What Really Happened to the Class of '65?

What Really Happened to the Class of '65 by Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky was a best seller in 1976 or so.  I got a paperback copy soon after it was published but didn't read much of it--even though I'd graduated high school in 1964 and this was my generation, I didn't find much to relate to, at least in a skim or two.  When it was made into a TV series later in the 70s, I don't remember ever watching it.

But when a deep dive into an obscure corner of my bookshelves recently revealed this old copy, I found more interest and more relevance in it, if only for the perspective of time and the greater breadth of my own experience.

The premise of the book was simple enough.  In 1964, Time Magazine sent reporters to interview members of the class of 1965 at Palisades High School, a brand new and lavish campus in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles.  Its 1965 article positioned these students as harbingers and leaders of the new post-war generation, the best and the brightest.  The authors, who were among those Palisades students at the time, decided to see what had happened to this promising group of students a decade later.

This book was a pioneer in at least two aspects: it was an early example of oral history, consisting almost entirely of excerpts from taped interviews with the subjects, and as one of the first of by now endless analyses of the Baby Boom--or Boomer--generation. 

David Wallechinsky, son of the then best selling novelist Irving Wallace was the apparent spark plug of the project.  Like his father's work (and their later work together) this book didn't involve a high proportion of actual writing--the work was in conducting the interviews, and having others transcribe them, then editing and assembling them.  Apart from the transitions designed to pull the reader onward--some skillful, some transparently artificial--the art of it is in the structure.  This may have been the role mostly of Michael Medved (whose name became more familiar later, as a TV film reviewer and conservative commentator.)  

For one thing, interviews they conducted with 11 of their classmates were dumped entirely.  Apart from short thematic sections (on the JFK assassination, sex, the draft and political confrontations) each chapter centered on a specific individual.  These were introduced by brief comments about this person by other ex-students interviewed, remembering (or trying to remember) what they were like in high school, before the bulk of the chapter was given over to narration by the subject person. 

 Though the person was often presented as the example of a type, their individuality dominated the narrative.  So on that level the book could be absorbing.  They did typically have a tumultuous decade, with a number of sometimes radical changes in their activities and attitudes.  Given their affluence, a surprising proportion did some jail time (drugs were always involved.)  None had yet achieved very much, their promise still awash in turmoil or otherwise not yet fulfilled.

In terms of simply being reminded of what it was like to be that age, I noted in this reading the number of students who were very insecure in high school, including some considered the most handsome or the most beautiful, who were cheerleaders and class leaders.  Some of this was an acute sense of class differences based as well on parents and their status and wealth, or lack of it.

Palisades however was not a typical high school.  Many of the students came from wealthy families, including the sons and daughters of prominent people, including Hollywood stars. Despite this, the introduction makes a pro forma claim to universality, and of course, adolescence and the the high school years have much in common nearly everywhere.  But in the stories themselves I was distanced by differences, though not quite as much this reading as the first time I encountered the book, perhaps because I am more aware of having met more contemporaries of more privileged backgrounds.

Of course my high school was a relative oddity in that it was a Catholic school, towards the end of the era of the Latin Mass and a general imposition of religion throughout the curriculum and the days of our lives.  One of the important events for the class of 1964 in my school is not even mentioned--the brief reign of Pope John XXIII and the Vatican Council that eventually changed so much that Catholics and Catholic school students experienced ever after.

My school was in western Pennsylvania, a working class culture within a growing middle class.  The translation of wealth into social status--of which these Palisades students were acutely aware--was both more subtle and less important for us. Family and community were also stronger factors and pressures in our lives than apparently in theirs.  And I'm pretty sure that in my high school there weren't any women who claimed to have had sex with more than 400 men before they were 18, as did the first student interviewed in this book.

But the biggest impression I came away with as I read about the wild swings of what these graduates did, and the serial excesses they sought and experienced, is that they typically had wealthy parents to bail them out (sometimes literally.)  We didn't have that luxury, though some of us did careen around for years.  We had our perhaps more modest but still for us wild swings as well--though this more typically happened with later graduates, as cultural changes swept from west to east, high to lower.

Still, there were elements of those years brought home sharply in these pages.  Most of the major themes of those years are involved: drugs (prominently), Vietnam and politics (less so), religious searches and cults (the "brain" in high school went from Eastern religions to TM to Scientology to the John Birch Society), the back to the land movement (big in California especially.)  All the intellectual or artistic currents are lacking--not even a rock musician, or a single Dead Head. 

 Race has a token chapter--there was but one black student in the Pali Class of '65 (though some subjects later got involved in various black communities.) There wasn't much about Women's Liberation as it was being called by the early 70s, though some of the themes within it were reflected in their lives: for instance, how smart should a girl let herself be and still be attractive?  Or the role of going to college mostly to meet a good potential husband. 

But there are occasional flashes from my late '60s experience, as when someone notes that he learned more from antiwar readings and discussions than he did in college classes; and another who noted all the "contradictions" in his schooling.  There were contradictions all over the place then--really maddening for those young and hopeful, or even dare we say it idealistic.  

The weight of Vietnam and the draft, particularly on young men, has largely been forgotten, but some of these accounts brings a little of it back.  When one such ex-student avoided the draft system until the lottery was instituted, and then drew an extremely favorable number, he recalled: "Interestingly, it was not until that moment that I realized the psychological burden that I had been bearing for several years.  Until it was lifted, I didn't realize that my whole life style, my whole mentality was cramped and distorted, twisted by fear of the United States government.  The fear of constantly having to evade and dodge, to defend myself against people who wanted to kill me, and wanted me to kill."

I personally was aware of it, although that awareness didn't prevent the damage, which I also felt when the burden was lifted.  The theme of self-awareness runs through this book.  Partly it's just extended adolescence, but it may also have been particularly acute in a time of such great change, when the young were almost forced to find a truer identity.  

Perhaps subsequent generations have (or are having) a tougher time.  Apparently they think so, because the prevailing image of boomers is how easy everything was for us.  But I'd take seriously this comment by the mother of one of the students interviewed, who was also a fictionist often published in the New Yorker, Sylvia Grossman:

"The late sixties were an incredibly difficult time for people to grow up.  I have some basis for comparison, I had other children and I know how it was the generation before.  I think the sixties were the most difficult time to be young that the world has ever seen.  All values were falling apart.  The bottom was falling out of everything.  We were at war--in a perfectly horrible war.  It was a terrible time. The only thing worse than being a child was being a parent in those days."