The Seven Lads

The Seven Lads

It was amazing how tumultuous the years 1963 and 1964 were. In '63 you had a new pope. The big civil rights “March on Washington” occurred and Dr. Martin Luther King started becoming a household name. Our president, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and his killer was subsequently killed on national TV soon afterwards. The Beatles were taking the U.K. by storm. Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique and Kurt Vonnegut wrote “Cat's Cradle”. And to cap off the year, the wonder drug Valium was introduced to an increasingly neurotic world.

'64 wasn't much more restful. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Vietnam War was off and running. In the Soviet Union, Nikita Krushchev, the buffoonish premier was ousted and replaced by a more sinister Alexey Kosygin. China gave the world a shudder as it shot off it's first A-Bomb. Three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Bob Dylan was increasingly popular and the psychedelic music craze was beginning to really heat up with groups like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. The Beatles first appearance in the U.S. occurred on the Ed Sullivan Show, “Dr. Strangelove” appeared on our movie screens and the Surgeon General told us what we already knew – cigarette smoking causes cancer.

I was in high school during those years, learning algebra, learning geometry, learning chemistry and beginning to learn that the world was neither bad nor good, evil nor saintly.

It was mostly just indifferent.

Those years encompassed the end of my sophomore year through the beginning of my senior year. There may not be another period in a person's life where more is going on than that time period. For me and most of my classmates it finished the chapters of our childhood and began the narrative of our adult years. What we would write on those fresh chapters of our lives was a mystery to us at the time, but we'd all hesitantly gathered up our pencils and pens and had tentatively started laying down the first few words.

“You going to the dance?” my friend Chuck said to me one mid-week Spring day in the high school hallway between classes.

Of course he was referring to the first of the weekly student dances the high school was putting on in the parking lot behind the high school. They staged those outdoor dances in the latter part of the school year after the weather had started turning nice and before the school year ended. Just a student DJ, a sound system borrowed from the AV department, lots of records, some speakers and a teacher or two to keep an eye on things. They usually ran from around 6 pm to maybe 11 or 12 o'clock on Friday nights, depending on turnout and how many kids stayed late.

I wonder if they have anything like that nowadays in school. Probably not. There's more than likely a Federal law or an EPA regulation or some kind of official nonsense that disallows this kind of activity. What a shame for the kids. If they do have dances they're probably chaperoned by six vetted couples and two armed security guards.

I'm glad I had a chance to grow up during the time when I did.

I reminded my friend who'd asked me if I were going to the dance that I didn't know how to dance. He smiled and said that that could be remedied. I was dubious but decided to see what he had in mind. He was much more advanced in the boy-girl thing than I was.

We met that evening at one of our girl classmates homes where, with lots of pushing and jerking and tugging, I began to learn the rudiments of what passed for dancing in those days. Nothing fancy, just get out there and stomp and wiggle a bit. Sorta. And try not to mash the girl's toes too much. That was fast dancing. Slow dancing was lots more fun and lots more terrifying. It wasn't as hard as learning all the strange fast dances – the monkey, the swim, the twist, the mashed potato, the Watusi and sixteen other weird kind of dances. When you slow danced you just held the girl really, really close and kinda shuffled around the dance floor. I was a very, very late bloomer and the idea of actually holding a girl close and dancing with her was intimidating, unnerving, sweat-inducing and generally terrifying. I found out much later in life that it was generally the same for the girl. I always thought that girls, being the ethereal creatures they were, were good at this stuff automatically. They were born knowing it, being good at it.

What a doofus I was.

Anyhow, the dance came and went and we had fun. Then there were more dances, high-school sponsored, YMCA-sponsored and the occasional radio-station sponsored ones, some in our hometown, some in other venues.

But I didn't want to tell you about dances, at least not directly. What I really wanted to tell you about was a group of guys I hung around with and some crazy stuff we did.

First off, you need to know there were seven of us.

Most of us were from lower middle-class families. One came from a rich family, but he was the exception to the rule. We used to hang around together after school, go to dances pretty much together, hang around at each other's houses and generally just spend time together.

One night the group of us was attending one of the indoor school-sponsored dances in the basketball gym (the weather had turned cold) and I noticed the clothes that one of us was wearing. I didn't know it at the time, but his choice of wardrobe that night was the genesis of the formal “gang” we would shortly become. I wish I could remember which one of us was the style setter, but that fact totally escapes me now. Anyhow, this is how he was dressed: (It may seem odd to someone now, but it was close to the tops in guy fashion of the day.) He had on black pants that were snug on the leg, a white, long-sleeved shirt with blue pinstripes, black boots with horseshoe cleats, a thin black tie with a white pearl tie-tack and a black trench coat.

The look was to die for! We all checked him out and started making plans on how we were going to pay for our new black trench coats. Luckily, most of us had part-time jobs and had some money coming in. In a few weeks we all had been able to purchase our coats, get a pair of black pants narrowed down to an acceptable thinness and to get horse shoe cleats nailed to the heels of our boots.

The next dance we went to was at the YMCA. We arrived at the dance as a group. We were even asked a few times that evening, as we were standing outside of the Y smoking our cigarettes, if we were the band! It was an incredible feeling.

