores of the South China Sea, enjoying Vietnamese hospitality. I was fortunate to be there before the Tet Offensive, and got back unscathed.
Most people don't realize that for every infantryman in everyday danger in Vietnam, there were at least seven people in support positions that were relatively safe. I was a mechanic for the Marines' Amphibious vehicles. We would haul supplies and ammo to the Grunts in the outlying areas, or follow along on search and destroy operations, because we could cross rivers and go just about anywhere.
I learned to smoke pot in a camp near Chu Lai, and, accept for a nightly Irish whiskey while I read myself to sleep, it was my primary intoxicant. There's nothing quite like the sensation of riding on top of a 40-ton vehicle, leaning back against the sandbags by the 30-Caliber machine gun, passing a dooby and listening to Motown music. Hell, I was 18 and immortal, and it seemed more than anything like Boy Scouts with guns. As I said, I was fortunate, and too foolish to fear danger.
After the Marines, I lived for about seven years in San Diego with my first wife, a Mumford girl from our church. I found work as a Central Office Equipment installer for the Bell System (remember them?). The work was technical enough and challenging enough, but not really satisfying. I had no real ambition for it. Thinking that I liked electricity, I went to night school for a year or two toward an EE, but eventually dropped out of that, too.
After awhile I decided to fulfill my dream of being a writer, so I put an ad in the paper as a ghostwriter and started writing term papers for college kids. Then, a man who was visiting his son in San Diego called and wanted me to help with his autobiography. He had been a bootlegger in Oklahoma from 1933 to 1958 (liquor was illegal here until '58), and had quite a story to tell. I eventually moved here to work with him, but he died, I got involved with life here, and that work is as yet unfinished.
I'm realizing as I write that I mustn't be so detailed, or this will turn into another 12-volumeRecherche de Temps Perdu.
So let me say that I've lived here in Oklahoma for most of the past 35 years, except for a three year stint with IBM in Virginia; I've worked for the University of Oklahoma as a technician for the past 13 years (Norman is a wonderful college town with tree-lined streets); I've hung out with artists; I¿ve run for office - as a Libertarian, naturally - about a dozen times; I've been married three more times - each time trying hard to be a good husband, but being eventually bored and disappointed.
So now I ...Expand for more
live in a nice, cheap apartment near campus with a sweet and generous woman. My life is full, and though I may add to this from time to time, I think this is enough for now.
(continued)
When I think back on the things that helped to form my character, there are certain things during high school that are significant. One was learning the joy and pain of skipping school. Another was learning to compartmentalize my life geographically. And, of course, there was the reading of Mark Twain's short story The Mysterious Stranger in senior English, which set the universe in its place.
Ever since elementary school I had considered school to be a sort of prison sentence. There were good days and bad days, of course, but I would always watch the clock, waiting for the final bell when I could go home and play. I especially hated homework, considering any time spent out of school as my time, not to be wasted on superficial studies. The only times I enjoyed homework was when I had to compose some sort of report to be delivered to a class, when I could put some sort of creative humor into it.
It was the threat of homework, after all, that got me into Ford. I was scheduled to go to Cass Tech out of Tappan Junior High, but I dreaded the thought of all the work it would entail. When my Latin teacher pointed out that there were openings for out-of-district students at Ford, I immediately asked my parents to let me go. (That was quite a conversation, with my mother insisting that Cass would be better for my future, and I insisting that Ford was new and modern, with green blackboards and a low crime rate.)
I have a pretty good memory, and found that, if I listened in class, I could retain enough to pass tests without doing homework. That led to me getting all A's in my first semester. Then, second semester, I found that I could skip the last class of the day - Mr. Turko's biology class - and get away with it. I loved it, though I then got my first B. The sense of freedom, of escape, was exhilarating. And addictive. By the middle of the 11th grade I began skipping whole days, spending them at the zoo, or the DIA, or walking around downtown by the river, and once on a fantastic tour of the Ford Rouge steel plant.
My skipping accelerated until the last half of my senior year (Autumn '65), when, after a summer of hitchhiking to California, surfing and cruising the Sunset Strip, then a road trip with pals to the New York World's Fair, school seemed just too boring to attend. I skipped the first 33 days of the semester, got caught, and soon after was in Boot Camp - my father insisting that I was killing my mother with worry, and had to go either to a trade school or into the service.
The negative aspect of skipping school was, of course, the agonizing walk to my house at the end of the day, wondering and worrying that my counselor had called my mother to ask why I wasn't in school. If he had, I would have been in big trouble. The sense of freedom in skipping was wonderful, but the excruciating apprehension of my parents' anger was an even purer, deeper emotion - a near-paralyzing fear combined with guilt and shame. I'm not sure of all the effects this contrast of emotions had on me, but I know that it increased my desire to be an adult, to be free of regimentation and control by others.
Our family lived 7 miles from Ford High, near the junction of Schoolcraft and Wyoming. We attended church, and I was in Boy Scouts, at Mayflower Congregational, near Curtis and Livernois. This meant that when I was in high school I had three sets of friends and acquaintances - neighborhood, church and Scouts, and classmates - all separated by a significant distance for a teenager without a car. As it turned out, most of my time was spent with pals from Boy Scouts. Because of the distance involved, the only after-school time I spent with classmates was during track meets and an occasional date or dance.
It was as if I lived in three worlds. In the Boy Scout/church world I camped out once a month and flirted with girls in the church balcony. In my home world I watched tv and flirted with the Catholic girls who came into the drugstore where I worked. In the high school world I read books and listened to teachers, and flirted with any girls who seemed receptive.
This compartmentalization gave me the chance to try on slightly different personas, learning to adjust my outward demeanor to fit the various people I met, experimenting with forms of conversation and body language, all with little chance of these worlds colliding.
It was in Mrs. Fischer's English class, with her reading of Twain's Mysterious Stranger, that my skepticism about many of the world's accepted institutions was affirmed. This short story satirizes many human frailties like pride, avarice, cruelty, rationalization, and illustrates how these affect the social contrivances of government and religion. It also affirms the benefits and honors of kindness and courage, and ultimately shows that we are very much alone in our responsibility to create our own destiny. I won't go into details of the story; those interested will have to read it for themselves. I will only say that it made my world-view more objective than it was before, and gave me a hint that there was more to life than the trivial details of most people's ordinary existence.
Register for Free to view all details!
Yearbooks
Register for Free to view all yearbooks!
Reunions
Photos
