doug dollard:  

I first met Billy Phillips the summer of 1960 before our freshman year of high school. He and John Boulle were standing on a stream bank rubber banding M80 firecrackers to small stones, lighting them and dropping them into the water where they would explode like miniature depth charges. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Billy was broad shouldered with blond, short cropped hair, clear complexion and a penetrating gaze. Strong, cheerful and filled with ebullient enthusiasm I took a liking to him immediately. John Boulle, a year ahead of us and already attending Valhalla High School was tall, lanky, dark haired and possessed with an air of self confidence that made him seem extraordinarily mature. On that warm summer afternoon the three of us became close friends, friendship that lasted all through high school. I heard Billy passed away last year. Though I had not seen him in nearly fifty years I felt a pain of loss that penetrated to my very core. Billy was there for me through the best of my high school years and the worst. He was one of my best friends and I loved him. Why I had not kept in touch I cannot fathom. For me Billy will forever be that blond haired boy standing in the sunshine beside a rippling stream, handsome, gentle and kind. We were the first graduating class from Westlake High, a daunting responsibility when you consider it. Being the first made us the de facto seniors in our junior year. With no tradition to follow and no seniors to emulate the onus for creating a legacy rested heavily on our shoulders. I don't think I considered the enormity of that when I was sixteen. Youth takes a different, more casual view of such responsibilities. In the former woods across Westlake Drive from the high school there used to be a Greek Temple, or at least thats what it appeared to be in 1964. It was all white columns and stone facade in the shape of an overly large gazebo or small bandstand. It sat in the middle of a thicket, tarnished by wind and rain and inundated by relentless forest undergrowth. I often wondered who built it and why, as a forest thicket seemed an odd place one would build such a structure. I grew up in Vallhalla, New York about an hour's commute outside New York City, graduating from Westlake High School in Thornwood, NY in 1964. After two years attending the University of Miami I enlisted in the Marine Corps. I did my basic training at Paris Island and infantry training in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. In 1966 the war in Vietnam was raging. Most of the men, boys actually as they were all in their teens, with whom I had done my training had already been sent to Vietnam where many had been killed or horribly maimed. I had received orders to Pensacola, Florida where I awaited an FBI background check. Several months later I received a security clearance after which I was sent for cryptographic training. After the Marines I attended Florida Atlantic University, earned a degree in economics. Later I earned a BS in electrical engineering and an MBA in business administration from Saint Mary's college in Moraga, CA. I taught community college for several years and later managed a high tech firm. Mister Grosso, our school librarian gave me a gift one day when I was a junior. It was a copy of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran. I guess he liked me for reasons about which I remain uncertain to this day. I loved the book and kept it for many years until it was lost in the move I made to California. I still remember one afternoon when I was in the library standing in front of one of the wooden card catalogs searching for a book. Mister Grosso came up beside me and asked if he could help. I told him I was looking for the Purple Pimpernel, a British vigilante who rescued French nobility from the guillotine. He laughed, and told me the title was the Scarlet Pimpernel. Well, whatever color pimpernel, thats what I wanted. Midway through the football season of my senior year at Westlake someone, a fellow football player I suspect, reported having seen me down on the playing field Friday night drinking beer, just me, not the four other football players who were also down on the field drinking beer with me. In 1964 you could buy alcoholic beverages at eighteen. I wasnt eighteen yet, but the liquor stores rarely asked for proof of age. The next day, which was a Saturday game day I reported to school to catch the team bus to an away game, I think it was Woodlands High. The principal called me from the locker room to his office. He demanded to know who else was on the field drinking with me. I couldnt' tell him of course, it wouldn't have been honorable. The fact was we usually drank beer on Fridays before games. Drinking down on the high school football field however, was an anomaly. When I refused to divulge the names of my cohorts he told me I was expelled, not suspended, expelled. There went my ambitions, such as they were, for college. My father was away on business at the time thank god, but my mother cried. She cried a lot during my four years of high school. As it turned out I wasnt expelled, just suspended. I wasn't on the football team anymore however, a worse punishment in many ways than anything I could contemplate. I never did find out which one of my compatriots on the team gave me up, perhaps a good thing in retrospect. I did wonder what I might have done to make his hatred of me so vile. My escapade made the yearbook, something about beer cans as I recall though we never left our trash on the field. None of this really mattered as long as I had my girlfriend Barbara. Two years later when I lost her the bottom of my world fell out. In the aftermath of my disgrace one of the administrators, I don't remember who anymore demanded I surrender all my sports chevrons, emblems and letters. He said I no longer deserved to wear them. I did cut the letter off my school jacket, but I didn't surrender it as required. I figured whatever my transgressions, Id earned every one of my awards and I wasnt going to surrender them. They have disappeared now of course, gone in some house cleaning years ago. But I'm glad I never gave them up. One of the older teachers, she was probably in her early sixties at the time, whom I had defended against an outrageously unfair teacher evaluation a few years before, wrote me a very nice letter telling me how sorry she was for my...Expand for more