We had an identity!

Now we needed a name. Once again I don't remember the particulars on who actually coined the name “The Lads”, but it seemed to click and we started calling ourselves by that title.

You also have to understand that none of us were particularly “good” boys. We were mostly middle-of-the-road students or a bit below, no jocks, most worked at after-school jobs and liked to raise a little hell from time to time. We weren't the lowest class of kids in the school, the ones heading directly to jail and worse in upcoming years, but we knew the kids in that group and were friends with a lot of them. We might have even emulated their style, their walk or their language occasionally. But we weren't hard-core. One or two of the Lads were on probation for petty crimes, but on the whole, most of us were clean.

Marijuana hadn't arrived quite yet in our town during those years. I guess it was around but it really hadn't gained in popularity with the kids in our high school like it would just a few years down the road. Our drug of choice was beer. The cheaper the better and a few of us were known to down prodigious amounts of the brew when we put our minds to it.

Of course none of us were old enough to drink. And, of course, that didn't stop us in the slightest. There were plenty of carryouts around that were more than willing to sell beer to us. I guess enforcement of the prevailing liquor laws weren't as stringent as they are now, since getting the beer was never a problem. We did have to be careful, though, when buying the stuff, to make sure we got the correct sort. At that time there were two kinds of beer available. The normal, high-power stuff that was around 7% alcohol which you had to be 21 to drink, and the weak, watered down, nasty 3.2% stuff that the 18-year-olds could legally imbibe. We always got the high-powered stuff. Hell, we weren't old enough for either of them so why not?

Some memories of the Lads:

A number of us walking down the hallways of our high school with the horseshoe cleats on our shoes clanking, clicking and echoing in the hallways, scarring up the floors, making the janitors furious. Or walking down a sidewalk at night with them on and seeing the bright sparks fly as the steel in the cleat met the concrete.

Spending the night in one of the guy's big garage/barn behind his folk's house and drinking beer until we couldn't stand up. Literally dozens of bottles apiece.

Stopping in an alley on a crisp fall night and waiting while our oldest-looking member went into a liquor store to buy a case of cheap “Old Dutch” beer – our favorite. It was taking a long time and we were starting to worry, but soon he came back to the car with the case under his arm. The reason why he was late? The man behind the counter was trying to sell him some wine to go with the beer!

A number of us standing in the woods behind one of our fellow-member's house, waiting for him to arrive. He'd promised us some hard cider and we were patiently waiting for it. He finally arrived with the gallon jug. We passed it around, drinking the strangely-flavored cider. When the gallon was gone he informed us that the cider wasn't really hard, so he had added some vinegar to it instead!

Having parties at the rich kid's house when his dad was out of town (his mother was deceased), drinking some beer and his dad's powerful bourbon, smoking cigarettes and goofing around. How our dates would come to the house and we'd all listen to the rock 'n roll records cranked up real loud, dance a bit and maybe make out with the girls if they were willing.

Stopping on a snowy lane out in the country near some railroad tracks one winter night on our way to a radio-station sponsored dance. We opened up the trunk and everyone grabbed a long neck beer and starting drinking it – ourselves and our dates. Then another. And another. We were heading for a dance and wanted to get a little drunk before going. The mission was soon accomplished and we headed off to the dance.

Riding in our rich member's maid's Corvair. (Don't ask.) There were six of us, 3 of the Lads and our 3 dates. The two of us in the rear seat had our dates sitting on our laps. We were heading to a small town about ten miles from where we lived. The route there was a narrow, 2-lane, winding road that had many hills and blind areas. At one spot there was a bridge that was a bit narrow. It was night, we were sober (for the moment), we were heading for the bridge and a semi was heading toward us. The Corvair and the semi passed on the bridge at the same time. When we asked our driver (the rich kid) how he was able to pass the semi on the bridge, as we were sure there wasn't enough room, he answered, “I dunno – I closed my eyes!”

Perhaps the one thing I remember the best was a small thing. I had gone to the boy's room in the high school and had stood at one of the urinals. Written in magic marker on the wall in front of my eyes were the words: THE LADS SUCK.

We had arrived!

Of course we were stupid. That goes without saying. A lot of time being young and being stupid are synonymous. How we all escaped being killed or seriously maimed during our time in the “gang” will continue to be a mystery to me. Maybe we were being saved for something later in life? Maybe those chapters in our books are still to be written.

Of the seven Lads, I'm still great friends with one, on nodding acquaintance with two more, another one's living in Arizona running a convenience store, one went to prison for murder and dropped off the radar of my life, and the other two I don't have a clue about. Most of us spent time in the military, some saw combat and a few learned what the inside of a jail cell looked like.

The Lads were a chapter of my life of which I'm not particularly proud but do recognize as a milestone in my development. I would be horrified to know my son had done half the things I did in those days as I'm sure my parents would have been horrified in my case.

The memories of my friends in the Lads have faded some with the passing of time, but those that are left are some of the sweetest of all.

I guess, when you boil everything down, it's called growing up. You do things – some bad, some good - you grow, you learn. And on the way you become a man.

And that's what makes it all worthwhile.